I saw a screening of the film Objectified, after which the director, Gary Hustwit, and two of the designers featured in the film, Bill Moggridge (IDEO) and Dan Formosa (Smart Design), did a little Q&A.

One audience member asked Moggridge to reflect on defining interaction design as a discipline. In his response, he said that it was necessary at the time to define it as a discipline because software was so new and no one knew how to design it. But now that it’s pervasive, interaction design as a discipline may no longer be necessary.

As someone with a masters degree in interaction design, this caught my attention. Though because I have a design job that is neither industrial design nor communication design, it seems that interaction design, or at least some form of design that deals with the less tangible, is needed. However, his statement speaks to the many communication and industrial designers who feel they have had the same focus on behavior that interaction designers, including myself, like to refer to as their domain.

With the interaction design community still struggling to define itself, this statement is worth some thought.

As our efforts to consider how current design firms might transition to new areas for design, our team talked about designing design teams as a possible strategy to advance the influence and understanding of design. The idea is that as a design consulting firm, we would create design teams within organizations that could sustain themselves and then create other design teams within the organization if or as needed.

But obviously, it would be difficult for a current design firm to make this transition. We discussed initially inviting people to work with us during a design engagement, to be part of a design team for a real project to gain design experience and learn methods and tools. These people would then go back to their organizations with their new appreciation of design as advocates for design and for our firm. With word-of-mouth marketing, we would seek to shift the business from taking individuals into our firm to embedding ourselves into client organizations while we help build internal design teams. This is similar to what IDEO did for SAP a few years ago when they created the Design Services Team.

Just a few days ago, Henning Fischer of Adaptive Path interviewed Peter Coughlan, Partner and Transformation Practice Lead at IDEO. The following snippet of conversation addresses a potential problem are nascent plan would face.

Fischer: The challenge we are most often faced with happens when the engagement ends and the client team struggles. How do we avoid situations like that?

Coughlan: Well, the obvious answer to that is to anticipate the client team struggles, and design the program in anticipation of that. We started down this path by offering clients some “telephone consulting” or follow-up visits to hold their feet to the fire — that’s evolved into a more formal process in which we help them prototype the infrastructure they’ll need to implement while we’re still actively engaged. We’re also exploring new models including “externships” (where an IDEO person goes to live with a client to keep things moving along), as well IDEO alumni who can embed themselves in our client organizations after we’ve completed our programs.

I view this as design mentoring. Naturally, client teams or even new design teams, as my team is considering, will not have the expertise and experience of design firms whose mission is to be leaders in the field. But as Coughlan points out in the interview, solutions are more likely to be implemented if developed by the client and not the design firm. The role of the design firm thus becomes to show clients the way rather than to do the work.

Coughlan: I would say that the most important shift in the design profession will be for designers to get comfortable with the notion that it’s more important for a client to have a great idea than for the designer to have the idea. If the client organization has played a role in coming up with the idea, it’s way more likely to see the light of day.

Designing design teams could be an extension to this shift.

Adaptive Path scheduled a visit for the interns to visit the Google campus and IDEO in Palo Alto today. At Google, we met with Douglas Vander Molen, who helped AP create Measure Map, which was then acquired by Google. The team from Measure Map then went on to redesign Google Analytics, which launched this past May. We also briefly chatted with Jeff Veen, an AP founder and the leader of the Measure Map and Google Analytics teams.

Overall, I wasn’t that impressed with the Google campus. Sure, there’s healthy free food (lots of wheat grass drinks), pool tables, a space ship, a dinosaur, and one-person swimming pools (complete with lifeguard), but there are also a lot of cubicles, no open design spaces, and no project rooms. Design isn’t something that gets a lot of attention, and it seems like it’s going to be an uphill battle to get design more involved in the process.

Conversely, IDEO looked cool and seemed like it could be a lot of fun. However, we only got a superficial tour of the offices. (Surprisingly, Google seemed pretty open to visitors just walking around.) The IDEO tour guide showed our group and a bunch of executive MBAs several of IDEO’s well-known endeavors, including the Nightline shopping cart, first Microsoft mouse prototypes, and Palm 5 prototypes.

The MBAs gushed over all of these. Though I couldn’t help but remember the comment the IDEO Chicago folks made to me during my interview with them this spring that they were so over the shopping cart as it happened so long ago. Apparently not.

There were loads of hanging bikes, open spaces, project rooms full of boards with tons of stickies on them, lots of vegetation, and a van inside the office that had been converted into a meeting space. They had a machine shop, a toy-making office, and a well-designed lobby. It looked like a cool place to work.

But the tour guide did mention hours being 8 am to midnight for some folks. I love design, and this schedule is not as demanding as grad school, but that did not seem cool at all.

I was talking to a current second-year interaction design student at CMU, who was offered a job by Microsoft. But she said she wanted to apply to IDEO before accepting.

I checked out the positions currently available with IDEO, and came across the following description for a Senior Design Strategist:

You are both creative and analytical. You possess a strong aesthetic sense and rich conceptual thinking ability — that is, you know form and design language, but are equally engaged in exploring broad, undefined problem areas and articulating points-of-view about what really matters. You can problem-find and problem-solve, as well as come up with powerful ways to visualize and share rewarding user experiences. You bring an expansive view of design — encompassing product, service, and communication — and a holistic approach to process: formulating cultural and user insights, mapping opportunity spaces through strategic frameworks and expressing compelling solutions.

You have a proven track record innovating at a high level: drawing insights from users and cultural trends, creating generative frameworks, expressing compelling solutions and communicating at a level to inform executive decision-making. You understand the value of design to build businesses and transform organizations.

That sounds like a kick-ass job description to me: creative and analytical, articulating points-of-view about what really matters, an expansive view of design.

A job description like that would have scared me in the past. And while I could not possibly apply for such a position at the moment, this is the type of higher level position that I would like to achieve.