• IBM is gearing up to become the world’s largest and most sophisticated design company
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In this bookThe Perfect companyWe studied all the small and beautiful companies in the world, and found that no one company can be called perfect, but if you put them all together, you can have the characteristics of the ideal company.

The ultimate ideal

“Design is not a formula. It’s not as simple as building a shell and ignoring what’s inside. Good design is in the spirit of the Renaissance and combines technology, cognitive science, human needs and aesthetics to create things that amaze the world.” _ Paola Antonelli, director of the Museum of Modern Art.

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In 2012, the 105-year-old technology company made an ambitious vow to transform its teams with hundreds of designers and train all of its employees (377,000-plus worldwide) to think and work like designers. Just as IBM set out to raise the benchmark through design thinking 60 years ago, this time it is more determined to extend it throughout the company.

IBM’s design Renaissance attitude is very different from that of the Enterprise Design Project, which was published 20 years ago. In 1956, Thomas J. Watson, IBM’s founder and president, famously coined the slogan “Good design is Good Business” to achieve “visible design goals” and increase the company’s influence. But IBM no longer employs design titans like Eliot Noyes, Eero Saarinen, Paul Rand, Charles and Ray Eames in the same high-profile way it did in 1960, Instead, aggressively hire new graduates and mid-career designers who can collaborate. “A single designer is not enough to meet these challenges.” This is the design philosophy of IBM’s new team.

But of all the professional jobs at IBM — scientists, engineers, business professionals — why is it that designers are given such a high status?

“Designers have an intuitive sense of the right direction for a product. They understand the power of a great user experience and how to make people feel at home when they use the product.” Says Gilbert, IBM’s chief design evangelist.

IBM’s design positioning.

“Design is everyone’s job. Not everyone is a designer, but everyone should use their users as their Pointers.” Gilbert says the design project has helped the $14.3 billion company become more visionary and shift from a technology-driven “feature first” company to “user first.” “It allows us to start solving real problems for our users, rather than constantly developing one new feature after another.” “He added.

In a recent project, an airline asked IBM to help speed up its ticket window to reduce check-in times for passengers. The engineers got the request and started thinking about how to improve the software performance of the ticket collection window, while the designers went straight to the staff and asked why the ticket collection was so inefficient. They eventually found that female staff were having trouble charging the ticket check-in machines because their special uniforms made it difficult for them to reach the charging holes at the back of the machines. Having identified the crux of the problem, IBM developed a mobile app that replaced the traditional check-in process and cut airlines’ costs.

Gilbert says that by getting employees to think like designers, they can develop an “emotional connection” and start caring about users’ difficulties, stresses, and insecurities. “It may not be familiar to people in other departments, but it’s very familiar to designers because it’s how they solve problems.” Gilbert explained that design has become increasingly part of IBM’s business and engineering divisions. “If you don’t have three departments working together on a project, you’re not going to get reliable, quality results, at least to a certain extent.”

IBM design management document.

In the IBM Design Boot Camp article, empathy (the ability to understand what others are feeling) became a key word in the boot camp to better connect with colleagues and customers. They are also trained in prototyping, team building, problem solving, and understanding the feelings and needs of customers and colleagues to come up with better solutions.

“Design is everybody’s job. Not everyone is a designer, but everyone should be user-centric.” Gilbert wrote in a company blog post. By the end of 2016, 100,000 IBMers will have to undergo design training of various kinds.

In three years, IBM will triple its work force, with 1,300 formally trained designers spread out in nearly 31 studios from Boston to Berblingen. They have acquired four digital branding agencies and built the largest studio network in the world. IBM is also rapidly building its Noah’s Ark of design, which includes product designers, graphic designers, interface designers, brand designers and even typography designers.

IBM’s design studio in Austin, Texas.

Design thinking at IBM.

IBM will also be joined by a new crop of creative minds: design researchers with formal ethnographic education and mFA degrees who will explore how to apply their methods to the real world. In practice, they will conduct interviews and collect data to understand the nuances of different functional components to users. Gilbert says the “open spirit” of the researchers enables engineers to better implement their ideas and better meet customer requirements. “The inclusion of a design researcher has caused quite a stir in the design community, but in the long run it’s quite revolutionary.” “He said.

“The inclusion of a design researcher has caused quite a stir in the design community, but in the long run it’s quite revolutionary.”

With a special expenditure of $100 million, IBM actively promotes and promotes design culture in all internal systems of the company, from recruitment to training, from employee visits to office layout, and even the procurement of office supplies. “When we started this project, we had a hard time using post-it notes in the office. But now you can get a post-it note at the touch of a button, which is an amazing change.” Gilbert says post-it notes are an office necessity and one of the surprises of the design project.

Post-it note items.

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To increase returns, IBM has also reserved two-thirds of its design positions for new graduates. Gilbert says this strategy can bring new blood to the company. “We built this design project for the long term, and we want people from all over the world with different perspectives, ideas, specialties and design cultures.”

To focus on design thinking is to instill a collaborative, group-discussion based company culture, which may not be immediately acceptable to all employees. “It’s not total collaboration, it’s total transparency,” Gilbert says. “It’s about sharing ideas, passions and information.” He said IBM must retool its internal systems toward more collaborative and inspirational platforms like GitHub, Slack, and MURAL.

Bringing in design fellows (with backgrounds in science and anthropology) will have the most profound impact on how companies operate. Gilbert says many of IBM’s engineering and business teams are surprised when they come across designers who can speak with data in addition to pretty pictures. “Designers in the past focused on form and color and didn’t do a good job of understanding the audience, which was tricky, but it’s getting better and better.” “He added.

IBM’s ambitious and radical design-thinking program will spread design influence even more. In the 170 countries in which IT operates, IBM will reposition itself and improve its design expertise. Spread the influence of design to create better shapes, prettier interfaces, and simpler solutions. Well-trained IBMers can put design to work and use it to solve the world’s toughest problems, from detecting cancer to fighting Zika to flying drones with real-time weather data.