Behind every great invention is an engineer who figured out how to make it work. But how do you take an extremely technical, cutting-edge innovation and make it easy to understand and use for the public? That’s where designers come in.

Barry Katz is a professor emeritus of industrial design at California College of the Arts and a consulting professor at Stanford University. He is the author of the book, Make It New: A History of Silicon Valley Design, co-author of Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation, and has spent decades studying the history of design thinking and its purpose at organizations. 

Barry and Greg discuss the historical trajectory of design in tech, how engineers and designers began collaborating in the 1980s, and the role of design in transforming technologies into user-friendly products. The conversation also covers the interdisciplinary nature of design, the impact of design thinking on various industries, and Barry’s latest book detailing the application of design principles in healthcare. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

You don't have to be a designer to think like one

31:47: You don't have to be a designer to think like one. And in fact, you probably don't want to become a designer. But over the course of this rather remarkable few decades, designers have learned a lot of tricks, and they're basically tricks. And many of those tricks can be learned by entrepreneurs, lawyers, physicians, which is what we dealt with in our most recent book. And it's not turning them into designers; it's giving them tools to solve their problems in medicine, law, engineering, or wherever, in something like the way that designers solve their problems.

Why design thrives like an ecosystem

19:17: So what is the connector between the internal combustion engine and the car, between the printed circuit board and the lamp? It's design. So, in the course of that, designers have had to learn a whole lot of new skills, new tricks. That’s where design thinking has played, I think, an important role, which may be drawing to a close. They’ve learned to integrate the behavioral sciences. They’ve learned how to talk to technical people. There's no doubt that it is an ongoing challenge.

Designers shape experiences, not just products

25:40: We don't want products to fail people. Now, a refrigerator is one thing, but then, when you are starting not just to approach a large appliance in your kitchen but to put it in your pocket, your kid's backpack, or a contact lens—which is to deliver insulin to a diabetic, which Google X is working on—then your tolerance for a bad experience vanishes. And it is a bit of a hackneyed thing to say, but the role of designers has been to create an experience.

Design isn’t about knowing everything, it’s about knowing who to ask

27:15: What happens when you have an exposure to the way anthropologists approach a problem, or economists, or linguists, or whoever it might be, is not that you become one or you acquire that level of professionalism, but you know who to ask. And you've heard an entirely new inventory of questions that may not have occurred to you in the past but are now on your agenda.  And you either acquire a sufficient level of professional skill to answer those questions, or you now know who to ask. 

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

• Moore’s Law 
• The Microma 
• Silicon Valley (TV series) 
• Alphonse Chapanis 
• Larry Page 
• Franz von Holzhausen
• DeepSeek
• Natasha Jen: Design Thinking is Bullsh*t

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at California College of the Arts
• Faculty Profile at Stanford University
• Professional Profile on LinkedIn

His Work:

• Make It New: A History of Silicon Valley Design
• Change by Design, Revised and Updated: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation