Ep. 264 - Wayne Li, Director of Design Bloc & Professor of Design and Engineering at Georgia Tech on Design, Design Thinking and Changing Trends

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Wayne Li, Professor of Practice of Design and Engineering, School of Industrial Design at Georgia Tech and Director of Design Bloc. Wayne and I talk about the growing importance of design and design thinking, and we explore some of the changing trends when it comes to technology, tools, and tactics for building new products and services that matter. Let's get started

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we'll bring you latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator.

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Wayne Li. He is Professor of Practice of Design and Engineering, School of Industrial Design at Georgia Tech, Director of Design Bloc. Welcome to the show, Wayne.

Wayne Li: Hi thanks. Thanks Brian. Thanks for having me. 

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on, because you have had a long career in this whole world of design and innovation. You were a founding class member at the Stanford d.school. You've worked with great companies like Ford and Pottery Barn and VW. And I think you were a part of the original team that helped develop the original Tesla Roadster. I think I'll start off the conversation with where you're currently at with Design Bloc and how it got has origin. 

Wayne Li: Design Bloc is a multidisciplinary Design Thinking initiative on Georgia Tech Campus. So, you can think a center. We try to bridge different schools and colleges. Think like a large university, they're separated in different units or colleges. You have a college of engineering and college of design, college of natural sciences.

And what Design Bloc tries to do is to teach in a multidisciplinary type of way. And so we partner with professors from all over the Institute to try to offer courses that teach not only Design Thinking, but do it in a way that bridges more than one unit, more than one college. We have things like Bio-inspired Watercolor Painting all the way to Transportation Design.

Community Engagement and Service, like a humanitarian design project. And again, you can see that those problems exist. They exist beyond just the sphere of one unit. For example, you're saying, okay, I'm going to address developing countries energy grid. That's not just engineering that requires public policy. It requires cultural engagement and community knowledge. You have structure or architecture there. 

So, you can see a problem like that is multifaceted. We shouldn't be teaching in a siloed or singled mono disciplinary manner. You know, I learned this really early on, probably back when I was still in college, actually. But I worked at IDEO product development very early on in my career.

You know, I think the reason why it came to be like, you mentioned, like, you know, what is it, how did it get started? Was that when I went to undergraduate, I was both a fine arts and engineering major. I kind of saw how the perception of an object, its beauty, its appearance, had a cultural relevance to it.

And then you coupled that with how well it was engineered. How well it was built. What it was actually intended to function as and whether or not those mesh together well. And I think that's kind of what got me to my work at IDEO. But I think that was the benefit. 

And so about almost seven years ago, an alumnus from Georgia Tech, Jim Oliver, went back and visited the Institute and just notice that the College of Engineering and the College of Design really didn't talk to each other that much. Even though he himself had had a similar background. In undergraduate, he also had a mechanical engineering and industrial design background just like me.

So, he basically put out a search and said, I want someone. I will donate a certain sum of money. And I want someone to establish this kind of initiative, whose goal it is to teach students in a more well-rounded way. And so, I'm very lucky and very blessed after a nationwide search that I managed to get it. That's kind of how it came to be.

So, we started about six, seven years ago with basically one class. With 8 students to 12 students in it. And now we teach about 20 classes a year, with about a thousand to 2000 students. Right? So, it has grown. It's wonderful to see it. I love being the director of it and seeing it grow and getting partners and collaborators who are really psyched about it.

And the cool thing is, yeah, you actually see professors who have a PhD in something, so they're very, very intelligent about something. All of a sudden get intrigued, like I never thought of myself as a designer. Well, everyone, little d design. 

Brian Ardinger: That's an interesting point because obviously people are beginning to understand that design is a core component of every facet of their life nowadays. But tell me a little bit about like what's the process of Design Bloc and how do you go from an idea to creating something valuable in the market? So, walk me through the whole process of Design Bloc. 

Wayne Li: Design Bloc, the initiative, right? Is you, like you mentioned, I did my graduate work at Stanford. We were in the class that helped to found the Stanford d.school. So, let's take like the little d design. Don't think like I'm a fashion designer or I'm a software designer or I'm a car designer. Let's take the little d design. So, design, if we just think about design process, right. 

Stanford has a certain method for their design process. They call it Design Thinking Process. But if we just think of it as a process, when anyone goes through steps or goes through mindsets or phases in order to create something, they go through a design process. Design is a very flexible word. It's like Smurf, it's the only word where you can almost use it like six or seven times and still get the actual understanding.

Like I could say, well, I'm designing a design that will design a design to design. So, and you'll be like, what? But that would make sense, right? I'm designing a design; I'm creating a blueprint that will create a robot that will actually learn and make something of use. That's what it is. 

The idea of course, is that when they build anything. They're going through what we consider a process, a design process. And again, this isn't something that necessarily is taught at an Institute. You know, an Institute will teach physics, or it'll teach mathematics or Latin. They're not actually teaching the process of how you create novel, useful, effective ideas, right, for society. 

The Design Thinking processes that Stanford created along with the Hasso-Plattner Institute in IDEO. Talks about how can you hone and better your design process regardless of what it is. Regardless of what you're building. So, I think in that sense, Design Bloc is also trying to create courses that allow students to learn about the design process, hone it, and foster good mindsets and behaviors as they go through it.

Like for example, with pick something relatively trivial, but let's just for kicks. You get up in the morning and you want to make eggs for your partner or your wife or your spouse. That's a design process, right? You're making something that serves a nee...