Designer

Amna Nawaz: For decades, David Kelley has helped people to unlock their creativity. A pioneer of design, he founded Stanford's d.school as a place for cross-disciplinary problem-solving.

In tonight's Brief But Spectacular, he reflects on the journey that shaped his belief that everyone has the capacity to be creative.

David Kelley, Stanford University: I met Steve Jobs soon after I started IDEO in 1978. He didn't have an internal design group, and so he was using people from the outside. He liked what he saw and we ended up doing 53 projects for Apple after that.

The most impactful project that I think we ever did for Apple was the computer mouse. It's one of those great things where to see something adopted that quickly was really gratifying as a designer.

These are things I designed. So this is the chassis for the Apple III computer. This is the Palm V. It's a personal digital assistant before your time. My mom's spatula, I don't know why that's memorable.

I grew up in Barberton, Ohio, the Rust Belt of the country. As a kid, I was always tinkering. You know my grandfather was a machinist, and if you needed a part for the washing machine, you made a new one. When I first arrived at Stanford, I really didn't have any knowledge of what design was.

Design was in the engineering school, but it was very human-centered, so that was a better fit for me. I was much better at going out and trying to understand what was meaningful for people. Twenty years ago, I was diagnosed with throat cancer, and it really hit me hard, but I really had the epiphany that I wanted to do something that was meaningful in the world.

And as I started teaching, I realized that my purpose in life was figuring out how to help people gain confidence in their creative ability. Many people assume they're not creative. Time and time again, they say, a teacher told me I wasn't creative or that's not a very good drawing of a horse or whatever it is.

We don't have to teach creativity. Once we remove the blocks, they can then feel themselves as being a creative person. Witnessing somebody realizing they're creative for the first time is just a complete joy. You can just see them come out of the shop and beaming that I can weld. Like, what's next?

I couldn't get that anywhere else, I think, other than being an educator. The way the d.school idea came to me basically was, I was in a bunch of meetings in those days about multidisciplinary. Early prototypes for the d.school were just some of us getting together from different departments and teaching a class together.

The way of thinking and working together in a radically collaborative way results in really life-changing, world-changing kind of ideas. The d.school is really focused on helping people gain a new mind-set, designing in a way that's human-centered.

What's different about design today, I think, is, we used to be at the kids table and now I think we're at the adult table, that we're getting to work on the most interesting problems. Design is just one of the disciplines, along with business and technology, we can actually contribute to making solutions that are meaningful and fit with people.

My name is David Kelley, and this is my Brief But Spectacular take on creativity and design.

Amna Nawaz: And you can watch more Brief But Spectacular takes on our Web site, PBS.org/NewsHour/Brief.