Deep Dive and IDEO

To introduce my student to the engineering design process I like to show them a video titled Deep Dive. This video is a twenty minute clip from an old 60 Minutes piece that focused on a company by the name of IDEO, a design firm in California, lead by David M. Kelley. My students absolutely love this video and they always ask me more about the firm. Just this past week I found a new 60 Minutes piece where they interview Mr. Kelley after his battle with cancer.
 
I believe this most recent video is a great way to show the students how passionate Mr. Kelley is in regards to the engineering design process as they go into his home and talk to his 15-year-old daughter and the projects that she is working on with her father. This allows students to see that Mr. Kelley lives and breathes the design process in both is professional life as well as in his personal life.

I often have the students also ask me what ever happened to the grocery cart that the IDEO team designed in the Deep Dive video and the closest design that I can find to it is the IKEA cart.

One of the main rules when my students begin to brainstorm early on in their projects is that there is no such thing as a bad idea. We actually encourage crazy ideas. Unfortunately students can be cruel from time to time so from now on I will show them this other video clip that I found of a TED Talk of Mr. Kelley talking about building your creative confidence. It seems that he witnessed the creative confidence of a young classmate and he uses this illustration as a platform to jump into the importance of having having a creative confidence and how we can all achieve such levels ourselves. I will also have my students read this article as well.