IDEO is the go-to firm for translating ideas into products
The Magic Mirror that prospective customers encounter at the BriteSmile Professional Teeth Whitening Center on Newbury Street doesn't talk, and it won't tell you who is the fairest of them all. Instead, it uses technological wizardry to show you a live image of what your teeth would look like after undergoing the company's $600 whitening treatment.
BriteSmile developed the Magic Mirror in collaboration with the Lexington office of IDEO, a product design firm headquartered in Silicon Valley. While IDEO's work is well known -- the company created the first mass-produced computer mouse for Apple -- IDEO's Lexington outpost, founded and run by two veterans of Wang Laboratories, has kept a low profile. The 40-person group, headed by Douglas Dayton and David Privitera, seems happy to let the products they design get all the attention.
Introduced last fall, the Magic Mirror is a handheld computer with a color LCD screen that digitally alters the brightness of your teeth in a way that BriteSmile says is representative of how well its treatment works. The result is a split-screen before-and-after picture of your choppers in real time -- in their current coffee-stained state and gleaming with pearly-white potential.
"It's the best sales tool we could create," says Bruce Fleming, president of BriteSmile Inc., a publicly traded California company. "We wanted to capture the eureka experience when you look into the mirror after a one-hour treatment and see the difference."
You may not have gazed into that Magic Mirror, but chances are good you've encountered the work of Dayton and Privitera's team, whether it's the interiors of Amtrak's Acela trains, the exterior of a Pepsi vending machine, the Polaroid i-zone instant camera, a PaperMate correction tape dispenser, an insulin injection "pen" for Eli Lilly, or Sony cordless headphones. The Lexington IDEO office has designed a device that heart surgeons use to open up blood vessels during a balloon angioplasty procedure, and the luminous blue tap handle that bartenders use to dispense a cold Sam Adams.
"We get to be at the leading edge of markets and technologies, and to think about how people will use new products," Dayton says. "And one of the coolest things about our work is that we're usually being asked to do something that hasn't been done before -- things that may not be possible."
Dayton was part of the original group of Stanford University alumni who worked with Apple to design the first mass-produced mouse. (The mouse was invented in the 1960s, but it remained mired in the lab until the debut of Apple's Lisa personal computer in 1983.) For Apple Dayton built dozens of prototype mice out of wood, and the team experimented with different kinds of roller balls -- including one that came from inside a container of Ban deodorant.
Dayton left IDEO (then known as David Kelley design, after one of its founders) in the early 1980s to take a job in Lowell with Wang Laboratories, where he started a skunk works called the Advanced Product Development Group. At Wang, he worked on long-term projects in voice recognition, computer vision, artificial intelligence, and pen-based computing. David Privitera, the second-in-command at IDEO's Lexington office, was at Wang, too. He remembers the evanescent nature of Wang's market dominance.
"It was a $4 billion company, with 38,000 people," he says. "I was working on a letter-quality dot matrix printer that was the best in the world. But one year we were the pinnacle of dot matrix printing, and then the next year, laser printing came along."
At IDEO, Dayton and Privitera can continually work with clients on disruptive technologies; they aren't forced to defend an established market position or make incremental improvements to mature products.
"At a company like Wang, it's like you're riding a wave, and when it crashes, you're done," Privitera explains. "Here, there are a lot of waves. We're not stuck in one part of the ocean. We get to try 'em all."
IDEO's office space feels like a cross between a Montessori classroom and a bric-a-brac shop. Hanging from the ceiling near the wood and metal shops is a soap box derby car emblazoned with yellow flames. The smell of sawdust emanates from the wood shop, and a half-eaten blueberry pie sits on the counter in the kitchen, left over from the weekly staff meeting. Gray foam cubes, each about the size of a television, serve as impromptu seating or wall-building material. A "techbox" serves as a central trove for interesting materials that the designers might someday incorporate into a product. Brainstorming and continual prototyping are the central tenets of IDEO's product design philosophy. In a conference room, above a wall-to-wall whiteboard, rules of brainstorming are inscribed like commandments: "Encourage wild ideas," "Defer judgment," "Build upon the ideas of others." When IDEO holds brainstorming sessions with clients, the output is measured in I.P.H. -- ideas per hour.
"We expect to produce 100 ideas an hour, each of them sketched on a piece of paper," Privitera says.
Building prototypes of the ideas that emerge during brainstorming can be an elaborate process. For the Magic Mirror, IDEO shot video of employees' friends and family members, then painstakingly whitened their teeth to give BriteSmile executives a sense of the impact that the before-and-after imagery would have. For Amtrak, they built a full-scale railroad car out of foam core and aluminum. The IDEO designers wanted their clients to experience what it would be like to bring luggage through the doorways, work in the cafe car, and negotiate the bathroom while seated in a wheelchair.
Dayton won't say anything about the firm's current projects, and there are certain parts of the office that are off-limits to visitors. But IDEO's Lexington branch has recently worked on the interior for a new, low-cost private jet, and also a conference name badge with electronic innards that allow it to communicate with other attendees' badges, exchanging contact info or identifying common interests. Achieving perfection with any product, Dayton says, is elusive.
"There's no such thing as a final design," he says. "Even when a product is in the market, that's just testing with several hundred thousand beta users. And then you can start thinking about version two."
Scott Kirsner is a contributing editor at Fast Company. He can be reached at skirsner@verizon.net. 