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Kevin Bethune: Nonlinear—Navigating Design with Curiosity and Conviction
00:22:05
We talked to Kevin Bethune about how we can bring non-linear thinking into our very linear workflows to shake them up to embrace ambiguity and exploration. Kevin also shared why he thinks multidisciplinary thinking is essential to innovation and creativity.
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- [00:01]
Kevin Bethune
If we value the folks around the table as full human beings, if we appreciate their full humanity. Beyond the title, there's so much richness that we could leverage in our problem solving, the respect for culture that could be intertwined in those constituents that we're claiming to design for that can make its way into the problem solving. And we're better for it.
- [00:24]
Eli Woolery
One core strength that good designers cultivate is the ability to navigate ambiguity. Our guest today, Kevin Bethune, returns to the show to discuss his new book Nonlinear, which emphasizes that to achieve real innovation, teams must be willing to venture into the proverbial forest of ambiguity.
- [00:41]
Aaron Walter
We talked to Kevin about how we can bring nonlinear thinking into our very linear workflows to shake them up and embrace ambiguity and exploration. Kevin also shared why he thinks multidisciplinary thinking is essential to innovation and creativity.
- [00:57]
Eli Woolery
This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Woolery.
- [01:04]
Aaron Walter
And I'm Aaron Walter. You can get ad free episodes, discounts on our workshops, access to documentaries like Design Disruptors and our growing library of books, as well as our monthly AMA's with big names in design and tech by becoming a DesignBetter Premium subscriber. It's also the best way to support the show. Visit designbetterpodcast.com subscribe to learn more. And if you're hiring or looking for your next design role, visit designbetter.directory, our new site that helps talented designers and great companies find each other. Hi there, Aaron Walter here. If you're hearing this, you're not currently on our Premium subscriber feed. DesignBetter Premium subscribers enjoy weekly episodes, four episodes per month in total rather than two. All ad free and invitations to our monthly AMAs with the smartest folks in design and tech. You'll hear a preview of this episode, but if you'd like to hear the full conversation, please consider becoming a premium subscriber@designbetterpodcast.com subscribe. It's just $7 a month and it supports not only your personal growth, it also makes our work at Design Better possible. The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program. If you can't afford a subscription, email us@subscriptionsecuriositydepartment.com and we'll help you. And now back to the show.
- [02:53]
Eli Woolery
Kevin Bethune, welcome back to the Design Better Podcast.
- [02:57]
Kevin Bethune
Thank you Aaron and Eli, thank you for having me back.
- [02:59]
Eli Woolery
We are very excited to have you and in the interim, since recording your first episode, I was lucky enough to have you up in person, at campus, to our class, and then we hung out in San Francisco, which is a lot of fun. But I was not aware at the time that you had this project brewing in the background, which is another book. And Aaron and I are curious, given that there is some not insubstantial pain involved in writing a book, as Aaron and I both know what brought about this idea of doing it again.
- [03:26]
Kevin Bethune
Yeah, the thought of writing another book, I feel a little dead inside, but I think definitely having the privilege and the support of the MIT Press, after Reimagining Design came out and having a litany of conversations with some tremendous audiences and at schools, at companies, there was something more to say. And not to say that the idea of a second book was going to be a sequel to Reimagining Design, but there was another opportunity to create a narrative around a set of thoughts and convictions that I thought were important for this conversation around where design fits into multidisciplinary opportunities. And the MIT Press saw fit that the second book, Nonlinear Navigating Design with Curiosity and Conviction, could also fit within the Simplicity series that the MIT Press has supported under the editorial direction of Dr. John Maida. So this will be, I believe, the 11th book in the series. It's not a sequel, but it's just another set of arguments that I felt were still necessary to convey after the first book.
- [04:25]
Aaron Walter
So folks who missed your previous episode on Design Better, which we will link to in Show Notes, would not know that you've had a very multidisciplinary background, that you worked in a nuclear engineering capacity, you worked with Nike designing Jordans, and you've just had like a very widely varied career, which is unique. How much of that informed or was the impetus of this book Nonlinear?
- [04:54]
Kevin Bethune
Very much the foundation, as you said, I definitely had some very unique zigs and zags, as I call it, in the journey, and I never would have predicted it playing out that way, honestly. But hindsight being 20 20, I can say that Curiosity was a defining thread. And I had the privilege of finding myself in some situations that were arguably early in comparison to maybe what my peers were going through, whether it was a previous life as an engineer, a business person, and then understanding how design could fit into my puzzle moving forward. I did find myself in situations where I had to connect the dots between disciplines, sometimes what I had permission to do so, and sometimes what I did and ruffled a few feathers in the process of just connecting the dots and running experiments to see what could happen from that. And so I think Those experiences definitely help me today in terms of the times that we're in where multidisciplinary convergence, I believe, is the requirement, not the exception, like it used to be.
- [05:52]
Eli Woolery
So talk a little bit more about that because I think from Aaron and my perspective, we're certainly seeing that multidisciplinary thinking play out in the fact that roles like designer and developer are starting to blur together with these access to these generative AI tools, where me as a designer, I can code little prototypes or a developer can very quickly create some kind of initial UI design. So that's certainly part of it. But maybe talk us through your thinking on why these things are converging and why it's becoming very important to become multidisciplinary.
- [06:22]
Kevin Bethune
I think the benefit of digital is that it's definitely brought us together. It's shrunk the world down, it's ever shrinking. The connectivity is just at a whole other level where a lot of the complexities of today, thanks to digital, thanks to the rise of generative AI. A lot of the complexities, I believe, require an elevated sense of importance to creative problem solving and critical thinking. Because you could argue that information is readily accessible, data is readily accessible in many ways. But to be able to pull together people around the table to make sense of what's happening, to parse what is credible information from potentially misinformation, disinformation, and to be able to surface patterns of importance of what we can pursue as an opportunity to create something new and of value to whoever it is we claim to be serving. That's why I believe the complexity of our times and especially the way the future is unfolding is going to require us to sort of lean in together and almost, I hate to say, dis, remediate some of the preconceived sort of titles that we've given ourselves, the preconceived sort of silos of discipline that has to blur too.
- [07:32]
Aaron Walter
Can you ground that a little bit for us? Maybe give us some examples of some of the problems that are unfolding right now in the times that we live, where multidisciplinary thinking is kind of the only solution.
- [07:44]
Kevin Bethune
You know, I definitely look at the application of generative AI. I mean, I am no expert. I think we're all in our early infancy experimenting. It was nice to see Eli up in Palo Alto show a couple of prototypes he was working on. So I think it's necessary that we lean in and experiment on some of these tool sets to see where is there value, you know, can These algorithms, for example LLMs take away some of the routine and help us automate some of those tasks. But again, we need to interrogate like how can we actually show up for the constituents that we claim to be designing for, for designing with and new and novel ways that are beyond just the present patterns of marketers, marketing and consumers consuming things. If anything generative AI and the like, algorithms like it can speed things up to a level that's going to further exacerbate a lot of the problems that we are encountering today. Sustainability, data ethics, privacy, all these compounding intended as well as unintended consequences will just further exacerbate. And then I'm also drawn to some of the thought leadership of the likes of Monica Bilsquite and others like her, where there are strong reminders that there are people living in dystopia right now that are vulnerable to some of these ill effects. And all the more reason to bring sort of the human quotient, the technical quotient and the business quotient together around the table more than ever before.
- [09:06]
Aaron Walter
I don't know about you, but I've definitely worked with multidisciplinary people like Eli, and they tend to be the people who come up with the best ideas, are the most capable, are the most resilient when they're thrown really challenging problems. Talking about, you know, working on software with people who have a background in not just software development but biology, or they've got a background in industrial design. Like I have a background in painting, for goodness sakes. Like that's very different. And I find like personally, either working with someone who's multidisciplinary or the way that I've approached my own growth journey, the more I learn about adjacent things, the better I am prepared to answer problems. I wonder if you can share any examples of people you've worked with who embodied that multidisciplinary thinking and how that affected the workflow.
- [10:04]
Kevin Bethune
It's funny, in Nonlinear I shine a light on a client partner that I've been working with for the past well over six years. It's a biotech venture based in Irvine, California called Envoy. Invoy is how you spell it. Envoy, led by an incredible leader in Lubna ahmad. She's a PhD in respiratory chemistry. So she was a scientist. She was a scientist that had to learn to become a CEO, had to learn how to take her research and package it in a way that could be piloted and that she could find benefactors that would want to potentially help in the Fundraising to raise funds to actually manage this as a company. So she became this science business, hybrid science slash, you know, Silicon Valley's founder sort of Persona. And we met at a serendipitous time when she wanted to bring out her intellectual property out of stealth and begin to align this as a product that could be sold into companies. And so when we met, she had an open mind because of her background, having to wrestle with different muscles herself. Design was now this new entity put in front of her upon our meeting. And she was open to just sort of experiment with me. And we tried some things together. We worked at the whiteboard together. How would this unique intellectual property that she had around breath biomarkers and understanding what's happening in the human body, how could we take the existing traction that they've achieved and begin to humanize how we show up for different constituents that this platform could serve? How could we iterate and come up with the most coherent, relevant solutioning that matched the value criteria of all those different stakeholders in her sort of path, in her trajectory for this business? And we challenged our own sort of assumptions in that journey. We went on listening tours and talked to some of the existing members that were part of the early pilots and got a lot of latent substance that we can then shape to make our solution even more relevant, more impactful, and figure out the best ways to show up. And so it's been a beautiful relationship. It wasn't, you know, something that started with a design sprint and ended. We've been working together in a creative problem solving capacity over the last six plus years.
- [12:11]
Eli Woolery
Let's talk a bit about the title of your new book, Nonlinear, and maybe just walk us through what nonlinear thinking is. How might it be different from thinking in business terms or in engineering terms or design terms?
- [12:22]
Kevin Bethune
You know, even with the rise of things like design thinking, human centered methods and approaches, the business world at large, when introduced to a new methodology, there tends to be a tendency to take the risk out of any approach. Like once it kind of works over here, I want to replicate that and ask all the teams to sort of follow that same approach. And so the de risking leads us to sort of formulaic practices that, you know, you can't necessarily tweak or break later in time when it is appropriate to do so. So nonlinear in a way, especially with design being the youngest to the party in terms of the creative problem solving at the table, I wanted to shine a light on design's nuances, that design is so much more than the Sprint framework or if you follow these six steps, you get innovation automatically. We know that design is much richer and more nuanced than that. So how can we shine a light on these nuances and complexities as a source of nonlinear advantage to have people understand, you know, armed with new perspectives, how can we help them understand the litany of choices that they can have as they enter a forest of ambiguity and be able to make a decision based on the best information they have at their disposal? To take a step and experiment, to learn more, to get more evidence, to get more inspiration, to get more insights and data points, to then navigate to the next step of effort, ideally for the sake of learning our way, prototyping our way to the more relevant solution versus just any solution.
- [13:50]
Aaron Walter
I think there's a notion of that linearity of innovation that I don't have research to back this up. This is only a hunch, but it's connected to industrialization, that as we start to automate and produce things, we should follow this line. But when we think about famous examples like Archimedes trying to figure out the volume of gold and a crown for the king, figures it out in a very nonlinear way, tries to do a lot of math, a lot of formulas, can't figure it out, takes a bath, water displacement. Aha. Eureka. I've got this idea and that's kind of the way that the brain works a lot of times it's like when we confront these intractable problems, you know, we kind of have to let it stew a bit. I'm curious how that factors into non linearity, that reflection process.
- [14:43]
Kevin Bethune
I would sort of translate what you just described as sense making. It is not a linear act to sense make. No matter the opportunity that's been put in front of me, especially as of late, running my own practice, no matter what the brief is, I always try to exercise an MO of opening the aperture with my client partners and the teams that I work with and am a part of. And the M.O. there is like, how can we make sure we're surfacing as much diverse ingredients that reflect the context of the stakeholders we're designing for, but really the world that they're operating in, the journey that they're on, not necessarily what us trying to sell a product or a service. It's like what context is surrounding that set of people in this ecology. And let's understand all the different inspirations, the data points, the business drivers, the hard constraints, but also like, what are some of the analogous inspirations we can pull in that are outside the realm of what we're focused on in the moment because there could be some patterns. I honestly believe that you gotta get the team immersed in that diversity of ingredients that maybe that initial brief isn't even asking for. But if you put all that substance around a team or give them the autonomy and empowerment to go get it and bring it into the room together, then you're allowing a natural environment where sparks and connections can naturally occur. You got to give people a little bit of freedom, a little bit of space, the right ammunition around them to be able to make those sparks and connections. And that's creativity.
- [16:08]
Eli Woolery
In your book, you talk about diversity as a flywheel and an accelerant. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that, how that works and innovation.
- [16:16]
Kevin Bethune
I think as we discussed, the world is a lot smaller. The complexities of our times require us to sort of lean into each other, even like notions of our lived experiences. I mean, Aaron, you mentioned painting some of those adjacent things that we're involved in do color how we see the world. If we value the folks around the table as full human beings, if we appreciate their full humanity. Beyond the title, there's so much richness that we could leverage in our problem solving. If we ensure that the teams that were empowering or evolving, were growing and shaping, actually reflect and mirror the beautiful mosaic that is the world and all of the intersectionality that make us up as human beings. Those adjacencies, those relationships that we already have, the respect for culture that could be intertwined in those constituents that we're claiming to design for that can make its way into the problem solving. And we're better for it. We're more astute, we're more respectful. We're more able to pick up on the nuances that could lead to unintended or intended consequences as it affects people. You know, right now we're feeling that in terms of algorithms not being able to pick up on the needs or the specific realities of certain groups of people. Like, there are people already vulnerable to some of those disconnects today, and we see that already. So the faster the world gets, the tighter that we are intertwined together, the more diversity and design become interlinked.
- [17:40]
Aaron Walter
I. I believe you mentioned earlier on that your book is part of this series that was started, the Simplicity series by John Maeda. And when John was on the show in a prior episode, he's been on a few times, he talked to us about the idea of genius design is like one methodology for designing. And genius design is basically like. It's sort of like what we think of as Steve Jobs. Like I came up with this idea and I made it. Another example is I know that that is not true. That's not the way that Apple has worked, but that's the perception 37 signals. For a long time they make Basecamp. Now they're called Basecamp. I believe they sort of had this idea of we're designing for ourself. Even Ralph Lauren has said I am the client and to some degree sometimes that can work. But what you're talking about is these diverse perspectives. Problems are not always so tidy. What's your view of this idea of genius design and where does it fall short, if at all?
- [18:42]
Kevin Bethune
I guess I do view it as a two sided coin. I do agree that if you'd like.
- [18:49]
Aaron Walter
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- [19:34]
Meredith Black
Hey there. I'm Meredith Black, co founder of Design Ops assembly and formerly of Pinterest and Figma. I co host a podcast called Reconsidering alongside two of the design world's most respected voices, Bob Baxley, formerly of Apple and Pinterest, and Aaron Walter, co host of this very podcast. Design Better Reconsidering is a show about looking at the big questions and challenges that we face in everyday life. With a fresh perspective, we dive into topics like building a fulfilling career, navigating tough conversations, making meaningful friendships as adults, and even handling life's biggest transitions like illness and loss. We bring in authors and experts to provide actionable advice and thoughtful guidance to help us all develop the skills needed to thrive as well rounded and healthy adults. We spoke with New York Times best selling author and TED speaker Dan Pink on the power of regret and how we can make smarter decisions to deepen our sense of meaning and purpose. And Tina Roth Eisenberg, the founder of Creative Mornings, joined us live to talk about the importance of creating community and friendships. It turns out it has a huge impact on longevity and the quality of your lives. And we spoke with MIT professor of Philosophy and best selling author Kieran Setia about facing life's inevitable hardships, in which ancient philosophers can teach us about living the good life. We explore so many topics and we'd love for you to give the Reconsidering Podcast a listen. Listen and subscribe@reconsidering.org that's reconsidering.org or find us wherever you get your podcasts.
- [20:57]
E
Reconsidering.org Design Better is supported by Masterclass.
- [21:02]
Aaron Walter
At the start of each year, I.
- [21:04]
E
Always reflect on my life and set some concrete goals for myself. This year, one of my goals is to rethink my personal style, so I jumped into Tan France's Masterclass on this topic. You may know Tan as the fashion expert on Queer Eye. Well, I learned a ton about creating a flexible capsule wardrobe and I gotta.
- [21:24]
Aaron Walter
Say, I am dressing pretty sharp these days.
- [21:27]
E
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