Ninety Questions + Answers From Thirteen Design Thinkers: Questions to Bill Hill, president and founder of MetaDesign San Francisco

IIT Institute of Design: Fall 2008

Bill Hill
Bill Hill is president and founder of MetaDesign San Francisco. Utilizing fundamentals of human-centered design, he has led projects for clients including Eli Lilly, Palm, Adobe, Sony, Ernst & Young, HP/Agilent, and The Ocean Conservancy. In Spring 2008 he taught a graduate seminar at the IIT Institute of Design entitled Visual Language: Designing Wellbeing as part of the school’s larger Rethinking Health initiative. The course explored the creation of new products, services, and businesses to support wellbeing, defined as people’s overall quality of life, both materially and in intangible aspects like freedom, satisfaction, environment and emotion. We spoke to him about designing wellbeing and its relation to innovative strategy.

IDO MORE: People’s notion of wellness takes many definitions. What does it mean to you?
BILL HILL: I have actually struggled with “wellness” as a name, so I have been using “wellbeing” to represent breadth and depth. Personally, I believe we have both physical (human) and spiritual (being) bodies, and it is key to somehow convey that wellbeing is the integration of these. Also, wellness can imply a passive state, while wellbeing implies active participation, which is an important distinction. To begin by thinking about how “well” we are every day, as opposed to how ill or non-well we are on a given day, is not the common way of thinking about our health. This is a key part of the transformation into wellbeing that is necessary to change the direction and velocity of our health practices.

Ultimately, it is about balance across many domains: physical, spiritual, financial, educational, environmental, etc. To be well is to be balanced in our wellbeingness (how is that for making up a new, even more fuzzy word?) and involves attending to this range of concerns in ways that one can actually manage in the lifestyles we have. I am the first to say that removing ourselves from the world to be well can only last for so long. As social beings, we are hardwired to be in relationships of many kinds. It is in these relationships that I believe we need to embody new practices for wellness. Also, there is an ebb and flow about this that might tip one way or the other depending on where we are in life, so it is important to took at this over an appropriate horizon of time.

IDO MORE: What has evolved in our culture recently to raise the level of social awareness around wellbeing?
BILL HILL: That is the big question. Philosophers like Ken Wilber and others talk about the movement of people in western democratic cultures towards what he calls “second- and third-tier consciousness,” which is when people first become aware of issues like wellbeing, sustainability, empathy, etc. I personally believe that the Gen Y-ers moving into influential positions in the work force are also a part of this: the ability to see the whole as it transcends and includes the self. So really, everything: Eckhart Tolle’s work being shared with hundreds of millions of people on Oprah’s webcast, Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture on YouTube and prime time TV, Ken Wilber’s inspiration to found Integral Institute. The key is that all of these are not new notions, but new and more effective ways of sharing with digital technology. Technology is a part of this awakening in the same way that printed information was 400-plus years ago, but now the pace is accelerating exponentially.

I am not grounded enough to speculate whether this is a western cultural bias or if places like India and Tibet – which are far less technologically “connected” but in most ways far more enlightened than we are – are similarly affected. I was fascinated to find out that in India meditation, yoga, and giving back to the community are a standard part of life, as opposed to a marginal discourse, as is the case in the U.S. My own awareness practice began a decade ago and has been in fits and starts, but always with an inward sense that this is where our culture is going. Utilizing design practices to understand and hopefully extend this to others is even more recent, and though it is too early to predict its impact, when I sign up for clairvoyant training and find influential designers from firms like IDEO there, I am pretty sure this is no longer a marginal discourse that does not involve the increasing awareness of business.

IDO MORE: How do the principles of wellbeing extend into your business approach? How might aspects of wellbeing inform design or business strategy?
BILL HILL: As Larry Keeley articulated so well in his Convergences in Healthcare talk at IIT Institute of Design, the possibilities of wellbeing as a component of a multi-trillion dollar healthcare market are enormous. Thinking about user-centered design as beginning with “you,” the ultimate user, includes everyone on the planet in some respect. Certainly in the U.S., with significant issues facing the healthcare industry, the opening for personal sustainability seems obvious. If one looks at the intersection of our concerns (what we care about) and our actions, the alignment is a potential source of power for those early to the market. Venture funds like Physic Ventures introduce this as a market opportunity: “Investing in keeping people healthy.”

Following the advice of my economist colleagues, the concepts of “follow the money” and the “holy trinity” of shareholder, customer, and employee lead one to took for metrics to support what the practitioners of yoga, meditation, non-western diets, exercise, et cetera, have been doing for decades. It is just now that these marginal discourses are being brought into the mainstream and are becoming part of what I think will be the extension of the sustainability movement into personal realms. Patrick Whitney often says that for a field of practice to become integral in the marketplace, it needs educational institutions, practitioners, and the media all to align. It seems to me that this is happening now in this domain of the intersection of design thinking, wellbeing, and business strategy.

IDO MORE: In your response to the first question, you mentioned some paradigm shifts, such as, “begin by thinking about how well we are, as opposed to how ill or non-well.” How might this and other tenets of wellbeing inform the practice or approach of design strategy?
BILL HILL: Design strategy, like all organisms, needs to evolve not just to survive, but to thrive. Systemic health of an organism – be it a person, a business, a service or an economy – is a biological need, and the more that we incorporate these fundamental needs, the more likely opportunities will open up for an organism to succeed. One way to look at this might be our immune system and its ability to attack threats on the health of the body. A healthy immune system does this constantly and with great success; a compromised immune system does not. In my own personal experience, I approached my health opportunity not with the desire to remove or “cure” the problem, but with the desire to strengthen my immune system so that it can do its job. As we continue to reinvent design and strategy practices to strengthen organizations, the same thing can happen.

I am a believer in the tenets of western medicine and I trust empirical science, but to discount that which we might not be able to measure empirically, one only needs to look at quantum mechanics to see that that is false. We are linguistic beings, living in language that is constantly reinvented to reflect the action that is produced. When we try to define strategy in Cartesian terms or as mechanical processes alone, we are missing an opportunity to address the fundamental concerns. User-centered design addresses this, and, I believe, if we continue to explore this in terms of what I have called YOU-ser centered design, we have the basis for extending wellbeing into all forms of design strategy.

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