As the lead of the Smart Space practice, Fred Dust employs IDEO's unconventional methods to transform environments from hospitals to cubicles. He explains IDEO's theory of radical collaboration, why sometimes less time yields better results, and the importance of naps.

IDEO is probably one of the only firms I know that openly discusses its methods. You even have IDEO U to educate others about your process. How does that contribute to IDEO's success?

Our methods allow us to make leaps in design and innovation that you couldn't make without them. As such, people who work with us need to understand our process and methodologies in order to understand where we ended up.

Additionally, teaching our methodologies to our clients through things like IDEO U allows for a more seamless collaboration between IDEO and the companies we work with. It's not uncommon for us to have our clients out in the field observing along side of us and spending time with us throughout the process. We call it radical collaboration.

Right, that's another remarkable concept. You've required that your clients, these top-level execs at Fortune 500 companies, go out and shop for their own products in the retail environment. What kinds of things do your clients say after this incredible interaction with their own brand?

Its not really what they say, but what they do. Typically having CEOs out in the field breaks through a lot of the typical blockages to getting things through to action. When you see what's broken and you have the power to fix it--which a lot of these people do--you fix it.

My favorite IDEO term I've heard is a "deep dive." Can you briefly describe that?

Sometimes in innovation time is the greatest enemy--by that I mean too much time. More often than not we see situations where the longer you spend with a problem the less fresh it feels and the less original the response.

A deep dive is an exercise where an IDEO team will take a short period of time, maybe a week, to tackle a problem. We often spend a day understanding the problem, a day in the field, a day designing, and the last days prototyping and refining. The solutions from these projects are not meant to be final, but rather to inspire fresh ideas and open up opportunities that might have been refined away through a longer project.

A caveat: deep dives are not meant to be stand alone projects, but rather a piece of a broader exploration.

But IDEO is still known for working exceptionally fast. How do you maintain this efficiency?

Some of it is about our belief system. We believe that there is value in not over-investigating a problem to the deficit of innovation, as I previously discussed. And a lot of it comes from our culture. The fact that IDEO really tries to remove as much of the hierarchical and bureaucratic roadblocks as they can leads to teams doing good work. So often the things that slow down best practice have to do with organizational roadblocks--which we really strive to avoid. Size also matters; we'd rather have a small collaborative team working unhindered than opening the doors to the too many chefs syndrome.

You've worked on a lot of medical facilities. What have you learned about the healthcare environment that surprised you?

One of the things that has been the most surprising to me in the world of healthcare is just how often simple flaws in the system that patients must deal with get overlooked. Part of this is that healthcare is so used to seeing things from the practitioner's point of view that it loses sight of the user--in this case, the patient.

I think the other side of this is that healthcare is especially good at benchmarking within the industry but not outside of it. This means that mistakes made by one organization get reproduced and passed on to entire systems regardless of whether or not it's appropriate for that particular context.

What's the Smart Space group working on now?

Some of the most exciting things we've been working on in the last year have been taking the notion of space and space strategy to the extreme by looking at how we apply our design process to cities, communities and sometimes even countries. Some of the work has been around rebranding cities, using collaboration methodologies to rethink public hearing processes, and helping city governments to think more seriously about their consumer--the people who live there. A lot of the project work I will be talking about next week will focus on this work.

Of course, I can't complete the interview without asking about Dilbert. You revolutionized the cubicle with cartoonist Scott Adams. Are Dilbert's Ultimate Cubicles really being used out there in corporate America?

In a way the Dilbert Cubicle project was a longer form of a deep dive--taking a month instead of a week. What we developed was a lot like a concept car, where pieces of it have made it into other design and products but as an entity it was never meant to be a real world product.

That said, not a week goes by that someone doesn't call me asking if they can place an order.

Did this project cause you make any alterations to your own workspace? Say, adding a snap hammock for naps?

We've got all kinds cozy places for naps at IDEO, but we had those long before that project.

Fred Dust will speak with Roshi Givechi at Collaboration Series 3: IDEO at Skirball Cultural Center on July 27th

Alissa Walker is the editor of the AIGA/LA website.