10.31

rick robinson, social scientist

partner, iota

 

 

I was born in Youngstown, Ohio in 1958. I was, as it appears to me now, a bit too achievement oriented for my first twenty-some years. I was in my last year of my Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago before it really occurred to me what being an academic really entailed. Fortunately, during my post-doc year, I got connected to Jay Doblin & Associates, more because I was a pretty good social science methodologist than because I was following a particular interest in design. The only desk available in the office was next to John Cain, and that changed my life, entirely. With John and Larry Keeley I got to meet and work with people like Michael Bierut and Tucker Viemeister, and found out who Raymond Loewy and the Eames’ were.

 

Still, I was and remain an egghead, always doodling in the abstract. Trying to see and make patterns clear. So from 1990 until 2004, I worked in the space of design and product development without, I must say, ever acquiring any real skill in the actual work of designing things. John Cain and I left Doblin and founded e-lab, a small firm that developed new ways of providing bases from which to make new stuff. It was both very successful and great fun. It led us through an acquisition by Sapient to a different scale of design and research work. For a few years after I left Sapient, I worked in very large market research firms, and learned another, entirely different side of the business world. 

 

I felt, correctly I think, that what we had done at e-lab changed the practice of design widely and significantly. Inside communications conglomerates I wasn’t as successful in getting that kind of effectiveness. 

 

In 2009 John and I decided that we really needed to work together again in something as interesting as we had done before-- like it but different. We have, with a varied set of additional partners from across our careers, started a set of new ventures, including, most recently iota Partners, which is trying to marry up several decades of thinking about the work of designing stuff to the new technologies of “The Internet of Things.” 

 

At the end of 2010, I broke my arm. Should have been minor.  Instead, I ended up in a coma for 18 days, in the hospital for 40.  That, like sitting down next to John in 1989, changed my life in unexpected ways. I’m still recovering, slowly but well.