Today, the design consultancy Ideo announced that it has acquired Datascope, a Chicago-based data science company. The acquisition is meant to help Ideo, one of the country’s most prominent firms, respond to demand from AI-powered clients and can be read as a harbinger of where the design industry is headed.
Tim Brown [Photo: courtesy Ideo]
“We have spent the past hundred, or thousand, years designing artifacts,” Ideo CEO Tim Brown says. “The things we designed were relatively dumb and all of the intelligence in the relationship between us and the artifact came from the human being. Algorithms and technology are taking on their own intelligence. That’s a fundamentally new design problem. We’re designing relationships now as opposed to designing artifacts. How does the traditional discipline of design, the new discipline of data science, and the new technologies of machine learning come together to form these relationships?”
Datascope’s 15-person team of data scientists will move into Ideo’s Chicago office. Founded in 2009 by Dean Malmgren and Mike Stringer, Datascope has consulted with Ideo over the past four years on a number of projects around the world, like improving safety on a national school bus system that transports over a million children and future of mobility concepts for Ford.
Datascope and Ideo have a new buzz phrase for their application of human-centered design to the world of algorithms and data science: “augmented intelligence.”