In Service of Design

As an officer in the United States Marines charged with building a water storage system for locals in one of the poorest countries in Africa, Douglas Jefferson Hsu (M.Des. ’12) first discovered his passion for design thinking.

After two combat missions in Iraq, was placed in charge of a humanitarian aid mission in Djibouti in 2007 as the forward operations officer for the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit. Leading 200 Marines and engineers, he was tasked with building a water storage facility to Marine Corps standards for a mid-sized village.

But from what he would later recognize as examining it from a design standpoint, such an undertaking would have been a big mistake. The locals would likely not have been able to maintain the facility if it broke, and it called for materials, such as valuable metal, that could be broken down for scrap.

Instead, rather than have the Marines build the facility on their own, Hsu consulted with the local villagers to build the system together, largely out of wood, giving the villagers both confidence and ownership.

“That was where I realized good design thinking,” says Hsu, who had quit a Wall Street job in finance to join the military, as many in his family had. “My time in the Marines, dealing with people and chaos and the complexity of war and seeing a whole different side of the world, I realized there’s a lot more to life and business than just the numbers and profit margins and shareholder value.

“Design thinking is about solving complex problems. A Marines’ job is to solve complex problems in dangerous situations. So it kind of goes hand in hand.”

When he left active duty as a captain in 2008, Hsu went to business school, earning an M.B.A. from the University of Notre Dame. But he wasn’t interested in finance or accounting or marketing. “I fell in love with innovation and the design process,” he says. So he pursued a degree from the Institute of Design.

After graduating, he worked for two years as a consultant before working for his family’s company, Far Eastern Group (FEG), one of the largest conglomerates in Taiwan, spanning more than 10 major industries and encompassing nine publicly listed companies. There, he started the conglomerate’s first internal design team and innovation center, called DRIVE.
But there were cultural opinions about design that had to be overcome.

“In Taiwan, they see design as a way to make things look good. They don’t see that it’s both form and function and actually solving complex problems,” Hsu says. “I needed a team that had both spent time abroad and understood design and design thinking as it is understood in the West.”

With ID’s help, he did just that. One of those endeavors includes ID’s Taiwan Immersion Program. “It keeps me abreast of what’s going on with design and how to use its capabilities to push design forward,” Hsu says.

DRIVE was given the task of helping to plan the company’s A13 retail project, which aimed to design a new department store in a district of Taipei that already had four others.

The team had to figure out a way to make it stand out. To do so, they were able to recruit Apple to build its global flagship store within its complex, and then design the space around it. Despite being smaller in size, the store is now Far Eastern Group’s third-highest revenue earner out of 24 department stores.

After completing the project, Hsu says the company hierarchy began viewing design as more than just “making things look good.” Hsu’s DRIVE team now includes 16 designers, and is looking for its next big challenge within the company.

—Tad Vezner