Kelley was helping a fourth-grade
class at his daughter’s school use design
thinking to create better backpacks when
his cell phone rang and his doctor’s num-
ber came up. He stepped out to take the
call. “You have cancer,” the doctor said.
“Just like that,” Kelley recalls. He went
back into the class to finish the lesson
keeping on top of appointments, medica-
tions, and daily life. But, Kelley says, it was
his brother, Tom, who got him through the
rough patches psychologically. “Here’s a
guy I shared a room with for 18 years,” he
says, choking up. “Basically, he gave up his
life to be there for me every day.”
David asked Tom to negotiate his rela-
tionship with the world, alerting friends
that his brother wasn’t up to communicat-
ing with anybody. “More than 100 people
came to me and said, ‘I know David’s not
talking to others, but he’ll talk to me. I’m
a special friend,’” Tom says.
It was the thought of his 11-year-old
daughter that kept Kelley fighting through
the lowest moments. “At first, you think, ‘I
don’t want to miss her growing up.’ That’s
When Kelley got sick, his friends
were desperate to find ways to help him,
sending cards, movies, cartoons. John
Maeda, formerly the associate research
director of MIT’s Media Lab and now pres-
ident of the Rhode Island School of Design,
built a Web site with a picture of Kelley at
the White House, surrounded by other
2001 National Design Award winners—all
with Kelley heads—under the banner,
everybody wants to be david kelley.
“David is the kind of person you aspire
to become,” says Maeda. “He’s like a
brainy Muppet. You want to hug him,
stick by him, and support what he stands
for. He doesn’t wear a fur stole or sun-
glasses. He’s like the guy you run into at
the 7-11 getting a Slurpee. I like the idea
“WE movED From THinKing oF oursELvEs As DEsignErs
To THinKing oF oursELvEs As DEsign THinKErs.
WE HAvE A mETHoDoLogy THAT EnABLEs us To
ComE uP Wi TH A soLu Tion THAT noBoDy HAs BEForE. —DAviD KELLEy ”
but, he says, “I was a mess.”
It was stage-four squamous cell carci-
noma, which had gone misdiagnosed—
as “inflamed fish gills”—for a year and a
half. During that time, it had migrated to
his lymph nodes. “I could tell by looking
in people’s eyes that this was a big deal,”
he says.
Preliminary tests looked worrisome,
but Kelley, an optimist, figured that with
good energy and good medicine, he could
prevail. Then his oncologist sat him down
and gave him the statistics: He had a 40%
chance of being alive in four years. “That
was the moment,” Kelley says. “As an
engineer, you say, ‘Show me the data.
This has got to be for older people.’ So the
doctor looks at the chart and the median
age is 56. I’m 56. So it’s right on me.”
What ensued was sheer hell. Chemo,
surgery, radiation. Mouth sores. A throat
so raw he could barely swallow. Nausea so
severe he couldn’t concentrate enough to
read or even watch TV. “I spent nine months
in a room trying not to throw up,” he says.
The treatment wrecked his saliva glands
and his taste buds. He lost 40 pounds.
Kelley, now 58, says his wife, Kc Brans-
comb, a former CEO of IntelliCorp whom
he met through his buddy Jobs, was master-
ful at orchestrating his care, marshaling
doctors, haranguing insurance providers,
80 Fast company February 2009
motivating, but not i]Vi motivating,” he
says. “It’s when you manage to get out of
yourself and start thinking of her that you
get the resolve to continue. When you
think, I don’t want her not to have a father—
then you want to stay alive.”
In the recovery phase, Kelley was
assigned a psychiatrist. “When they tell
you that you don’t have that many more
years to live, you ask yourself, What is it
that I want to get done? What is it that’s
going to make me feel good?,” he says, sit-
ting in a neo-yurt at Ideo’s Palo Alto head-
quarters. “Given a finite amount of time,
how do I spend it?” Kelley and the shrink
began parsing his days, calibrating which
activities were the most satisfying. “The
punch line is that one of the things that’s
really fun for me is Ideo,” he says. Working
at the firm he built fits into Kelley’s life-
long mission: “I really do believe I was put
on the planet to help people have creative
confidence,” he says. “I don’t have 27 agen-
das. I’m not the sustainability guy, or the
developing-world guy. My contribution is
to teach as many people as I can to use
both sides of their brain, so that for every
problem, every decision in their lives, they
consider creative as well as analytical
solutions.
“The illness has given me more resolve
to do that.”
that he’s an anonymous superstar.”
Watching Kelley, in his jeans, flannel
shirt, and striped socks, shuttling between
Ideo and Stanford in his greenish-yellow
’ 54 Chevy pickup, you’re more likely to
think he’s a Sacramento tomato farmer
than one of the country’s great design
minds. (A self-confessed “car nut,” Kelley
also has a ’ 67 Ferrari, a ’ 57 Porsche, and a
’ 32 Ford in his fleet.) Even as a boy growing
up in Ohio, Kelley saw the world from a
different angle. “David believes he was a
geek,” says Tom, the youngest of the four
Kelley siblings and four years David’s
junior. “But it’s not true. He had his own
rock band, for chrissake! Even then he was
a rock star.” At the town line, there’s now
a sign that trumpets, you are now entering
barberton, home of david kelley.
After graduating from Carnegie Mel-
lon, Kelley took a job at Boeing, where he
designed what he calls a “milestone in
aviation history”: the 747’s lavatory occu-
pied
sign. He eventually moved to National
Cash Register (now NCR) in Ohio, a simi-
larly dispiriting experience. Fate inter-
vened during the 1973–1974 oil embargo,
when Kelley met a guy in a car pool who
told him about Stanford’s product-design
program. “Without the oil crisis, David
may have spent the rest of his life as a
very capable but moderately unhappy
