For more than a half century, Sara Little Turnbull has been renowned for counseling American CEOs on strategic design development and cultural change. Here the 83-year-old director of the Process of Change, Innovation and Design Laboratory at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business talks with Peter Lawrence, chairman of Corporate Design Foundation.

For decades CEOs have considered you their secret weapon in product design development. You've approached your research from a cultural anthropologist's perspective, yet your design concepts are invariably right on the mark.

From early on, I've believed that the way of life of a people influences the things they design and want to live with. I feel that companies would be very well advised to know a great deal about their users' activities for example, the way we relate socially, how we work and how we live as communities. If a company is developing foods, for instance, it is useful to think about how people eat and dine in different parts of the world. It's from these behaviors and studied observations and analyses that you understand what tools are used to define a way of life.

Given the emerging global economy back in the late '50s when you began your consulting business, why was learning about other cultures so important for product design?

It has long been my belief that effective design emerges at the intersection of culture and commerce. Developing a deeper understanding of how different cultures solve problems can be a competitive advantage in business. In the late '50s, many companies were on the verge of having patents expire for technologies they invented for the war effort. To protect their patent claims, they had to create new applications for these technologies. In my consulting role, I was asked to suggest new uses developing such things as freezer-to-oven cooking vessels made from a material originally used for space travel, for example. A protective antipollution mask made from nonwoven fibers is another example.

In a recent article I read, I was intrigued that you got the idea for improving a pot lid handle from observing cheetahs. It's an enlightened client who would agree to send a designer to Africa to study cheetahs for cookware.

I have news for you, kiddo. If you make sense, the world is your oyster. I didn't just say, "I'd like to go to Africa to see the cheetahs." The conviction that I developed through initial research led me to explain: "I've been thinking about what on this earth is excellent in catching and holding onto their dinner while moving at 70 mph. The cheetah does it with remarkable skill and finesse. I am curious about what its claws are like. How are the claws used? How does the cheetah grab prey and hold onto it?" And, in fact, observing cheetahs gave me insights into levels of dexterity and hand motions for lifting lids.

What kind of questions did you ask yourself about cookware lids before thinking about cheetahs?

Well, the client's data showed that a certain number of accidents resulted from people dropping the lids of hot cooking pots. The question became what kind of lid should the company make. I looked into several considerations. For instance, does a round knob increase the tendency to pick the lid up with your fingertips? What does it mean to "grasp"? How is the thumb used for leverage? What other conditions in the kitchen affect the user? Stresses like time, or interruptions from kids and pets. Keep in mind that the designer is the custodian of the care and kindness extended to the user. Aesthetics is only one consideration.

More than 30 something years ago you wrote an article entitled, "When Will the Consumer Become Your Customer?" It's still a relevant question as we watch companies fail, not because their products were bad but because they didn't know their customers.

Sensitivity to your customers is crucial. Who are your customers? What do they want? What do they need? How can you help them? In that article, I argued that most companies create products for retailers, not for the people who were actually going to use them. I feel strongly that when you really observe what your customers want and understand what you're observing, you can make the connecting linkage that lets you create a long-lasting relationship with your customer. It's a relationship of trust and loyalty between product and user.

You were an editor of "House Beautiful" in the 1940s and '50s. What was your philosophy of home decorating? How did you go about changing consumer awareness?

I was never interested in decorating per se. I didn't care whether Mrs. McGillicuddy wanted a pink wall, blue ceiling and green floor. That was her choice to make and it wasn't my place to be judgmental. Sure we offered guidelines baroque should go with baroque; if you mix decorating styles, it should be done with an understanding of the period's characteristics. But I wasn't trying to make House Beautiful the arbiter of decorating taste. I tried to encourage readers to use decorating to create the atmosphere and environment in which they wanted to live.

How was that different in the 1940s than today?

Well, knowing the war would be over soon, I gave a great deal of thought to where my readers, who were mostly women, were going to be. The manpower shortage during the war had forced many of them into the workplace. When the war ended, were they going to return to homemaking or stay in the work scene? What kind of relationships were they going to have with others around them? Their husband-soldiers were coming back from Paris and from all kinds of exotic places where they had learned a thing or three that their wives didn't know. I kept asking myself how we could help these people put their lives back together through ideas in our magazine? Decorating wasn't the primary focus for me; a way of life was. I was focused on changes going on in society. I began to think about what a dining experience would be for post-war families and what they would be doing in the rest of the house. Incidentally, House Beautiful was the `birthplace' of the family room. Before that homes used to have parlors, but parlors didn't serve the same function of a family room.

So would you say your approach to design has always been anthropological?

No, I would say it has always been driven by learning that leads to exploration. Exploration that leads to discovery. The important concept is the relationship between experience and thought. It always starts with a fundamental curiosity. When I can't find the answer in a book, I go out and search for it. The excitement of my life is that I have always jumped into the unknown to find what I needed to know.

Why have you chosen to teach a course on design at Stanford's Graduate School of Business? Your students are seeking MBAs, not design degrees.

After 60 years on the corporate consulting side, I came into the academic sector because I wanted to create a commonality of background between management people and design people. Business needs to understand that design is a key aspect in the process of product development. You can't make a product without taking design into consideration, and making it part of your planning process from beginning to end.

How do you teach a bunch of business and engineering students to integrate design into their process?

We give them hands-on experience by asking them to solve a real problem. We divide them into teams and assign them to design, manufacture and market a prototype of a consumer product like a juicer or a bike pump. Each team has to invent a product, develop a design that would appeal to consumers, learn about the manufacturing machinery required to make it, and write up a marketing strategy. In other words, they have to step outside their own narrow perspective and appreciate the complexities of every step of the process.

Your learning lab is entitled the "Process of Change, Innovation and Design." Why the emphasis on Change?

Because design acknowledges change. Its meaning encompasses change in our times. To design is to "create order and to function according to a plan." The notion of change and design move along the same path. Design influences actions that are part of a whole process, whether it is making a shoe, building a house or whatever. But the process itself is a thought process, not only a function process. That is why I encourage students to learn from their own and other people's experiences and let their minds meander to discover the unexpected and the creative accident.

How can companies and designers learn which design concepts will sell?

They should observe with all of their senses their eyes, nose, ears, touch. If you are designing ways to improve the public dining experience, you need to go into a restaurant and think carefully about how your waiter takes your order, how you can make his life easier, the kinds of technology that can assist his memory, help him perform his job with greater satisfaction. You need to observe the things on the tabletop that will help people dine graciously and comfortably. If you take that exercise all the way through the entire dining experience, you may end up with many specific ideas, not just abstract thoughts about how people eat.

What kinds of new things are you interested in designing?

The worst thing that anybody can ask me to do is to make a new thing. I want to make something better. I want to improve the experience. I'm not interested in the object itself; I'm interested in the behavior. I'm interested in why you want and need things.

How did you first become interested in design?

My mother had an appreciation for aesthetics even though our household was one of very limited financial means. When my mother assembled the food stuff that were going to become our dinner, she allowed herself to have the pleasure of combining marvelous bowls of fruits and vegetables. She used them to teach me about composition, color, texture. We would sit together in the kitchen and talk about the range of color of peppers, from brilliant yellow to dark rich green. We would talk about the sameness of things and the remarkable differences. They were all peppers, but it was a wildly exciting vision of color. She taught me that if you put a purple fleshy eggplant within this spectrum of peppers, they were still all similar in form. She would question my mind's eye. She'd ask, "Wouldn't you like to have a spray of scallions that would disturb the consistency of the round forms?" I'm 83 years old now and I vividly remember what those conversations were about.

It's interesting, Sara, that the basis of so much of what you've been talking about is all about developing the ability to really see. But I'm probably oversimplifying that.

No, no, no! It's not oversimplifying, because to really see the depth of things is not a simple thing to do. So few people are made aware that they could do that. I'm just an ordinary soul, but I've had marvelous influences in my life. I think we're all designers, we're all artists, we're all musicians. Some of us have been exposed to what meaning that has. If you were trained to do what I'm talking about and you took a walk in the forest, you would know that it is a world of sound and music and beauty that feeds the soul.