And, by pointing out how all of these three designs model existing behavior, I’m showing how important that is! Design isn’t about inventing something new for people to do, it’s about inventing better ways to do what we already do…that’s what these services have done.

From these examples, it seems like innovation is just a fancy word for “cheaper”. People have always wanted what these technologies provide, and the innovation is in making it cheap enough that it can be made widely available. As a designer, it’s not clear how I would participate in this. Do designers innovate by reducing the complexity of a product/service, making using it a more efficient use of mental resources? Isn’t the point of user-centered design that many technologies often shift costs on to the users? “We introducing a brand new system to make things much more efficient! We’ll be having a 4-day training program…” In fact, aren’t some of these new user-incurred costs *caused* by the new system’s innovations.

This doesn’t seem to cover all aspects of design — aesthetic, cultural, psychological — and this might mean that the scope of the word “innovation” doesn’t cover design, or at least not completely. I think its extremely important that so many people are obsessed with the next new thing, and yet what designers do, exactly, seems to escape their notice. It’s as if the notion of innovation has stagnated, and what we need today is not new practical innovations, but a new theory of innovation within which we can locate design.

Here are my issues though:
1. while at some high level the 3 examples you give do address existing activities, by saying that they do so, negates how much all 3 have radically changed the ways these activities are performed and thus the innovation of behavior they created. I.e. to say that netflix addresses the activity of watching movies is a bit off.

2. I also think that you are using the terms behavior and activity equally which I think causes the issue in #1. If you are clear that there is a high level activity but we can innovate the behaviors for achieving or accomplishing that activity then I think it might be more strong/sound.

3. At some point though (to my initial criticism) there are many people who are looking to invent activities and sometimes when your area of design is big enough, addressing one activity type, say transportation (horse > car), may lead to the invention of new activities (filling gas, changing oil, washing car) that in turn create completely new activities around completely new services.

The best example of having to think forward today is how Nissan/Renault is bringing battery powered cars to Israel. They are not just selling the car, but installing a completely new infrastructure. W/o the new infrastructure (battery exchange stations) the entire project would fail.

Now you could say they discovered the need based on modeling existing behavior, but they also had to model future behavior along the way to understand the validity of their answers since you can’t test it until it is built.

– dave