“I’ve thrown many a Philippe Starck alarm clock at the wall,” admitted Tim Brown, CEO of Ideo Inc. We were at the MITX Fireside Chat event, where Tim talked about the role of design across a spectrum of applications. He was commenting on how things that look good are rarely as functional as they should be.

I asked about his impressions of design success, failure, and opportunities in connectivity products for the consumer. He agreed that there are looming opportunities to meet the appetite of emerging Anywhere Consumers to have their experiences with them wherever they go, in the form of newly-conceived products and services that move us beyond the now-iconic iPod. “[But] the consumer electronics industry has been frustratingly slow to realize that it’s a systems problem, not a device problem. We don’t need better objects — we need entire processes that are better. Why don’t they understand that when the consumer is left to figure out how things go together, it doesn’t work? Too much of the important part of the consumer experience falls into a black hole. Meanwhile, clearly we are overwhelming people with too many potential solutions.”

He’s right, of course: Microsoft’s re-tooled Zune does what Microsoft can always do — iterate steadily over the prior effort — but doesn’t yet unlock the next Anywhere music experience.

Tim points to part of the cause: the bell-curve addiction. “When I look at consumer market research, I don’t care about statistical significance. I am looking for the outliers at both ends of the bell curve. That’s where design inspiration comes from.”

If that’s true, unlocking the Anywhere Consumer’s latent demand for more portability in information, entertainment, and transactions could come from understanding both how extreme users behave and what’s holding back the non-users.