consulting in design research, strategy and decision-support

Sunday, August 28, 2011

What is “Design Thinking?


Design Thinking has been around at least since the early seventies, and still a majority of designers’ seems to wonders what it is. Is it old wine on new bottles or a new California thing? The next weeks we will examine what literature, various institutions, experts and practicing designer have to say.

To be continued September 4.

17 comments:

  1. Let us kickoff with what Stanford Management, Science and Engineering has to say: Design thinking is a way of finding good problems and framing and forming solutions that is different from analytical thinking - it relies more on synthesis, meaning, and context than on analysis and data-reduction.

    It employs creativity, empathy, prototyping, and iteration, and is multi-disciplinary and requires radical collaboration among teams. It is particularly powerful when applied to solutions to “wicked problems” “Rittell/Webber (Berkeley, 1973), - “ill-defined problems which are messy, circular, and aggressive and who’s solutions are not true-or-false, but better or worse.” [Stanford, 2011]

    To be continued September 11.

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  2. There are multiple definitions of the design thinking process. Stanford Center for Design Research and Hasso Platner Institute School of Design Thinking (also called the d.school) use a six-steps in their design thinking process:
    Understand, Observe, Point of view, Ideate, Prototype, Test

    BMW Group DesignworksUSA prefer a three-step process:
    Define, Design and Develop

    While Wikipedia operate with a six-step process:
    Define, Ideation, Prototyping, Choose, Implement and learn

    The all describe the same process, however segment and emphasizes different parts of a long established creative process. So, - what is really new?

    To be continued September 18.

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  3. In general, the thought leaders in Design Thinking place more emphasis on the foundational front-end work, effective framing of the challenge and objective decision-making. Since 70% of products costs are determined in the first 5% of a new product development project, this makes intuitively sense. However, - how do you know your project is off to a good start? How does Design Thinking help here?

    To be continued September 25.

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  4. Design Thinking
    Ensuring a good beginning requires that Design Thinking is applied from the formulation of the business plan and initial management of the product portfolio. Traditionally, business plans contain less than 7% Philosophy, less than 5% Function and less than 1% Expression (styling/aesthetic) criteria. These statistics clearly show that management offers very limited input into the business plan or the product portfolio and therefore has no control of the overarching corporation's design philosophy.

    To be continued October 2.

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  5. Since the contribution of Design Thinking, with regards to new tools and value creation, is to be found in the three phases of: Understand, Observe and Point of View, let us take a look at these in turn.

    Understand begins with asking your network about the assignment and listing the knowledge and tasks you estimate are necessary for successful execution. Prioritize the tasks and review existing publications on the subject and determine who are the experts in the field and how you can interview or collaborate with them. Design success is closely related to becoming an expert quickly.

    To be continued October 9.

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  6. Observe begins with need finding, engaging with, living with and shadowing users as well as trying out your clients products and competitive products. The data collection’s focus is on activities, environment, interactions, objects and users. Document your findings using interview instruments, voice recording and video and analyze your findings at the end of each day. A good nights sleep erases big chunks of your experience from your memory.

    To be continued October 16.

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  7. While conducting your need finding, log the product ideas, any ideas that occur to you. Spend time ideating. Brainstorming sessions will help you make a connection to new ideas and to look into further user aspects. Mind mapping is also a powerful tool, not just for idea generation but also note-taking. Visualize your ideas and call out descriptions. The more specifically and explicitly you describe your ideas the better the performance of the ideation process will be.

    To be continued October 23.

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  8. Analyze your collected data and generated ideas using: Problem restatement, Pros/Cons/Fix it, Divergent - Convergent thinking, Sorting chronologically, Morphological matrix' and Decision-event trees. If, during this early data analysis, you realize there are necessary data you have not collected or new questions arise, it will be relatively inexpensive to go back and make up for this shortfall.

    To be continued October 30.

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  9. The Point of View of any challenge determine to a large degree what opportunities you are going to see and what solutions you will generate. The key to comprehensive design is to alternate between various stakeholders’ perspective. What does the challenge look like from the buyer, user, service guy/girl and so on? Your product will in essence be the tradeoff between satisfying various users need. If you try to make everybody happy, nobody will be happy.

    To be continued November 6.

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  10. The d.school steps of: Ideate, Prototype and Test, are included in the established design process. The newness here is the addition of tools and increase in speed with which these steps are conducted. These speed tools help keep the momentum going and the team’s energy level high. I see decision-making and learning as the two components, which notably differentiates Design thinking from our established design process in the phases following the definition of the design objective and goals. Let us address these in turn.

    To be continued November 13.

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  11. Decision-making is traditionally based on feasibility and novelty criteria, prioritizing immediately feasible ideas highest. Comparing, evaluating, combining and deciding which ideas to select are currently based on initial subjective criteria, emerging criteria during the process, intuition and social power. This makes the decisions prone to situational mood swings, personal negotiation abilities, temporary corporate politics and context dependent preferences. New evidence-based and analytical methods improve the objectivity and therefore consistency of decisions.

    To be continued November 19.

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  12. The literature contains several methods for addressing these problems, however they ignore how designers work. The Design Quantification Method we developed takes into consideration how designers work and think, detecting patterns for external success, such as trend setting ability and investors expectations, and provide recommendations as to how to improve and combine concepts. Adding a short interview and analyzing designers’ reasoning, prior to presentation their idea formally, it is possible to see and compare concepts main elements.

    To be continued November 27.

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  13. Learning is fun, - however scrutinizing ones mistakes publicly is no fun at all. Making matters worse is that at this stage the project is usually out of budget and ready to move on to new exiting projects. Consequently organizations repeatedly make the same mistakes. One way of seeing and capturing the value of after action reviews is to frame the process as an opportunity to increase and disseminate the organizations knowledge building a competitive advantage. Without this new knowledge the organization will stagnate.

    To be continued December 4.

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  14. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  15. One approach to after action reviews and learning is having a strategy for which competencies to develop, defining the knowledge acquisition and dissemination goal and objectives up front. The strategy needs to outline the experimentation types and risk level you are prepared to take on. At the end of the day, your most precious resource is your creative staff. They need to see progress, not just on projects, but in their career to increase build their knowledge and skills, increasing you intangible competitive advantage. Without this new knowledge the organization will stagnate.

    To be continued December 11.

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  16. One approach to after action reviews and learning is having a strategy for which competencies to develop, defining the knowledge acquisition and dissemination goal and objectives up front. The strategy needs to outline the experimentation types and risk level you are prepared to take on. At the end of the day, your most precious resource is your creative staff. They need to see progress, not just on projects, but in their career to increase build their knowledge and skills, increasing you intangible competitive advantage.

    To be continued December 18.

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  17. In summary, Design Thinking is an evolution of the established design process, increasing the emphasis on the early phases, decision-making and learning. For further reading see: Change by Design byTim Brown, Design Thinking by DMI, Design Thinking by Hasso Plattner and Profit from Design by Søren Petersen.

    Next week, December 25, we will explore the topics of The chasm between Business and Design.

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