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Design and the Public Good: Creativity vs. the Procurement Process?

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(via @fergusbisset)

On 2nd March the Associate Parliamentary Group, in partnership with the DBA, launched the findings of its 6 month inquiry into procurement of design services with a reception and panel discussion in the House of Lords. Group Officer Barry Sheerman MP called for the design community to be more determined in their lobbying of government, in the mission to bring design to the heart of public life:

‘Through this report we’ve engaged some of the leading people in design, engaged parliamentarians from all parties. But the coming election poses a real challenge. The composition of the house will be changed fundamentally. Design is at the very heart of most of what we do as civilised human beings, and we’ve got to engage the people who run this country in a more meaningful way. 

Barry also encouraged the design community to improve their lobbying skills in order to put design at the heart of everything we 'should be doing as a modern, progressive and innovative society'

Simulating Empathy in Ideation Workshops

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(via @jenvandermeer)

Innovation as a Learning Process: Embedding Design Thinking

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This article was published in the California Management Review from the University of California, Berkeley back in 2007. However the way it is structured is still topical and relevant to the innovation practices around the world. 

The innovation process returns to the concrete realm to generate solutions, choose the ones that best meet the imperatives, and test them with potential customers or users. This part of the innovation cycle is, perhaps, the best documented and exercised in practice. 

Based on the imperatives, which firmly connect back to the observational research, the innovation team can use a wide range of concept generation techniques to come up with alternative solutions, a well-documented set of concept selection techniques to choose the solutions they wish to take forward, and then a variety of mechanisms for soliciting feedback from potential users. 

Innovation teams must be careful not to remain isolated in either the concrete or abstract realms, but must move fluidly between them in the iterative process of innovation. 

The Economist launches Ideas Economy: Innovation, Fresh Thinking for the Ideas Economy

In 2010 The Economist is launching a marketplace for ideas focused in innovation, human potential and intelligent infrastructure called Ideas Economy. This event series will run throughout 2010 and aims to bring together top thinkers from around the world to discuss and debate the most important ideas of our time.
The inaugural session will take place at the Haas School of Business at the University of California on March 23 & 24. The topic of the Berkeley chapter is Innovation: Fresh Thinking for the Ideas Economy and will be focused on the latest thinking on what makes innovation possible, how innovation is changing and why innovation matters today more than ever.

Among the outstanding panel there are incredible members of the business, government, non-profits and the academic sectors such as the Dean of the Rotman School of Management Roger Martin, Jaqueline Novogratz from Acumen Fund, praised author and Harvard professor Clayton Christensen, Ed Catmull from Pixar & Disney Animation, David Kelley head of the Stanford Design School and founder of IDEO and more.

This event will be followed by two more sessions held in New York, Human Potential on the 14 & 15 of September and Intelligent Infrastructure on the 3rd & 4th of November.

For the full program, list of speakers and details visit Ideas Economy. 

 

Catalytic Innovation: In the pursuit of real social change

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In this article published by the Harvard Business Review in 2006 the authors Christensen, Baumann, Ruggles and Sadtler explore the effectiveness of the traditional versus innovative approaches to drive real social change. Their sharp, logic and concise proposition dubbed as catalytic innovation is based in the creation of services to address the people ignored by traditional social sector organisations. 

Implementing strategies to address and improve the most basic social needs will improve our chances to step up and enable us to approach the more specific needs without compromising the wellbeing of the community. The article points out the difficulty of a business minded approach to the innovation in the social sector. Thus catalytic minds must differentiate themselves from the rest of the innovation approaches. Catalytic innovators share five qualities:

1. They create systemic social change through scaling and replication.
2. They meet a need that is either overserved (because the existing solution is more complex than many people require) or not served at all.
3. They offer products and services that are simpler and less costly than existing alternatives and may be perceived as having a lower level of performance, but users consider them to be good enough.
4. They generate resources, such as donations, grants, volunteer manpower, or intellectual capital, in ways that are initially unattractive to incumbent competitors.
5. They are often ignored, disparaged, or even encouraged by existing players for whom the business model is unprofitable or otherwise unattractive and who therefore avoid or retreat from the market segment

There are many successful examples of its application in sectors like health care, education, economic development. Identifying the opportunity for catalytic innovation is a crucial aspect for successful results, the article defines a set of guidelines to promote the investment in social innovations worth to endorse: To look for signs of disruption on the processes; focus on innovative solutions that meet a significant underserved need; analyse the feasibility of the project and asses the business model.

The full article is available for purchase here.

Innovation Through Design Thinking

via mitworld.mit.edu

In 2006 Tim Brown gave an extended talk in the MITSloan about the meaning, scope, and influence of Design Thinking as an effective tool to facilitate innovation.

As part of my research I have revisited this talk with a social coloured glasses and the intention of extracting the very essential aspects of his perspective and experience scalable to other realities. It is always refreshing to see him talking about what he knows the best and see him selling it without even trying: just telling a story.

The first thing Brown highlights in his presentation is the difference between design and design thinking as "the way designers approach problem solving"; how designers connect with people (users), how we come to a problem from the people's perspective and create meaningful experiences for them.

One of the things I enjoy the most about his talks (apart from his hypnotic and mastered storytelling skills) is his devotion to ideas: where they come from (inspiration), how we have them (ideation) and the useful things we do with them (implementation). 

Inspiration is the first step of this process and the key stage for any creative process. It starts with empathy, looking at people and see the world from their eyes. Inspiration is the fuel for creativity and innovation and for designers the world is our source of inspiration. That is why we should spend more time in this phase trying to understand the environment to be able to discover the real opportunities/challenges that the culture has to offer.

The role of designers is to understand the users on multiple levels: cognitive, emotional and physical (what they feel, how they feel it, when they feel it, etc). Also the environment where these experiences happen, the social and cultural level: how groups act and interact between them. 

Brown illustrates their innovative approach to research with two examples: the use of analogous situations and focusing on the insights that come from the extreme users.

Ideation is the ability to build to think: prototyping. In the traditional (old school) school of design we build things to show what we've done, to show advance or progress and get approval instead of building to learn about our ideas. Design is a constant process of learning, design thinking proposes learning by prototyping. This bit has a tremendous potential since we associate a prototype with a mock-up, a physical model of what we have achieved. Brown explains that this prototyping phase doesn't need to be physical but tangible in order to allow you to build the picture and come to sense of what you have learnt in different stages of the design process.

Prototypes have three main objectives in the design process: inspiring, you design as you build; developing, evolve ideas to make them better; and at the end is about validating the ideas, how good they are or how they work.

Implementation
Contrary to what we understand traditionally by this concept (distribuition system, engineer, cost/profit analysis) implementation is the way we ensure that the products/services get to the market engaging all the stakeholders in the process. A mechanism to help with this is storytelling. Brown says that "the more powerfully and the best you can construct a story around the ideas; the better you communicate them to colleagues, users, stakeholders, the more likely your ideas will succeed and become real products"

Implementation is not only at the end of the design process but since the beginning, telling a story about the whole experience is a way to detect problems and opportunities. This makes clearer the real scope of the design problem/opportunity to scale and frame the problem. Storytelling connects the stakeholders with the spaces, tools, roles and processes. It helps to joing the dots and bring people together, it can be tangible and physical and experiential. 

Brown points out that design thinking is about methodology as much about culture. As designers we have to make sense of the place we are in the world in order to discover opportunities and be inspired by them. Culture connects us with new ideas.

During his presentation Brown refers constantly to the increasingly stronger link between design and business strategy; how design thinking is used to tackle a whole range of creative and business issues leaving the social enterprise practically out of his discourse.

Last May I had the opportunity to attend his talk at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and noticed that even when his speech continues to be the one from the design agency pioneering in service and business strategy he mentioned in more than one occasion the social projects IDEO has been involved with and the potential of design thinking to enable social innovation.

It has been three years down the road from this 2006 talk at the MIT and the discourse seems to move faster and faster towards social innovation and the need of a methodology as rich and well articulated as design thinking to engage people around the challenges of our communities and effective ways to tackle those challenges.