Filed underTim Brown
Jocelyn Wyatt on Design Thinking for Social Innovation
(download)
In this paper from the Stanford Social Innovation Review Jocelyn Wyatt together with Tim Brown from IDEO review the challenges faced by design thinking in a new field that the this approach is currently exploring: the social sector. Wyatt discusses the difference between the design thinking approach for businesses and social enterprises. This piece reminds me to the work of Jim Collins in his monograph Good to Great & the Social Sectors.
A conversation about Design Thinking
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(via businessweek.com)
In this podcast Tim Brown discusses in his own words the concepts explored in his soon to be published book Changed by Design about Design Thinking and its impact in the new approaches to the design discipline. He talks about IDEO's approach to the application of design thinking to social innovation outside conventional business.
When asked about 'what is the coolest product in the market?' it is specially interesting and extremely inspiring when he cites a service instead of a tangible object. Another great example of the shift from product constraint design culture to the develop of an integral thinking around cultural issues that challenge the discipline.
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.
HBR + Design Thinking
The Harvard Business Review showcased an article by Tim Brown on Design Thinking in 2008. Brown’s definition of design process as “a system of spaces that demarcate different sorts of related activities that together form the continuum of innovation” opens the discussion about the role of design, its momentum and how it can be used to address today’s challenges.
