Design Thinking: An Overview
Jun 30 2008
Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO, provides an excellent overview of design thinking and its benefits in this month’s Harvard Business Review.
Design thinking focuses on the intersection of customer, technology, and business opportunities. More specifically, he defines design thinking as “a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity”.
An approach that leverages design thinking also includes:
- A team of people from multiple perspectives (not the “lone genius inventor”).
- Rapid prototyping to “generate useful feedback and evolve an idea….the goal of prototyping isn’t to finish. It is to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of an idea and to identify new directions that further prototype might take.”
- Planning the work as “a system of spaces rather than a predefined series of orderly steps”. IDEO defines the spaces as Inspiration, Ideation, and Implementation. For example, the Ideation space may include activities such as brainstorming, sketching, prototyping, and getting early reactions from potential customers.
He argues the following personal characteristics are most vital to achieve design thinking:
- Empathy: Design thinkers” imagine the world from multiple perspectives”. They “notice things that others do not and use their insights to inspire innovation”.
- Integrative Thinking: They combine “analytical processes (those that produce either/or choices)” with integrative thinking (“the ability to see all of the salient – and sometimes contradictory — aspects of a confounding problem”).
- Optimism: They assume “at least one potential solution is better than the existing alternatives”.
- Experimentalism: To innovate, design thinkers rely on revolution rather than evolution (i.e. “incremental tweaks”). They “pose questions and explore constraints in creative ways that proceed in entirely new directions”.
- Collaboration: The “myth of the lone genius” has been replaced by the “reality of the enthusiastic interdisciplinary collaborator”.
The article outlines several examples of design thinking and its impact, including a project at Shimano (a Japanese manufacturer of bicycle components). An interdisciplinary team spent time with potential customers to gain broad insights into people’s thoughts about and experiences cycling. Their work resulted in a holistic view of the cycling experience and a new concept, “coasting”, focused more on the pleasure of riding than the sport. The insights also led to changes to make the in-store experience less intimidating to potential customers. The result was a complete, innovative solution that benefited the business as well as customers.
Design thinking can be applied to a wide variety products, services, and entertainment experiences. You can read more of Tim Brown’s ideas on design thinking on his blog.
Stanford University’s Institute of Design (also known as the d.school ) is a graduate-level program that focuses on teaching design thinking. I’ll be spending time there this fall as an informal advisor. I’ll write more about my experiences there at the end of the year.
– Jeff
Tim Brown’s photo by Robert Scoble. Some rights reserved.