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While we know a lot about practices that stimulate new ideas, innovation teams often struggle to apply them. Why? Because people's biases and entrenched behaviors get in the way. In this article a Darden professor explains how design thinking helps people overcome this problem and unleash their creativity.

Though ostensibly geared to understanding and molding the experiences of customers, design thinking also profoundly reshapes the experiences of the innovators themselves. For example, immersive customer research helps them set aside their own views and recognize needs customers haven't expressed. Carefully planned dialogues help teams build on their diverse ideas, not just negotiate compromises when differences arise. And experiments with new solutions reduce all stakeholders' fear of change.

At every phase-customer discovery, idea generation, and testing-a clear structure makes people more comfortable trying new things, and processes increase collaboration. Because it combines practical tools and human insight, design thinking is a social technology -one that the author predicts will have an impact as large as an earlier social technology: total quality management.

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While we know a lot about practices that stimulate new ideas, innovation teams often struggle to apply them. Why? Because people's biases and entrenched behaviors get in the way. In this article a Darden professor explains how design thinking helps people overcome this problem and unleash their creativity.

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Popularized by David M. Kelley and Tim Brown of IDEO and Roger Martin of the Rotman School, design thinking has three major stages.

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While we know a lot about practices that stimulate new ideas, innovation teams often struggle to apply them. Why? Because people's biases and entrenched behaviors get in the way. In this article a Darden professor explains how design thinking helps people overcome this problem and unleash their creativity.

Though ostensibly geared to understanding and molding the experiences of customers, design thinking also profoundly reshapes the experiences of the innovators themselves. For example, immersive customer research helps them set aside their own views and recognize needs customers haven't expressed. Carefully planned dialogues help teams build on their diverse ideas, not just negotiate compromises when differences arise. And experiments with new solutions reduce all stakeholders' fear of change.

At every phase-customer discovery, idea generation, and testing-a clear structure makes people more comfortable trying new things, and processes increase collaboration. Because it combines practical tools and human insight, design thinking is a social technology -one that the author predicts will have an impact as large as an earlier social technology: total quality management.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
While we know a lot about practices that stimulate new ideas, innovation teams often struggle to apply them. Why? Because people's biases and entrenched behaviors get in the way. In this article a Darden professor explains how design thinking helps people overcome this problem and unleash their creativity.

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January 19, 2016 | by Steve Fyffe Karen Lee

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How Design Thinking Improves the Creative Process

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How entrepreneurs can take a big idea to a real-world product.

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Analyzing the value of the design thinking process and solutions for marketers in better understanding your consumers.

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What is the relative prevalence of critical thinking, creative thinking, systems thinking? | this thinking

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Explore the relative prevalence (or popularity) of critical thinking, design thinking, creative thinking, systems thinking, computational thinking and many more.

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On March 2, 2015, a line of people stretching around the block waited to get into the Rickshaw Stop on Fell Street in San Francisco. This was not like most nights at the funky music venue and bar; the people in line weren't waiting to see an indie band, or dance to music spun by a DJ. This night the entertainment would be opera ... of a sort. The evening, organized by the San Francisco Opera (SFO), was called "Barely Opera," with the slogan "This Isn't Your Grandmother's Opera." Complete with a "Wheel of Songs" that audience members could spin to select the next song, a live DJ, opera-themed drinks, and costumes for attendees to try on, it was designed to remove the intimidation often felt by those new to opera and introduce a younger, hipper audience to operatic music.

Barely Opera was the result of a project that was part of a course at Stanford University's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design ("d.school"). As part of the course, two students worked with SFO to help the Opera think about how to best use a new 299-seat facility that would open in early 2016. But they hoped that the benefits would extend far beyond this objective - that the project would introduce the Opera staff to new ways of thinking that offered the potential to fundamentally change how it operated.

The challenge of experimenting at an organization committed to perfection

An important part of the city's cultural scene, the San Francisco Opera dates back to the 1850s. SFO's facility, the 3,146-seat War Memorial Opera House, was funded by a voter-approved municipal bond in 1927. Where most opera houses are funded by wealthy patrons, this "people's opera house" was paid for by ordinary citizens. The new facility would enable the performance of programs not well suited to the large opera house.

As one of the world's leading opera companies, SFO has traditionally focused on perfection in all aspects of its performances. Matthew Shilvock, the company's new General Director, described this drive for perfection as, "our blessing in allowing us to produce moments of exquisite theater, and our curse in terms of not giving us the flexibility to adapt quickly."

Like almost every non-profit organization, SFO has limited resources. Ticket sales cover just a fraction of its production and administrative costs, with the balance coming from donations, grants and endowment. To survive and thrive with the conflicting demands of performance excellence and constrained resources, SFO has developed a highly structured organization.

As a result of these factors, previous "experiments" had typically been meticulously planned, and executed at extremely high levels of quality. Given the drive for perfection ingrained in its culture, the natural response to poor results was that the quality level had not been sufficient, and other potential lessons were often lost. This blend of perfectionism and limited resources meant that experiments were rare events at SFO.

Getting comfortable with feeling uncomfortable

"Design thinking" is a hands-on approach that focuses on developing empathy for others, generating ideas quickly, testing rough "prototypes" that, although incomplete or impractical, fuel rapid learning for teams and organizations. The two d.school students who worked with the Opera were Zena Barakat and Madhav Thattai. Zena was a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford, and previously a senior video producer at The New York Times. Madhav was in the MSx program at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, a program for mid-career managers. He had been director of product management at Dell Computer before coming to Stanford.

The SFO project began in January 2015. Zena and Madhav's first step was to take the SFO team working on the d.school project to meet with people from outside the world of opera. One was Christina Augello, founder of the experimental EXIT Theatre and organizer of San Francisco's Fringe Festival. She described the struggle of experimenting on a tight budget, something she considered to be an essential part of the creative process-a sign on the wall read "No Risk, No Art." At EXIT Theatre, everyone worked as a community, sharing roles, pitching in where needed.

The opera team also spoke with Hodari Davis, the Artistic Director of Young, Gifted, and Black, and the National Program Director of Youth Speaks. He emphasized the importance of going out into the community, insisting that you can't "wait for the community to come to you. Don't build a space and think that the community is coming to you. You have to go to the community."

Zena also brought in James Buckhouse, an opera and ballet fan who works at venture capital firm Sequoia Capital and formerly with Twitter. He was scheduled to be the Master of Ceremonies of an under-40 night for the San Francisco Ballet, which shares the War Memorial Opera House with the Opera. Planning for the event had just started, and it would take place in 30 days.

These conversations energized the SFO team, who realized that they usually communicated and learned from within the opera community. There was also a useful sense of competition - if the Ballet could put something together quickly, why couldn't the Opera? The group brainstormed around this idea, and began to conceive a dramatic new prototype that would enable them to attract a new, younger audience.

To gain insights into audience perceptions, SFO team members approached strangers near San Francisco's Ferry Building and asked if they would be willing to give 5-10 minutes of their time for some feedback. Once they agreed, they were given tickets and told to walk through some imaginary doors. The "audience members" were warmly greeted by the SFO team, given a mask, and directed to three stations, each with an iPad providing information: one station had food menus on the iPad and a person playing a bartender, one station showed a video of a wig maker, and one station had videos of a singer performing. Afterwards, each participant was debriefed.

This exercise taught the team that people in different age groups have very different needs, and also that there's much variability within age groups. For instance, among people in their 30s, parents were vastly different than singles. They also learned that audience involvement (tested by giving participants the mask) was far more powerful than previously anticipated. They got useful input on menu items and prices.

Most importantly, the SFO team learned the power of rapid prototyping. It had taken them just two hours to pull the materials together and three hours in the field, and they had gained valuable insights. Although they were a bit embarrassed by the low-budget feeling of the prototype, they were surprised at the depth of the insights they gathered in such a short time. The feedback was so much more useful and empowering than information from surveys.

And yet there were setbacks during this early stage. Zena and Madhav challenged the SFO team to go to some event that they would never ordinarily attend, something that made them feel uncomfortable - and do it within the next two weeks. The idea was to gain empathy for their new audiences, who would be asked to come to a new experience put on by the SFO. They wanted the SFO staff to talk to people at these events to learn more about them. But only two of the seven team members completed the exercise.

Zena and Madhav scheduled another prototype to get the SFO team into the community, interacting with people outside the opera. The team went to a park in nearby Hayes Valley, played opera music, and tested ideas about including drinks in ticket prices (an idea that was not well received), various menu options for the new venue, and whether people would want to take food and/or drinks into the performance. Their d.school classmates weren't impressed by this prototype: With the SFO team in the room, they criticized it as being too safe and encouraged Zena and Madhav to push the SFO team further outside their comfort zones.

Building a more ambitious prototype

As the SFO team walked out of the disappointing design review at the d.school, they told Zena and Madhav that they were thinking of taking over a bar for their next, more ambitious prototype. Zena and Madhav challenged them to put on the event in just two weeks, by the end of the class, which was far sooner than the SFO staff thought possible. In less than a week, the SFO team had booked the Rickshaw Stop, an alternative music venue just three blocks from the Opera, which had a stage and space for an audience of 400 people.

Zena and Madhav formed three teams to plan and carry out the event: programming (what the performance would be at the venue), experience (things surrounding the performance), and engagement (audience engagement before the event, and feedback afterwards). The seven SFO project members joined teams that were outside of their comfort zones. For instance, the marketing person was on the programming team, and the woman who would be responsible for programming at the new SFO venue joined the experience team. Each team then recruited three more people from amongst the staff, for a total of 5-6 people per team. While the whole event was intended as an experiment, each team also designed experiments within their area to provide additional insights.

They came up with a name, Barely Opera, at a brainstorming session 10 days before the event, involving all 20 people from the teams plus Zena and Madhav. As soon as the name was chosen, the engagement team bought a URL, developed a website, created a logo-all within a few hours, and without having to go through the approval process normally required for decisions at the opera. The SFO teams found this autonomy liberating.

They advertised the event on social media and on local blogs, charging a $10 "cover charge" (not ticket price). A list of songs was developed with the Adler Fellows, a group of young resident opera singers in training, who would perform with piano accompaniment. Their hope was modest: to attract 100 people.

When the doors opened on March 2, 2015, a line of nearly 400 people stretched around the block. Just inside the door was a photo booth, with costumes from the Opera's inventory that people could put on. To make guests feel welcome, six opera-loving volunteers served as hosts - dressed in full costumes, wigs, and makeup. They greeted the attendees, took photos with attendees, asked for feedback, and served opera-themed cocktails and tamales.

The idea was to flip conventions on their head. The greeters were in extravagant attire, but the singers themselves were casually dressed-just jeans and t-shirts. The audience members were invited to try on opera costumes, but that's where the formality stopped.

Audience members selected songs by spinning a "Wheel of Songs." As each song was performed, a projection screen behind the stage provided translations in the form of memes (a funny image sometimes accompanied by text.) For instance, when the final singer hit a dramatic high note, a picture of Beyoncé was shown. The audience loved it.

The event was a huge success. But the real purpose was not the single event; it was to help SFO staff top change how they think about their mission and to develop new ways of operating. The next day, everyone met to debrief. As Madhav described it, "We had decided ahead of time that we were absolutely not going to focus on the outcome of the experiment." They did not want the event to be the end, but rather the beginning of an ongoing process.

A few days later, when the group met up again, after 10 minutes of celebratory champagne, strawberries, and cupcakes, Zena and Madhav asked, "What were our failures?" The entire group then celebrated the committee that had the most failures-and celebrated the freedom to experiment and try things outside their comfort zones.

Keeping the creativity going

The project opened the eyes of Opera personnel to the power of experimentation, spurring "a new commitment to innovative thinking and creative brainstorming" as Shilvock put it. The Opera subsequently formed a number of innovation groups (iGroups) drawn from different departments to work on issues related to opening the new facility.

These in turn gave rise to a new production arm called "SF Opera Lab" to stage productions at the new facility, now named the Diane B. Wilsey Center. SF Opera Lab would experiment at the Wilsey Center, but also in other venues around the city.

For the new theater's first season, lasting from March through May 2016, events included an a cappella opera, a one-man show, a film concert, and a program of music featuring the opera's promising young performers (again, the Adler Fellows) and members of the Opera's orchestra. Ticket prices for these events were considerably less than for the opera, ranging from $25 to $125. The web page for each event had a box titled "Who's Gonna Love It," describing the type of person who would be most attracted to the event. For instance, "Svadba-Wedding" is an a cappella opera about a Serbian bride-to-be and her friends preparing for her wedding day. The "Who's Gonna Love It" box read, "Fans of Pentatonix, World Music lovers, or anyone planning a wedding."

Through Wilsey Center performances and casual pop-up events around the city, the SFO team began to learn what younger audiences wanted from an opera experience.

The art form (opera) wasn't a problem - they thoroughly enjoyed the performances - in fact, the singers performed some pop songs at the pop-up events, but the audiences seemed to react more strongly to the opera songs.

The problem for younger audiences were some of the trappings and traditions that surrounded the art form - the feeling that there were lots of rules made for an intimidating experience. For instance, Zena attended an opera at the War Memorial Opera House and noticed a sign at the main stage that encouraged people to take selfies and to share them via a particular hashtag. When she did so, an older patron scolded her, saying taking pictures wasn't allowed.

The atmosphere at the pop-ups was much different. It was informal. There was an emcee that explained the songs, why the singer was doing a particular song, and who generally made everyone feel welcome and comfortable. The singers also enjoyed the less formal events, in which they were able to interact with the crowd in a different way than during staged operas. They could tell jokes, talk to the crowd, and see reactions up close. They were accessible to the audience, and the audience was accessible to the singers.

Yet, as with all innovators who challenge the status quo, the iGroups faced challenges. The SFO culture had a strong bias towards maintaining the highest possible production values. Not all members of the Opera's staff and management had embraced the design thinking "fail early, fail often" approach. And some felt that experiments like Barely Opera had diminished the Opera by not incorporating the high standards of a world-class opera company. The success of the pop-up events helped overcome this resistance. Sean Waugh, who led the SFO project team, observed that more and more staff were attending the pop-ups, where they realized "how thrilling it is to go to an opera event and see that the majority of people there are under the age of 35."

Given the strong cultural pull of perfection, there was a risk that the pop-up events, which originally had a high degree of spontaneity, could become too polished. That SFO would get comfortable with a successful formula, and that it would lose those attributes which made it successful. For the audience and performers, keeping the show authentic, real, and unpredictable was part of the appeal.

But now the Opera had a way of fighting these impulses. As Shilvock puts it, "Design thinking is liberating for a company tightly constrained by contracts and expectations!" The d.school project "opened the door for us to be a more creative, questioning, and iterative organization, a little more willing to try and fail."

Waugh agreed that the effect on the organization had been transformative. "This is an organization that has done almost a complete 360 after this process. Before it was an organization that was very, very, very adverse to change, not open to the idea of failure, and now we're embracing change to a greater degree, making SFO a more fun place to work."

To which we can only say, "Bravo."
Authors' Note: Zena Barakat's and Madhav Thattai's San Francisco Opera project was completed for a d.school class called d.leadership: Design Leadership In Context, where a dozen or so pairs of Stanford students each year work with an external "client" to help them apply design thinking to solve thorny problems. Charla Bear also contributed to the project during a different phase. The class is taught by Perry Klebahn, Kathryn Segovia, Bob Sutton, and Jeremy Utley.

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What Design Thinking Is Doing for the San Francisco Opera

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On March 2, 2015, a line of people stretching around the block waited to get into the Rickshaw Stop on Fell Street in San Francisco. This was not like most nights at the funky music venue and bar; the people in line weren't waiting to see an indie band, or dance to music spun by a DJ.

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In Design Thinking and Innovation Metrics: Powerful Tools to Manage Creativity, OKRs, Product, and Business Success , bestselling author Michael Lewrick delivers a simple and straightforward playbook to manage and measure innovation. In the book, you'll learn how to utilize the design thinking paradigm for innovation success and how successful leaders manage Explore and Exploit portfolios to create impact.

The author explains how to:

Strategically employ data analytics, artificial intelligence, and neurodesign to drive innovation and business results

Deploy Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) for innovation teams to realize true alignment between the business and team performance

Use the provided hands-on tools to measure your firm's success at creating meaningfully new and interesting products, services, and experiences

Part of the Design Thinking Series, Design Thinking and Innovation Metrics will earn a place in the libraries of managers, executives, product owners, innovation teams, entrepreneurs, and other business leaders.

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Design Thinking and Innovation Metrics: Powerful Tools to Manage Creativity, OKRs, Product, and Business Success (Design Thinking Series)

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Design Thinking and Innovation Metrics: Powerful Tools to Manage Creativity, OKRs, Product, and Business Success (Design Thinking Series) : Michael Lewrick: Amazon.de: Bücher

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What is design thinking? Why does it work? How do I get started with it? Our community had so many great questions on the power and potential of design thinking that we hosted an Ask Me Anything session on the topic with IDEO partners and IDEO U leaders Suzanne Gibbs Howard and Coe Leta Stafford.…

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Design Thinking – What is Design Thinking in 90 Seconds

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Design Thinking is a concept aimed at solving  complex problems as well as a process to promote innovative ideas. 
It approaches issues from the perspective of a designer, focusing on user needs first and foremost. 

One of the main goals of Design Thinking is to start to test a prototyp early on instead of spending too much time on the designing process itself. By getting constant feedback from potential users, Design Thinking aims to produce useable products fast. 

Listen to our instructor Professor Christoph Ihl explaining what Design Thinking is.
Would you like to find out more about this innovative method? 

Our Design Thinking workshops can be found here: https://www.nithh.de/digitalization/design-thinking/ 

Our Design Thinking Module: www.nithh.de/DT

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1. T. Brown, "Design Thinking," Harvard Business Review 86, no. 6 (June 2008): 84-92.

2. E. Tippmann, P.S. Scott, and M. Gantley, "Driving Remote Innovation Through Conflict and Collaboration," MIT Sloan Management Review, April 15, 2021, https://sloanreview.mit.edu; L. Thompson, "Virtual Collaboration Won't Be the Death of Creativity," MIT Sloan Management Review 62, no. 2 (winter 2021): 42-46.

3. A. Minet, D. Wentzel, S. Raff, et al., "Design Thinking in Physical and Virtual Environments: Conceptual Foundations, Qualitative Analysis, and Practical Implications," Technological Forecasting and Social Change 207 (October 2024): 123596.

4. "An Introduction to Design Thinking Process Guide," PDF file (Stanford, California: Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University, n.d.). (Accessed September 6, 2024).

5. D. Dunne and R. Martin, "Design Thinking and How It Will Change Management Education: An Interview and Discussion," Academy of Management Learning & Education 5, no. 4 (December 2006): 512-523.

6. Y. Trope and N. Liberman, "Construal-Level Theory of Psychological Distance," Psychological Review 117, no. 2 (April 2010): 440-463.

7. A.M. Glenberg, "Embodiment as a Unifying Perspective for Psychology," Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science 1, no. 4 (July/August 2010): 586-596.

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Teams can structure design-thinking processes to benefit from the strengths of both in-person and virtual collaboration.

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The allure of big design agencies is tempting—but at what cost? Over the years, large design consultancies have built a reputation for delivering cutting-edge insights and groundbreaking innovations. Their pitch is simple: pay us a large sum of money, and we’ll do the research, design, and thinking

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Cambridge Core - Cognition - Design Thinking and Other Approaches

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How to Generate Ideas with the SCAMPER Technique

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Design Thinking Methods and Tools for Innovation

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Design thinking (DT) is regarded as a system of three overlapping spaces—viability, desirability, and feasibility—where innovation increases when all three perspectives are addressed. Understanding how innovation within teams can be supported by DT…

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If I think about the value that Design Thinking can bring to the world, I think it's primarily about learning. In essence, Design Thinking is a different way to learn, a different learning strategy. And learning is becoming more and more important, as expressed elegantly in this quote from Alvin Toffler:

"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn." - Alvin Toffler

Learning is the crucial step in the Lean Startup's build-measure-learn process. If you don't learn, the whole process is useless.

Learning is also the key objective of the popular Google Ventures Design Sprint. The deliverable of a Design Sprint is not a prototype, it's learning.

The way designers learn is what separates them from other people and it's the key to understanding, learning, mastering Design Thinking. If you look at how designers work, you'll see that they don't spend months discussing what to design. Even if not all information is available, even if the objective is not clear, even if the whole project bathes in uncertainty, they start to do, to make, to design.

Why is that? How can you start designing when you don't have all the information? Where do you start when the goal of the project isn't even clear?

Designers do this because learning by doing is by far the best way to navigate complexity and uncertainty. Imagine first gathering all the information there is about a complex activity like walking upright or driving a car before you start. If we would learn to walk like that, not a lot of people would be walking. Learning by doing is far more effective strategy for solving complex problems. Yes, you are going to bump your head a couple of times. Yes, you are going to make a fool of yourself. But the other way, research until you know all the answers, takes too much energy, effort, time, money and will not guarantee better results. The complexer the problem, the more true this is.

All the big innovators of our time use this method. Elon Musk is learning by doing how to get people to switch to electric cars, how to get a rocket to the moon. Google, Twitter, AirBnb, you name them, all move before they are ready. They all learn by doing. They all make fools of themselves from time to time. They are all focussed on learning. The faster you can learn, the better your organization will perform. The world has become too complex to rely solely on research. There are too many variables, too many interconnections.

Designers do their research, but what separates them from non-designers is the moment they stop talking, reading and analyzing and start doing.

Engage your visual mind. Once you start making, you start to see. Once you start to see, your visual mind kicks in and helps you think. 75% or so of the energy in the human brain is dedicated to visual signal processing. It would be a shame not to use that.

Create a common language. If you make things concrete, you create a common language all stakeholders understand. This enables you to collect insights far better than just talking to people in abstract terms.

Access your intuition. Buddhists call our rational, thinking mind, the small mind and intuition our big mind. The big mind is far more creative than the small mind. Doing, seeing, using your visual mind opens up the door to intuition. All good designers use it.

See the gaps. If you start making, you quickly see what you don't know, what you don't see, what you need. Nothing beats executing in reality when it comes to pointing out the gaps in your ideas, knowledge and approach.

Think outside the box. If you spend too much time researching, you run the risk of thinking in best practices, in familiar patterns. Being bold and naive allows you to learn much more than coloring between the lines. If you have the guts to start early and be bold, you will be rewarded with big learning.

Cultivate the Beginner's Mind. Seeing things with fresh eyes is crucial to solve complex problems. If you are too deep into the matter, you lose your beginner's mind and the fresh perspective that is quintessential to designers.

The other reason why designers start doing way earlier than other people is because they need all the help they can get. When you navigate complexity, you definitely need all the help you can get. Doing, starting before you are ready, enables you to call in the cavalry when it comes to learning, to getting ideas, to validating. It allows you to:

making stuff

seeing (no not what you think you see, see what you actually see)

thinking outside the box

connecting dots

understanding stuff in new ways

This is not as easy as it sounds. It requires skills. You must master:

Learning in itself is a skill you must learn. And learning to learn like a designer is no different. But that is what Design Thinking is all about.

We don't know things, we have hypotheses. And we must validate those hypotheses. That requires learning, unlearning and relearning. If you think you know, you're in trouble when it comes to solving complex problems. Research is aimed at knowing, Design Thinking at learning. Learning is far more valuable than knowledge when it comes to solving complex problems, simply because you cannot know complexity, you can only learn.

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If I think about the value that Design Thinking can bring to the world, I think it's primarily about learning. In essence, Design Thinking is a different way to learn, a different learning strategy...

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Design Thinking for Social Impact - Design Sprint Conference 2017

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While we know a lot about practices that stimulate new ideas, innovation teams often struggle to apply them. Why? Because people's biases and entrenched behaviors get in the way. In this article a Darden professor explains how design thinking helps people overcome this problem and unleash their creativity.

Though ostensibly geared to understanding and molding the experiences of customers, design thinking also profoundly reshapes the experiences of the innovators themselves. For example, immersive customer research helps them set aside their own views and recognize needs customers haven't expressed. Carefully planned dialogues help teams build on their diverse ideas, not just negotiate compromises when differences arise. And experiments with new solutions reduce all stakeholders' fear of change.

At every phase-customer discovery, idea generation, and testing-a clear structure makes people more comfortable trying new things, and processes increase collaboration. Because it combines practical tools and human insight, design thinking is a social technology -one that the author predicts will have an impact as large as an earlier social technology: total quality management.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
While we know a lot about practices that stimulate new ideas, innovation teams often struggle to apply them. Why? Because people's biases and entrenched behaviors get in the way. In this article a Darden professor explains how design thinking helps people overcome this problem and unleash their creativity.

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Project Masiluleke - The Role of Design / Design Thinking

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An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.

When Kyle Cornforth first walked into IDEO's San Francisco offices in 2011, she felt she had entered a whole new world. At the time, Cornforth was a director at the Edible Schoolyard Project, a nonprofit that uses gardening and cooking in schools to teach and to provide nutritious food. She was there to meet with IDEO.org, a new social-impact spinoff of the design consulting firm, which was exploring how to reimagine school lunch, a mission that the Edible Schoolyard Project has been working toward since 2004. But Cornforth was new to IDEO's way of working: a six-step methodology for innovation called design thinking, which had emerged in the 1990s but had started reaching the height of its popularity in the tech, business, and social-impact sectors.

Key to design thinking's spread was its replicable aesthetic, represented by the Post-it note: a humble square that anyone can use in infinite ways. Not too precious, not too permanent, the ubiquitous Post-it promises a fast-moving, cooperative, egalitarian process for getting things done. When Cornforth arrived at IDEO for a workshop, "it was Post-its everywhere, prototypes everywhere," she says. "What I really liked was that they offered a framework for collaboration and creation."

But when she looked at the ideas themselves, Cornforth had questions: "I was like, 'You didn't talk to anyone who works in a school, did you?' They were not contextualized in the problem at all." The deep expertise in the communities of educators and administrators she worked with, Cornforth saw, was in tension with the disruptive, startup-flavored creativity of the design thinking process at consultancies like IDEO.org. "I felt like a stick in the mud to them," she recalls. "And I felt they were out of touch with reality."

That tension would resurface a couple of years later, in 2013, when IDEO was hired by the San Francisco Unified School District to redesign the school cafeteria, with funding from Twitter cofounder Ev Williams's family foundation. Ten years on, the SFUSD program has had a big impact-but that may have as much to do with the slow and integrated work inside the district as with that first push of design-focused energy from outside.

Founded in the 1990s, IDEO was instrumental in evangelizing the design thinking process throughout the '00s and '10s, alongside Stanford's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design or "d.school" (which IDEO's founder David Kelley also cofounded). While the methodology's focus on collaboration and research can be traced back to human-factors engineering, a movement popular decades earlier, design thinking took hold of the collective imagination during the Obama years, a time when American culture was riding high on the potential of a bunch of smart people in a hope-filled room to bend history's arc toward progress. Its influence stretched across health-care giants in the American heartland, government agencies in DC, big tech companies in Silicon Valley, and beyond. City governments brought in design thinking agencies to solve their economic woes and take on challenges ranging from transportation to housing. Institutions like MIT and Harvard and boot camps like General Assembly stood up courses and degree programs, suggesting that teaching design thinking could be as lucrative as selling it to corporations and foundations.

Design thinking also broadened the very idea of "design," elevating the designer to a kind of spiritual medium who didn't just construct spaces, physical products, or experiences on screen but was uniquely able to reinvent systems to better meet the desires of the people within them. It gave designers permission to take on any big, knotty problem by applying their own empathy to users' pain points-the first step in that six-step innovation process filled with Post-its.

We are all creatives, design thinking promised, and we can solve any problem if we empathize hard enough.

The next steps were to reframe the problem ("How might we ...?"), brainstorm potential solutions, prototype options, test those options with end users, and-finally-implement. Design thinking agencies usually didn't take on this last step themselves; consultants often delivered a set of "recommendations" to the organizations that hired them.

At the same time, consultancies like IDEO, Frog, Smart Design, and others were also promoting the idea that anyone (including the executives paying their fees) could be a designer by just following the process. Perhaps design had become "too important to leave to designers," as IDEO's then CEO, Tim Brown, wrote in his 2009 book Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation. Brown even touted as a selling point his firm's utter absence of expertise in any particular industry: "We come with what we call a beginner's mind," he told the Yale School of Management.

This was a savvy strategy for selling design thinking to the business world: instead of hiring their own team of design professionals, companies could bring on an agency temporarily to learn the methodology themselves. The approach also felt empowering to many who spent time with it. We are all creatives, design thinking promised, and we can solve any problem if we empathize hard enough.

But in recent years, for a number of reasons, the shine of design thinking has been wearing off. Critics have argued that its short-term focus on novel and naive ideas has resulted in unrealistic and ungrounded recommendations. And they have maintained that by centering designers-mainly practitioners of corporate design within agencies-it has reinforced existing inequities rather than challenging them. Years in, "innovation theater"- checking a series of boxes without implementing meaningful shifts-had become endemic in corporate settings, while a number of social-impact initiatives highlighted in case studies struggled to get beyond pilot projects. Meanwhile, the #MeToo and BLM movements, along with the political turmoil of the Trump administration, have demonstrated that many big problems are rooted in centuries of dark history, too deeply entrenched to be obliterated with a touch of design thinking's magic wand.

Today, innovation agencies and educational institutions still continue to sell design thinking to individuals, corporations, and organizations. In 2015, IDEO even created its own "online school," IDEO U, with a bank of design thinking courses. But some groups-including the d.school and IDEO itself-are working to reform both its principles and its methodologies. These new efforts seek a set of design tools capable of equitably serving diverse communities and solving diverse problems well into the future. It's a much more daunting-and crucial-task than design thinking's original remit.

The magical promise of design thinking

When design thinking emerged in the '90s and '00s, workplaces were made up of cubicles and closed doors, and the term "user experience" had only just been coined at Apple. Despite convincing research on collaboration tracing back to the 1960s, work was still mainly a solo endeavor in many industries, including design. Design thinking injected new and collaborative energy into both design and the corporate world more broadly; it suggested that work could look and feel more hopeful and be more fun, and that design could take the lead in making it that way.

When author and startup advisor Jake Knapp was working as a designer at Microsoft in the 2000s, he visited IDEO's offices in Palo Alto for a potential project. He was struck by how inspiring the space was: "Everything is white, and there's sunlight coming in the windows. There's an open floor plan. I had never seen [work] done like that." When he started at Google a few years later, he learned how to run design thinking workshops from a colleague who had worked at IDEO, and then he began running his own workshops on the approach within Google.

Knapp's attraction was due in part to the "radical collaboration" that design thinking espoused. In what was a first for many, colleagues came together across disciplines at the very start of a project to discuss how to solve problems. "Facilitating the exchange of information, ideas, and research with product, engineering, and design teams more fluidly is really the unlock," says Enrique Allen, cofounder of Designer Fund, which supports startups seeking to harness the unique business value of design in industries from health care to construction. Design thinking offered a structure for those cross-disciplinary conversations and a way to articulate design's value within them. "It gave [your ideas] so much more weight for people who didn't have the language to understand creative work," says Erica Eden, who worked as a designer at the innovation firm Smart Design.

It makes a good story to say there's a foolproof process that will lead to results no matter who runs it.

For Angela McKee Brown, who was hired by SFUSD to help bring the work IDEO had done on improving the school cafeteria to reality, the design thinking process was a language that bureaucracy could understand. In a district that had suffered from an overall lack of infrastructure investment since the 1970s, she watched as IDEO's recommendations ignited a new will to improvement that continues today. "The biggest role that process played for us was it told a story that showed people the value of the work," McKee Brown says. "That allowed me to have a much easier job, because people believed."

The enthusiasm that surrounded design thinking did have much to offer the public sector, says Cyd Harrell, San Francisco's chief digital services officer, who has worked as a design leader in civic technology for over a decade. Decades of budget cuts and a lack of civic investment have made it difficult for public servants to feel that change is possible. "For a lot of those often really wonderful people who've chosen service as a career, and who have had to go through times where things seem really bleak," she says, "the infusion of optimism-whether it comes in the guise of some of these techniques that are a little bit shady or not-is really valuable." And it makes a good story to say there's a foolproof process that will lead to results no matter who runs it.

Ideas over implementation

Execution has always been the sticky wicket for design thinking. Some versions of the codified six-step process even omit that crucial final step of implementation. Its roots in the agency world, where a firm steps in on a set timeline with an established budget and leaves before or shortly after the pilot stage, dictated that the tools of design thinking would be aimed at the start of the product development process but not its conclusion-or, even more to the point, its aftermath.

When Jake Knapp was running those design thinking workshops at Google, he saw that for all the excitement and Post-its they generated, the brainstorming sessions didn't usually lead to built products or, really, solutions of any kind. When he followed up with teams to learn which workshop ideas had made it to production, he heard decisions happening "in the old way," with a few lone geniuses working separately and then selling their almost fully realized ideas to top stakeholders.

Execution has always been the sticky wicket for design thinking.

In the government and social-impact sectors, though, design thinking's focus on ideas over implementation had bigger ramifications than a lack of efficiency.

The "biggest piece of the design problem" in civic tech, says Harrell, is not generating new ideas but figuring out how to implement and pay for them. What's more, success sometimes can't be evaluated until years later, so the time-constrained workshops typical of the design thinking approach may not be appropriate. "There's a mismatch between the short-cycle evaluations [in commercial design] and the long-cycle evaluations for policy," she says. For longtime public servants, seeing a project through-past implementation and into iteration-is crucial for learning and improving how infrastructure functions.

In a 2021 piece on the evolution of their practices, Brown, along with Shauna Carey and Jocelyn Wyatt of IDEO.org, cited the Diva Centres project in Lusaka, Zambia, where they worked to help teens access contraception and learn about reproductive health. Through the design thinking methodology, the team came up with the idea of creating nail salons where the teens could get guidance in a low-pressure environment. The team built three model sites, declaring the work a success; the Diva Centres project won a Core77 Service Design Award in 2016, and the case study is still posted on IDEO.org's website. But while the process focused on generating the most exciting user experience within the nail salons, it neglected to consider the world outside their walls-a complex network of public health funding and service channels that made scaling the pilot "prohibitively expensive and complicated," as the IDEO.org leaders later wrote. Though IDEO intended to build 10 centers by 2017, neither IDEO nor the partner organization ever reported reaching that milestone. The article does not say how much money or time went into realizing the Diva Centres pilot before it ended, so it's not clear if the lessons learned were worth the failure. (IDEO.org declined to be interviewed for this story.)

IDEO's 2013 work for SFUSD-the project that McKee Brown later worked on from the school system's side-has a more complicated legacy. After five months, IDEO delivered 10 recommendations, including communal dining tables, vending machines with meals to grab on the go, community food partnerships for fresher produce, and an app and interactive web portal to give students and families more opportunities to participate in lunch choices. (The food itself was a different issue that the district was working on with its vendors.) On IDEO's website today, the story concludes with SFUSD's "unanimous enthusiasm" for the recommendations-a consultancy happy ending. Indeed, the project was met with a flurry of fawning press coverage. But with hindsight, it's clear that only after IDEO left the project did the real work begin.

At SFUSD, McKee Brown saw instances in which IDEO's recommendations did not take into account the complexities of the district's operations and the effort it could take to even drill a hole in a wall in accordance with asbestos abatement rules. The vending machines the team proposed, for instance, would need a stable internet connection, which many target locations didn't have. And the app never came to fruition, McKee Brown says, as it would have required a whole new department to continually update the software and content.

An analysis a few years after IDEO's 2013 engagement showed that about the same number of kids or even fewer were choosing to eat school lunch, despite a continuous increase in enrollment. This may have had several reasons, including that the quality of the food itself did not significantly improve. The original goal of getting more kids to eat at school would eventually be met by an entirely different effort: California's universal school meal program, implemented in 2022.

Nevertheless, IDEO's SFUSD project has had a lasting impact, thanks to the work the district itself put into transforming blue-sky ideas into real change. While few of the recommendations ended up being widely implemented in schools exactly as IDEO envisioned them, the district has been redesigning its cafeterias to make the spaces more welcoming and social for students-after sometimes decades of disrepair. Today more than 70 school cafeterias out of 114 sites in the city have been renovated. The design thinking process helped sell the value of improving school cafeterias to the decision makers. But the in-house team at SFUSD charted the way forward after many of IDEO's initial ideas couldn't make it past the drawing board.

Empathy over expertise

The first step of the design thinking process is for the designer to empathize with the end user through close observation of the problem. While this step involves asking questions of the individuals and communities affected, the designer's eye frames any insights that emerge. This puts the designer's honed sense of empathy at the center of both the problem and the solution.

In 2018, researcher Lilly Irani, an associate professor at the University of California, San Diego, wrote a piece titled "Design Thinking: Defending Silicon Valley at the Apex of Global Labor Hierarchies" for the peer-reviewed journal Catalyst. She criticized the new framing of the designer as an empathetic "divining rod leading to new markets or domains of life ripe for intervention," maintaining that it reinforced traditional hierarchies of labor.

Irani argued that as an outgrowth of Silicon Valley business interests and culture, design thinking situated Western-and often white-designers at a higher level of labor, treating them as mystics who could translate the efforts and experiences of lower-level workers into capitalistic opportunity.

Former IDEO designer George Aye has seen Irani's concerns play out firsthand, particularly in settings with entrenched systemic problems. He and his colleagues would use the language of a "beginner's mindset" with the clients, he says, but what he saw in practice was more an attitude that "we're going to fumble our way through and by the time we're done, we're on to the next project." In Aye's view, these consulting engagements made tourists of commercial designers, who-however sincerely they wanted to help-made sure to "get some good pictures standing next to typically dark-skinned people with brightly colored clothes" so they could produce evidence for the consultancy.

Today in his own studio, which works only with nonprofit organizations, Aye tries to elevate what's already being created by a local community, advocate for its members to get the resources they need, and then "get out of the way." If designers are not centering the people on the ground, then "it's profit-centered design," he says. "There's no other way of putting it."

McKee Brown considers one of the greatest successes of the San Francisco cafeteria redesign project to be the School Food Advisory (SFA), a district-wide program in which high schoolers continually inform and direct changes to meal programs and cafeteria updates. But the group wasn't a result of IDEO's recommendations; the SFA was formed to ensure that SFUSD students would continue to have a voice in the district and a chance to collaborate often on how to redesign their spaces. Nearly a decade after IDEO completed its work, the best results have been due to the expertise of the district's own team and its generations of students, not the empathy that went into the initial short-term consulting project.

As she's continued to work on food and education, McKee Brown has adapted the process of design thinking to her experiences and team leadership needs. At SFUSD and later at Edible Schoolyard, where she became executive director, she developed three questions she and her team should always make sure to ask: "Who have you talked to? Have you tried it out before we spend all this money? And then how are you telling the story of the work?"

What's next for design thinking?

Almost two decades after design thinking rose to prominence, the world still has no shortage of problems that need addressing. Design leadership and design processes themselves need to evolve beyond design thinking, and that's an arena where designers may actually be uniquely skilled. Stanford's d.school, which was instrumental in the growth of design thinking in the first place, is one institution pushing the conversation forward by reshaping its influential design programs. Within the physical walls of the school, the design thinking aesthetic-whiteboards, cardboard furniture, Post-its-is still evident on most surfaces, but the ideas stirring inside sound new.

In fact, the phrase "design thinking" does not appear in any materials for the d.school's revamped undergraduate or graduate programs-although it still shows up in electives in which any Stanford student can enroll (and a representative from the d.school claims the terms "design" and "design thinking" are used interchangeably). Instead of "empathy," "make" and "care" are the concepts that program leaders hope will shape the design education across all offerings.

In contrast with empathy, care demands a shift in who is centered in these processes-sometimes meaning people in generations other than our own. "How are we thinking about our ancestors? What is the legacy that this is going to leave? What are all the intended and unintended consequences?" says academic director Carissa Carter. "There are implications no matter where you work-second-, third-order consequences of what we put out. This is where we are pulling in elements of equity and inclusion. Not just in a single course, but how we approach the design of this curriculum."

The d.school's creative director, Scott Doorley, who has been with the school for over 15 years, has begun to hear the students themselves ask for fundamental shifts like these. They're entering the programs saying, "I want to make something that not only changes things, but changes things without screwing everything else up," Doorley says: "It's this really great combination of excitement and humility at the same time." The d.school has also made specific changes in curriculum and tools; an ethics course that was previously required at the end of the undergraduate degree program now appears toward the beginning, and the school is providing new frameworks to help students plan for the next-generation effects of their work beyond a project's completion.

For the Design Justice Network, a collective of design practitioners and educators that emerged out of the 2014 Allied Media Conference in Detroit, slowing down and embracing complexity are the keys to moving practices like design thinking toward justice. "If we truly want to think about stakeholders, if we want to have more levels of affordances when we design things, then we can't work at the speed of industry," says Wes Taylor, an associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and a DJN leader.

IDEO's practices have been evolving to better address that complexity. Tim Brown says that toward the beginning of the company's life, its unique power was in bringing together different design disciplines to deliver new ideas. "We weren't looking particularly to help our clients build their own capabilities back then. We were simply looking to do certain kinds of design projects," he says.

Now, when the questions being asked of designers are deeper and more complicated-how to make Ford a more human-centered company rather than how to build a better digital dashboard, he gives as an example-IDEO leaders have recognized that "it's the combination of doing design and building the capabilities [of IDEO's clients and their communities] to design at the same time where the real impact can happen." What this means in practice is much more time on the ground, more partnerships, and sometimes more money. "It's about recognizing that the expertise is much more in the hands of the user of the system than the designer of the system. And being a little bit less arrogant about knowing everything," says Brown.

IDEO has also been building new design capabilities within its own team, hiring writers and filmmakers to tell stories for their clients, which Brown has come to see as " the key activity, not a key activity" for influencing change in societal systems. "If you had asked me 10 to 15 years ago," he says, "I would never have guessed that we would have as many folks who come from a storytelling background within a design firm as we do today."

Indeed, design thinking's greatest positive impact may always have been in the stories it's helped tell: spreading the word about the value of collaboration in business, elevating the public profile of design as a discipline, and coaxing funding from private and public channels for expensive long-term projects. But its legacy must also account for years of letting down many of the people and places the methodology claimed it would benefit. And as long as it remains in the halls of consultancies and ivory-tower institutions, its practitioners may continue to struggle to decenter the already powerful and privileged.

As Taylor sees it, design thinking's core problems can be traced back to its origins in the corporate world, which inextricably intertwined the methodology with capitalistic values. He believes that a justice lens can help foster collaboration and creativity in a much broader way that goes beyond our current power structures. "Let's try to imagine and acknowledge that capitalism is not inevitable, not necessarily a foundational principle of nature," he urges.

That kind of radical innovation goes far beyond the original methodology of design thinking. But it may contain the seeds for the lasting change that the design industry-and the world-need now.

Rebecca Ackermann is a writer, designer, and artist based in San Francisco.

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Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?

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An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.

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Written by Estefanía Ciliotta

Design has shifted immensely since its beginnings - from craftsmanship to a way of thinking and being. Michael Arnold Mages, our conversation series curator, defined design as a fundamental act of humans and design thinking as a way to know the world - through objects, by objects, with objects.

Regarding the specific topic of this conversation, Michael brought up Arturo Escobar's book and approach to designing for the Zapatista Pluriverse - where many worlds fit. This way of seeing design incorporates ways of being.

With this initial framework, we dove deeper into the panelists' discussion. Dimeji shared his perspective on collective history and how it has influenced the way we think and work today as designers, and this collective history is deeply intertwined and impacting the lives of others.

He also raised the concern regarding design thinking for being too problem-solving-oriented when perhaps, designers should be paying more attention to problem tracing and finding since current problems are more complex and wicked.

As designers living in and designing for a multicultural society, we need to ask ourselves more questions before jumping to conclusions, we need to be more critical thinkers and provocative.

image: Dimeji Onafuwa's approach to looking beyond the traditional design thinking model. The central spheres are the "typical" steps; the white text is his critique of each step from a broader perspective.

In addition, Dimeji shared some of the Pluriversal Principles:

Be egalitarian

Use a multimodal approach

Act as an ally

Lend your upstream privilege

Adopt collective agency

Steward the rights of others

Fight symbolic violence

Stay with the problem

To add to this pluriversal view, we need to consider people's perspectives regarding tradition and sacredness. Hajira Qazi's research approach incorporates sacredness in transition design and calls for systems-level change for transitioning to more equitable and sustainable futures, arguing that the things we design, design back on us.

She also raises a new view for design thinking and argues that instead of focusing only on innovative approaches, design thinking should consider traditional views and approaches towards the sacred, as traditions may offer radical creativity to solving modern problems by providing centuries worth of wisdom, culture-specific know-how, and experience.

Finally, Alexandra To added to these pluralistic views of design by sharing her research on design for empowerment and joy. She believes that HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) and Game Design can provide an interesting approach to thinking about racial justice.

She argues that as technology continues to develop, gaps between communities with access and without access continue to enlarge, thus, technology perpetuates marginalization of already marginalized groups. Alexandra is looking to combat this marginalization through design interventions and tools to provide and enable visibility, awareness, and community empowerment.

One of her projects, for example, focuses on participatory workshops to imagine speculative futures by coping with daily experiences of interpersonal racism using social technology (CARE Project). This project's goal is to provide participants not only with visibility to the issue but also with safety and dignity.

Design Thinking is not apolitical

Designers make judgments and decisions that influence people's lives... that is politics and design needs to be aware of it and take responsibility for it.

Human interaction is complex - culture and contexts

Traditional design methods are not enough. We need to incorporate new ways and approaches, new ways of thinking of design.

Embrace Diversity and Design for Dignity and Empowerment

Storytelling is key for accessing and participating with each other

Whoever holds the story holds the perspective. As designers, we should build and enable platforms that share different perspectives of the same story.

We need to Reframe Design Education

Design not for problem-solving, but we should be teaching a design approach that is more of a social collective process that is beyond problem-solving.
Some questions we may want to continue to think about as we develop the design practice are:

How might we redesign the practice without the influence of western/single-sided perspective?

How can we blend in a new way of being in a new world?

The future that we are designing is designing others' futures too, so how might we do it in a more responsible way?

How might we incorporate different perspectives and traditions into design and design approaches?

Sacred vs. Profanity: how might we build a bridge between them to not see them as two completely opposite things?

Written by Estefanía Ciliotta
Center for Design, Northeastern University

Michael Arnold Mages is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art + Design. His research interests include developing a rich understanding of the ways that service design, technology, and the material environment facilitate human conversation. Professor Arnold Mages is especially interested in creating work that supports participants' understanding of their own intersectional identity as a component of a conversation and creating work that can support conversations that are difficult, or high-stakes, or where one or more participants are in a leveraged position.

Dr. Dimeji Onafuwa is a designer, artist, and researcher with several years of UX design and research, transition design, service design, and social design experience. He has worked as a design studio owner, UX consultant, and researcher. After working as a senior design researcher at Microsoft, where he explored the future of work, Dimeji recently joined Google as a senior researcher in the Cloud Commerce space. Dimeji also teaches courses on Design and the Pluriverse at Emily Carr University in Vancouver, BC. Dimeji earned a Ph.D. in Design from Carnegie Mellon University. His doctoral study at CMU sought to understand commons-based approaches to user experience on platforms. To investigate this topic, he worked with various collectives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Portland, Oregon. Before his Ph.D., Dimeji also earned an MBA in management from UNC Charlotte and BAs in design and studio art from Concord University. Dimeji recently co-founded Common Cause Collective, an interdisciplinary group of designers exploring transition design methodologies for social impact in the Pacific Northwest. He has published papers, written a book chapter on design for the greater good, given talks, and conducted workshops on design's role in social justice.

Hajira Qazi is an accountant-turned designer currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Transition Design. She worked for four years in finance and then in a nonprofit organization, where she first began to recognize the value of systems-level approaches to design. In 2016, she joined the School of Design Master of Arts program and received her Master of Professional Studies in 2018. Her doctoral research is centered on how conceptions of the sacred can inform an alternative worldview that moves away from the consumeristic aspects traditionally associated with design towards design that fosters resilient and cohesive societies. Past work and research interests include participatory design, decolonization, and design for political change.

Alexandra To is an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University jointly appointed in the Art + Design (Games) department and the Khoury College of Computer Science. Her core research interests are in designing social technologies to empower people in vulnerable and marginalized contexts using qualitative methods to gather stories and participatory methods to design for the future. Her most recent research focuses on designing social technologies to empower support-seeking and coping with interpersonal racism. Alexandra is an activist, a critical race scholar, and an award-winning game designer. She previously received her Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.S. and M.S. in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University. She has published work at CHI, CHI Play, DiGRA, FDG, UIST, CSCW, and DIS.

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Center for Design @ Northeastern University

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Rethinking Design Thinking in the Pluriverse

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Written by Estefanía Ciliotta Design has shifted immensely since its beginnings - from craftsmanship to a way of thinking and being. Michael Arnold Mages, our conversation series curator, defined design as a fundamental act of humans and design thinking as a way to know the world - through objects, by objects, with objects.

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Biography

Cara Wrigley is a professor of design innovation at The University of Queensland and director of the Design Innovation Research Lab (DiLab). Cara leads a team of design researchers on projects spanning education, health care, science, business, and defence, crossing interdisciplinary boundaries. Cara has published extensively on the application and adoption of design, which has been disseminated through a number of books, including Design Innovation and Integration (2021, BIS Publishers, co-authored with Karla Straker and Erez Nusem), Design Innovation for Health and Medicine (2020, Palgrave Macmillan, co-authored with Karla Straker and Erez Nusem), and Affected: Emotionally Engaging Customers in the Digital Age (2018, Wiley, co-authored with Karla Straker). Cara has more than 60 refereed papers in outlets such Design Issues, Journal of Cleaner Production, Energy Policy, California Management Review, ASAIO Journal, and Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing. She is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Design, Business & Society. Cara holds extensive experience in curriculum development and delivery. During her time at The University of Sydney she developed and delivered a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Design Innovation (2018), rolled out a university-wide Design Major (2018), and launched the Master of Design Innovation and Strategic Design (2019) program. She is passionate about providing positive student and supervisor experiences and has presented at a number of universities on the topic of academic development and PhD supervision. She has advised colleagues and higher degree students on developing efficient and successful ways to collaborate, building professional networks, and working with industry partners.

Genevieve Mosely is a research fellow at the Design Innovation Research Lab (DiLab) and a PhD candidate at The University of Queensland. Genevieve's research focuses on design education as well as the application of design thinking to help capture new value through better understanding users and their needs. She has practical experience working in partnership with industry, including the Royal Australian Air Force, the Australian Defence College, and TAFE NSW, employing design innovation methods to help gain and sustain competitive advantage. She has published in high-quality peer-reviewed journals including Thinking Skills and Creativity, The International Journal of Technology and Design Education, The Australian Educational Researcher, and She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation. Her PhD research utilises a qualitative approach to contribute to current discourse on design practice, through specifically drawing attention to design facilitation. Genevieve holds a unique combination of undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in architecture and education, which have been drawn upon in the development of this book.

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Design Thinking Pedagogy: Facilitating Innovation and Impact in Tertiary Education

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The problems facing society today are complex, multifaceted, and require crossing multiple disciplinary boundaries. As such, these problems call for interdisciplinary collaboration, including new and different combinations of skills and knowledge. Currently, tertiary education providers are not well-positioned to develop these interdisciplinary capabilities at a rate commensurate with the speed of contemporary change.

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MOTION: “RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN DESIGN THINKING REPRESENT A MAJOR ADVANCE IN OUR UNDERSTANDING OF INNOVATION, STRATEGY AND ENTREPRE- NEURSHIP OVER TRADITIONAL APPROACHES”

Speaking for the motion: DIMO DIMOV and ROBERTO VERGANTI 

Speaking against the motion: DAN LEVINTHAL and SARAH KAPLAN 

Moderator: PAOLA CRISCUOLO

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In the whirlwind of change and innovation that defines our current era, a particular phrase has been echoing through the corridors of organizations and social media platforms alike: "Design Thinking is dead." This statement, while catchy, misinterprets the true essence and enduring value of Design Thinking in our ever-evolving world.

Design Thinking is not a static process; it's a dynamic, iterative approach to solving complex problems. It's not merely a brainstorm session, a workshop, or a rigid procedure. It's a language, an evolving one at that, which helps us humanize the systems designed to serve and create value for people. It's about understanding and empathy, about walking in the shoes of those you're designing for and with, and constantly refining solutions based on real human needs and feedback.
Overcoming the Fear of Design Thinking
Fear of Design Thinking often stems from a misunderstanding of what it is. It's seen as a threat by those clinging to fixed knowledge and micromanagement, by those who fear losing control. But here's the irony: control in the traditional sense is often an illusion, especially in the fluid landscape of modern challenges.

To embrace Design Thinking, we need to shift our mindset from control to facilitation, from knowing all the answers to being curious about the questions. It's about leading by letting go, by creating an environment where ideas can flourish, and where failure is not a setback but a step forward in the learning process.
Why We Need Design Thinking Now and in the Future
The world is not getting simpler. Challenges in business, technology, and society are becoming increasingly complex. In this labyrinth of complexity, Design Thinking emerges as a compass, guiding us to solutions that are not only effective but also humane and empathetic. It's about looking at problems from a human-centered perspective, asking the right questions, and being open to learning and adapting as we go.

In a world that's rapidly changing, the iterative nature of Design Thinking ensures that solutions remain relevant and responsive to evolving needs. It's this agility and responsiveness that make Design Thinking an indispensable tool for innovation, particularly in areas where traditional approaches fall short.
Here are a few key strategies to help embrace Design Thinking:
- Cultivate a Culture of Curiosity

Encourage teams to ask questions, to challenge assumptions, and to view problems through a human-centric lens.

- Embrace Experimentation

Create a safe space for experimentation where failure is seen as a learning opportunity, not a setback.

- Foster Collaborative Teams

Design Thinking thrives in collaborative environments where diverse perspectives are valued and where everyone feels empowered to contribute.

- Practice Empathy

Regularly engage with the end-users of your services or products. Understand their needs, frustrations, and aspirations.

- Adopt an Iterative Process

Remember that solutions are not set in stone. Be open to feedback and ready to iterate and refine ideas continuously.

In conclusion, Design Thinking is far from dead. It's more relevant and vital than ever in our complex, fast-paced world. It's a mindset, a growing toolkit, and a evolving language that helps us navigate uncertainty and create solutions that are not only innovative but also deeply human.

Let's not be afraid of losing control. You don't have it anyway. So, let's embrace the creative potential that comes from letting go and engaging with the world from a place of empathy and openness.

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In the whirlwind of change and innovation that defines our current era, a particular phrase has been echoing through the corridors of organizations and social media platforms alike: "Design Thinking is dead." This statement, while catchy, misinterprets the true essence and enduring value of Design T

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Savor Group eGift Cards are an easy and convenient way to send gifts. Ready to go, they are emailed directly to the recipient's email address. The gift cards can then be printed, or simply used at one of our venues straight from a mobile device.

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THE BEGINNERS' GUIDE
I thought Edison was the first to invent the lightbulb-he wasn't.
We give credits to Edison not for inventing the lightbulb, but for creating an industry around it. He knew people would use lightbulbs only if they have access to electricity.

What he invented was not the product; it's a solution-lighting every home.

It is an example of Design Thinking-an approach to make creative ideas, focusing on the human needs behind them.

Brands like Apple, Google, and IBM use Design Thinking to learn how people will use their products to improve them.

the difference between incremental, evolutionary, and revolutionary ideas;

what makes a successful idea;

5 stages of the Design Thinking process (as outlined in Stanford's design thinking guide,) and;

where to go from here?

This post is a beginner's guide to Design Thinking. I'll take you through

Let's make it interactive. I have questions at the end of some sections. Try to answer them in the comments area. Remember- design thinkers think in action.

Revolutionary ideas are authentic and creative. It helps to stay ahead of the curve instead of raising the bar. Such ideas are hard to copy because it may have worked for you for some specific reasons.

Our ideas are mostly in improving the current way. It's like cutting costs with new tools-Incremental.

Sometimes you think about changing the way you serve now or expand your offerings to more people. For a restaurant, you may introduce live music or open another one in the next street. Evolutionary ideas change the way or expand to new territories.

DoorDash transformed the food industry by creating a platform for food delivery. It connected...

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Edison's invention wasn't the lightbulb but giving people access to electricity to use it. That's perfect design thinking.

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MOTION: “RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN DESIGN THINKING REPRESENT A MAJOR ADVANCE IN OUR UNDERSTANDING OF INNOVATION, STRATEGY AND ENTREPRE- NEURSHIP OVER TRADITIONAL APPROACHES”

Speaking for the motion: DIMO DIMOV and ROBERTO VERGANTI 

Speaking against the motion: DAN LEVINTHAL and SARAH KAPLAN 

Moderator: PAOLA CRISCUOLO

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If I think about the value that Design Thinking can bring to the world, I think it's primarily about learning. In essence, Design Thinking is a different way to learn, a different learning strategy. And learning is becoming more and more important, as expressed elegantly in this quote from Alvin Toffler:

"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn." - Alvin Toffler

Learning is the crucial step in the Lean Startup's build-measure-learn process. If you don't learn, the whole process is useless.

Learning is also the key objective of the popular Google Ventures Design Sprint. The deliverable of a Design Sprint is not a prototype, it's learning.

The way designers learn is what separates them from other people and it's the key to understanding, learning, mastering Design Thinking. If you look at how designers work, you'll see that they don't spend months discussing what to design. Even if not all information is available, even if the objective is not clear, even if the whole project bathes in uncertainty, they start to do, to make, to design.

Why is that? How can you start designing when you don't have all the information? Where do you start when the goal of the project isn't even clear?

Designers do this because learning by doing is by far the best way to navigate complexity and uncertainty. Imagine first gathering all the information there is about a complex activity like walking upright or driving a car before you start. If we would learn to walk like that, not a lot of people would be walking. Learning by doing is far more effective strategy for solving complex problems. Yes, you are going to bump your head a couple of times. Yes, you are going to make a fool of yourself. But the other way, research until you know all the answers, takes too much energy, effort, time, money and will not guarantee better results. The complexer the problem, the more true this is.

All the big innovators of our time use this method. Elon Musk is learning by doing how to get people to switch to electric cars, how to get a rocket to the moon. Google, Twitter, AirBnb, you name them, all move before they are ready. They all learn by doing. They all make fools of themselves from time to time. They are all focussed on learning. The faster you can learn, the better your organization will perform. The world has become too complex to rely solely on research. There are too many variables, too many interconnections.

Designers do their research, but what separates them from non-designers is the moment they stop talking, reading and analyzing and start doing.

Engage your visual mind. Once you start making, you start to see. Once you start to see, your visual mind kicks in and helps you think. 75% or so of the energy in the human brain is dedicated to visual signal processing. It would be a shame not to use that.

Create a common language. If you make things concrete, you create a common language all stakeholders understand. This enables you to collect insights far better than just talking to people in abstract terms.

Access your intuition. Buddhists call our rational, thinking mind, the small mind and intuition our big mind. The big mind is far more creative than the small mind. Doing, seeing, using your visual mind opens up the door to intuition. All good designers use it.

See the gaps. If you start making, you quickly see what you don't know, what you don't see, what you need. Nothing beats executing in reality when it comes to pointing out the gaps in your ideas, knowledge and approach.

Think outside the box. If you spend too much time researching, you run the risk of thinking in best practices, in familiar patterns. Being bold and naive allows you to learn much more than coloring between the lines. If you have the guts to start early and be bold, you will be rewarded with big learning.

Cultivate the Beginner's Mind. Seeing things with fresh eyes is crucial to solve complex problems. If you are too deep into the matter, you lose your beginner's mind and the fresh perspective that is quintessential to designers.

The other reason why designers start doing way earlier than other people is because they need all the help they can get. When you navigate complexity, you definitely need all the help you can get. Doing, starting before you are ready, enables you to call in the cavalry when it comes to learning, to getting ideas, to validating. It allows you to:

making stuff

seeing (no not what you think you see, see what you actually see)

thinking outside the box

connecting dots

understanding stuff in new ways

This is not as easy as it sounds. It requires skills. You must master:

Learning in itself is a skill you must learn. And learning to learn like a designer is no different. But that is what Design Thinking is all about.

We don't know things, we have hypotheses. And we must validate those hypotheses. That requires learning, unlearning and relearning. If you think you know, you're in trouble when it comes to solving complex problems. Research is aimed at knowing, Design Thinking at learning. Learning is far more valuable than knowledge when it comes to solving complex problems, simply because you cannot know complexity, you can only learn.

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If I think about the value that Design Thinking can bring to the world, I think it's primarily about learning. In essence, Design Thinking is a different way to learn, a different learning strategy...

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The Stanford Design Thinking Process – Make:Iterate

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This article will explore how to use the Stanford Design Thinking process to solve complex problems with creative solutions.

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The Roots of IDEO’s Design Thinking Process

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In the February 1, 2009 issue of FastCo Design, Linda Tischler told the story of David Kelley, the founding of IDEO and the d.school at Stanford, but there is much more to the story.

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Harvard Business Review lauds the collaborative prompt "How might we" (HMW) as the "one secret phrase that all top innovators use." And it's certainly known as the quickest way to shift design teams to think outside the box, whether those teams are staffed by software engineers or product designers. But although the original intent of HMW was to encourage open-minded problem-solving, it has morphed into something far different.

In my data work with corporations as a tech ethnographer, I've seen HMW used to hide biases and assumptions. Worse, I've seen it exacerbate the lack of diversity on design teams and within corporations at large. The "we" in HMW refers to the people in the room, not to the users, customers, or populations for whom teams are designing their products and services. The prompt looks inward instead of outward, encouraging people to build solutions that suit their own needs and experiences. They end up with offerings that don't serve customer needs, and may even hurt the people they're meant to help.

We need to revisit our use of this ubiquitous tool. We need to ask ourselves if it's truly improving design's impact on making better products and services or if it's just perpetuating bad habits or-even worse-exacerbating the problems that come with a lack of diversity and justice in the sector.

How HMW infiltrated innovation and design

Design became more prominent at companies in the 2000s when corporations realized they couldn't optimize their way to organic growth with existing processes such as TQM, Six Sigma, and Kaizen. Forward-thinking corporate leaders such as Beth Comstock at General Electric and A.G. Lafley at Procter & Gamble welcomed design as a fresh way to meet their innovation and growth metrics. With that came a slew of techniques-often bucketed together as "design thinking"-that included exercises, such as HMW, which promised to create more empathy with users and generate breakthrough ideas.

A soda company worried about losing its dominance to a competitor offering healthier soda might've said, "How might we create a healthier soda?" or a car company struggling with its sales might've asked, "How might we rethink our car models for a new generation of urban dwellers?" Many associate the "How might we" prompt with innovation and design firm IDEO, but it actually got its start at Procter & Gamble. In the early 1970s, business consultant Min Basadur helped steer an internal P&G product development team toward broader thinking through an HMW-driven discussion. By shifting the team's focus away from competing products and encouraging them to consider more ambitious questions, he got them to be wildly creative while simultaneously leveraging P&G's innate strengths.

Basadur passed HMW along to Charles Warren at Scient. Warren moved to IDEO and introduced it to IDEO partner Tim Brown. IDEO adopted it and trained its designers to start every project with HMWs. Warren left for Google, leaving an HMW trail in his wake. (In a video of him recounting the history of HMW, he claims to hold the record for the most HMWs being done simultaneously.) At Google, Warren passed the practice to Paul Adams, who eventually took the tool to Facebook. As it spread from organization to organization, HMW mutated in form, but the core remained the same: Designers started projects by asking "How might we . . .?"

According to Warren, for P&G HMW led to creating a new soap to compete with other companies. The Google Design Sprint site states that teams use HMW during the "understand" phase. At IDEO, blog posts provide examples of using HMW to address modern issues like urbanization -which IDEO refers to as "wicked problems"-problems that are so complex there is no right or wrong answer.

So, take a wild guess at what Basadur, Warren, Brown, and Adams have in common. That's right, they're all white men. Which means that the leaders championing this mechanism across multiple decades and industries are bringing multiple layers of unacknowledged privilege to every HMW discussion. Now, 20 years later, the upper echelons of design are still mostly white and mostly male. In the latest Design Census, which polled 10,000 designers in the United States, 71% of respondents identified as white, and only 11% of women designers held leadership positions. When everyone in the room is from the same culture, class, schools, gender, and nationalities, they tend to put out things that reinforce existing hierarchies and power structures.

This inequity in the field directly affects which products come to market. Caroline Criado Perez's research documents all the ways that design privileges men in both physical and digital spaces. It's the reason why car crashes were more deadly for women until recently. It's the reason that ill-fitting personal protective equipment-from masks to work vests-put the lives of women and people of color at risk. It's the reason why digital harm is on the rise as social platforms are often not safe for women and people of color. These glaring oversights occur because the teams of designers, engineers, and coders are often homogenous in life, class, and ethnic backgrounds, led more often than not by white leaders, and they end up designing for what they know: people like themselves. Design can be life or death. And tools like HMW exacerbate how design reflects the needs of those who are in positions of power.

How the HMW question is (mis)used today

HMW may occasionally spark creative discussions in corporate conference rooms, but it also obscures structural problems in design challenges and prevents teams from doing deeper analysis. Some individual designers are beginning to recognize this issue, and call it out.

Product and UX designer Cyd Harrell tweets: "& for real, designers, sticking a 'how might we' on the front of wicked problems is not useful (& the d School & Ideo can go fuck themselves for popularizing the idea that it is)." When I asked her to elaborate, she said she'd recently been invited to yet another hackathon that launched with "HMW solve racism?"

Having received many similar invitations myself, I know how disingenuous and disconnected it feels when organizers attempt to apply a corporate innovation tool to tackle complex issues. Basadur invented the HMW question at P&G to create a viable competitor for Irish Spring soap. Suggesting that designers apply the same tool to insidious, systemic issues created over centuries of colonization, slavery, and genocide is reductive and insulting.

Not only that, since the default "we" refers to the people in the room, it exacerbates solutionism, which is rife in tech. Panthea Lee, design strategist and cofounder of service design firm Reboot, leads projects where people's lives are often on the line, and says that she sees, "the use of HMW granting false authority to elite institutions to 'solve' the problem, even when they often have limited actual understanding of the issue at hand. Whereas the people who actually are qualified to represent their lives aren't even in the room. Those with economic and political power rarely consider them as having the capacity and agency to solve their own problems."

This is what happened when the city of Gainesville, Florida, hired IDEO to revamp the city's inequality problems. The effects of applying design thinking-of which HMW is a hallmark-to systemic bias were disastrous, and the city is still recovering from the resignations of qualified leaders. As designer and cultural historian, Maggie Gram says in her article about the process, "You face wicked problems by struggling with them, not by solutioning them." IDEO did not respond to my request for comment.

More than anything, the prompt enables design-team navel-gazing instead of actual customer empathy. As a result, designers propose products that suit their own needs. That's how we got Juul, a nicotine vaping product that contributed to the massive rise in nicotine addiction among young people. Its two cofounders, Adam Bowen and James Monsees, met at Stanford's Product Design Masters Program where their thesis adviser was David Kelley, founder of IDEO. After graduating, Bowen and Monsees created their own design lab where Juul was born.

In the video on YouTube of their thesis presentation in 2004, they explain that they came to study at Stanford because they wanted to "design for social change." They then elaborate that the social change they want to address is smoking: "People who smoke are at odds with themselves." They believe there is "room for improvement in the overall experience" of smoking, therefore their HMW questions are: "Is it even possible to make a safe cigarette? What if smoking were safe? And even better, what if smoking wasn't offensive to others?" While they didn't use the exact phrase HMW at the beginning of their sentence, it is practically a HMW, and there's no doubt that they were taught HMW as a core part of the curriculum.

The bigger issue with Bowen and Monsees's HMW-like question is that it limits the scope of visibility on systemic issues to a narrow spectrum, and in their case, the spectrum was limited to their emotional experience of feeling isolated and shamed for being smokers. During the presentation, they show a South Park video in which a teacher yells at a person who is smoking: "Get out of here you filthy smoker," after which others chime in, "Yeah, dirty lungs," and "Go ahead and kill yourself stupid tar breath!"

The video then immediately transitions to interviews that the pair conducted with people talking about their experiences of being shamed for smoking. One person expresses how hard it is to get rid of the smell off of her body, another person talks about the judgment he feels, and another person says he was warned he wouldn't be able to get a job. The core emotional need that the Juul founders were designing for was the shame that they themselves felt as smokers. They found other smokers who felt like them too, who wanted the physiological effects of smoking without the shame and harmful chemicals.

Smoking is a global public health pandemic, causing more than 7 million deaths per year. And for two guys (literally guys) to believe that " innovation could address all the problems associated with smoking" means that they were so myopically focused on getting a product out for themselves and others like them that they never considered the unintended consequences, such as getting young people addicted to vaping. Eleven years after their thesis presentation, Bowen and Monseees launched their first Juul product in 2015 with a campaign featuring young models and celebrities partying. They bought ads on platforms and media channels targeted at youth.

Going back to their original question of making a safer, more socially acceptable cigarette, they have definitely succeeded at answering it. But their HMW-like question hid another perspective, that making smoking more socially acceptable and a better experience would create new smokers. Their shallow HMW-like question kept them focused on making nicotine delivery, not the quitting process, better.

I see HMW in seemingly less harmful but equally unproductive applications inside corporations. In my consulting work and at conferences, I've witnessed designers throw around HMW as if it were glitter. Katy Mogal, UX research lead at Google, expresses frustration with this tactic, saying, "We need to end with insights and a point of view about what they imply for strategy and product decisions, not just findings followed by an open-ended prompt." She even wonders if HMW is being used "as an escape hatch because maybe we don't have the courage to express our opinion about what our insights imply for strategy and product, so we just end with 'HMW solve this problem'!"

Part of the issue is that as design professionalized over the last decade into UX design within tech companies and beyond, user insights representing the voice of the customer have not evolved to become a strategic input. Many companies outsource the user insights work to agencies (or what is internally referred to as "vendors") because they either don't have the resources to execute research or it's seen as rote work. Product and engineering often treat UX insights as an activity to check off their list, not as a strategically foundational asset for the product roadmap.

The reality is that while design purports to be human-centered, the most human part-user insight-is not highly valued. Design pioneers like Jesse James Garret are now being more vocal about their concern that the field of UX design has strayed far from its original goal of providing insights. Entrepreneur and interaction designer Lauren Serota speaks about this insight gap in design: "Designers are experts at using shortcuts and oversimplifications to quickly ground in a new subject matter but many don't ever intend to put in the work beyond framing provocative statements and being the mighty bringers of insight. The HMW is an enabling tool for this."

Equally troubling is the use of HMW to pass the buck or shirk responsibility. In our work at Sudden Compass, we coach and train teams to integrate thick data (qualitative) and big data (quantitative) to truly understand customer needs. We would never advise any team to use HMW when sitting down with an engineer or product manager, never encourage them to ask "How might we change this algorithm?" or "How might we align on a new product feature?" Engineers and product managers want to hear insights about users backed by evidence and recommended actions, not enter into brainstorming sessions ad nauseam.

A CEO of an education startup, who preferred to remain anonymous, tells me that she's seen HMW used in the human-centered design process, but applied too late to impact the company's business strategy. "Asking HMW when the product is already defined can produce really cool experiments and ideas, but I don't see it answering the most pressing business problems," she says.

Exacerbating existing inequities

Although it was created to enable broad and open creative discussion, the HMW paradigm actually elevates the voices that are already the loudest. In addition to enabling racism and sexism to proliferate, this prompt is so open-ended that it encourages powerful people to respond first and most often. Introverts, women, BIPOC individuals, neurodiverse people, new employees, younger contributors, and many others who might have insights to share are likely to be drowned out by those with seniority and social capital.

It can also be leveraged to reinforce existing power hierarchies among colleagues. A colleague of mine who used to work at IDEO's New York office who wishes to remain anonymous told me that they have PTSD for life from watching designers use HMW to elevate their roles. "There was a power dynamic and a 'servant' type of vibe," they say. "At IDEO, it felt like you were just there to keep all of the super-smart designers happy. We literally had to 'HMW' how to keep the office clean without making anyone feel bad because the designers didn't have time to clean up after themselves."

This person's experience of colleagues weaponizing HMW is akin to a phenomenon that sociologist Catherine Liu studies: virtue hoarding. This transgression occurs when people in management and leadership positions engage in a performative action of doing "ordinary things in fundamentally superior ways." Using a design technique to passively aggressively address job responsibilities exemplifies virtue hoarding.

HMW also enables design leaders to masquerade as being empathetic, open to new ideas, and collaborative. Tanya Snook calls this performance " UX Theater." In a tweet response to me on Twitter, she wrote that she has always found the HMW condescending: "Someone brings up an issue and rather than discuss it, the others give a coy smile and challenge the speaker with a 'HMW?' It didn't seem to create collaborative conversation. It was used to shut down dissent. I never use it."

I've watched senior design leaders use HMW as a legitimate response for surfacing serious issues with representation, organizational structure, and HR practices. A few years ago I was leading a project where I observed that one person on my team had mental health needs. I shared my thoughts with the chief innovation officer who said to me, no joke: "HMW solve that?" and then just sat there and looked at me. I was baffled and stayed silent in shock at their reply. At that moment, I did not need an open-discovery brainstorming session. This wasn't an abstract design challenge, it was a request for support with a team member's well-being.

Much of this abuse of HMW by designers occurs because design roles have been elevated to a god-like level in the innovation space. Many recent design efforts decenter the designer by shifting their role from being a guru to a guide. For instance, inclusive design enables and draws on the full range of human diversity, asking designers to think far beyond their own lived experiences. Participatory design meaningfully involves communities and users as critical to the design process. But HMW works against this. It allows designers to remain the bright center of their own universes and ignore real-world, real human experiences that deserve more than a flippant call-to-discussion. HMW has become weaponized not because it was a weapon to begin with, but because people have found ways to use it as a shortcut to feign interest in users.

From "How Might We?" to "Who Should We Talk To?"

Now that I've thoroughly critiqued HMW, let me quickly say that I am not demanding that we all abandon it. Solving business problems is daunting and complex, so a prompt that encourages deep creativity has innate value. And there are some prominent champions of HMW who say its utility outweighs its failings.

Machine learning experience designer Ovetta Sampson is a former IDEO employee and still uses HMW, but she doesn't assume the "we" is limited to herself or the people in the room. As Sampson explained to me, "HMW in traditional terms refers to the designer, but the 'we' doesn't involve the designer at all. The best way to solve the problem is to have the people who really understand it help you to solve it all. The 'we' has nothing to do with me."

She's applied HMW to many situations, such as when she was leading Microsoft's enterprise technical team to diagnose the right customer problem to when she enabled one of the largest cruise companies in the world to redesign the customer journey with the frontline call center workers. As a Black woman who has worked as a journalist and now as a designer, Sampson has had a breadth of experience that informs her way of seeing the world, which means she resists putting herself at the center. Her use of HMW is unusual, but it illustrates that this tool can still be used productively-in the right hands . If you put a great design tool in the hands of someone who is not using it inclusively, it not only corrupts the methodology but anything that comes out of it.

So I won't suggest that we ditch HMW now and forever, but I will recommend augmenting it with prompts that decenter the "we" from the people in the room-ones that are less problematic and more inclusive. And I'll also suggest an alternative exercise that actually fulfills the original goal of HMW: coming up with a fresh take. Here are some alternatives:

WSW: Who should we talk to? This prompt explicitly recognizes that there are people outside the room who should be considered and consulted.

WAW: Why are we doing this? This prompt forces some level of introspection for team members. It is still somewhat internally focused, but makes designers examine their true motives.

Both of these prompts mimic the HMW structure while forcing a decentering of the team members asking the question. For example, during my work in the social impact design thinking space, I've seen many teams ask themselves, "How might we solve for poverty?" If we apply WSW or WAW instead, we can ask, "Who should we talk to next week to solve for poverty?" "Why are we solving for poverty?" Put the same problem in a WSW or WAW context, and it both removes the magical thinking that drives HMW and reveals the true complexity of the issue at hand. It can bring a sense of humility to ask ourselves, Who are we to even work on this and how do we do this with the greatest care?

There are plenty of other alternatives, too. At Sudden Compass, we start projects with BQ to the HQ, an exercise that focuses a team on their business question and then teaches them how to translate it into a human question. We find this prompt to be more productive than HMW for generating mundane yet relevant insights about the communities and individuals our clients serve.

Design consultancy cofounder Jahan Mantin of Project Inkblot says they kick off all work with their clients by asking "Who the hell are we?" Mantin explained to me, "We need to know the different lenses our identities propel us to bring to the table because for better or worse our identities influence who we design for." Companies like Project Inkblot are leading us into the next era of design-one that is more transparent, honest, and diverse. One that will forge better designers, ones who are more conscious of who they are excluding and including.

As these alternatives to HMW suggest, the design industry is entering a new phase. After more than a year steeped in the pandemics of COVID-19 and racial injustice, every industry and workplace should be examining its inclusion and exclusion practices, from sexism to racism to ageism to ableism and more. Right now is a great time to assess all the tools and techniques of design to see how useful they truly are. If designers want products and services to be more inclusive, they need to start by determining whether their design techniques are getting them closer or taking them further away.

Some people might think that HMW is just three harmless words, but anybody who has sat in on an executive review and hears buzzwords like HMW to mask a project's shortcomings knows how harmful these phrases can be. The way we use these phrases reflect not only how we see the world, but how we design the world. Workers at companies like Facebook, Airbnb, and Amazon, have (and may still) genuinely believe that they were making the world better through disruption, an idea captured by Mark Zuckerberg's motto, "Move fast and break things." But breaking things feels very different when you're the end user to the stuff being broken, especially when that stuff looks like housing, transportation, service industry jobs, and even democracy itself. HWM is in the same class of Silicon Valley truisms that may have been born out of innovation but have come to mean something different depending on the hand that wields it. If you don't have a seat at the table when that question is asked, HMW can sound sinister.

Design has moved beyond aesthetics, form, and function to play a strategic business role at many organizations. This is a lot of responsibility and designers need new tools to get back to the original goal of HMW: to think outside of the box. They can start by building a bigger box-inviting a broader, more diverse set of voices to the table and asking questions that get at their own biases and limitations. There is a whole new generation of designers leading the way, such as Mantin and Boyuan Gao's Project Inkblot, Lesley-Ann Noel who made Designer's Critical Alphabet, Bryan Lee's Design Justice Workshops by Colloqate Designs, and Creative Action Lab's workshops, including "How Traditional Design Thinking Protects White Supremacy."

It's time to redesign the field to reflect the people who are in it. From now on, don't trot out another HMW unless it's used with total awareness of who the we represents. Think twice before saying it. Like everything else.
Tricia Wang is cofounder of Sudden Compass, a collective of world-class strategists, product leaders, data analysts, and network-builders. She is a Geotech Atlantic Council Fellow working on cryptocurrency design. She was also a consumer insights expert-in-residence at IDEO's Shanghai Office in 2015. This article has been updated to correct where Juul founders Adam Bowen and James Monsees met and developed their thesis project.

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The most popular design thinking strategy is BS

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Harvard Business Review lauds the collaborative prompt "How might we" (HMW) as the "one secret phrase that all top innovators use." And it's certainly known as the quickest way to shift design teams to think outside the box, whether those teams are staffed by software engineers or product designers.

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1. R. Martin, "The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage" (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Business Press, 2009); T. Brown and B. Katz, "Change by Design, Revised and Updated: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation" (New York: Harper Business, 2019); and J. Liedtka and T. Ogilvie, "Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Tool Kit for Managers" (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

2. M. Kupp, J. Anderson, and J. Reckhenrich, "Why Design Thinking in Business Needs a Rethink," MIT Sloan Management Review 59, no. 1 (fall 2017): 42; and B. Nussbaum, "Design Thinking Is a Failed Experiment. So What's Next?" Fast Company, April 5, 2011, www.fastcompany.com.

3. D. Leonard and J.F. Rayport, "Spark Innovation Through Empathic Design," Harvard Business Review 75, no. 6 (November-December 1997): 102-115.

4. J. Liedtka, "Perspective: Linking Design Thinking With Innovation Outcomes Through Cognitive Bias Reduction," Journal of Product Innovation Management 32, no. 6 (November 2015): 925-938; Leonard and Rayport, "Spark Innovation Through Empathic Design," 102-113; W. Visser, " Schön: Design as a Reflective Practice," Collection 2 (2010): 21-25; and C. Bason and R.D. Austin, "The Right Way to Lead Design Thinking," Harvard Business Review 97, no. 2 (March-April 2019): 82-91.

5. D. Dunne, "Implementing Design Thinking in Organizations: An Exploratory Study," Journal of Organization Design 7, no. 1 (December 2018): 1-16.

6. Visser, "Schön: Design as a Reflective Practice," 21-25.

7. F.E. Smulders, "Co-Operation in NPD: Coping With Different Learning Styles," Creativity and Innovation Management 13, no. 4 (December 2004): 263-273.

8. K. Dorst, "Frame Innovation: Create New Thinking by Design" (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2015).

9. J. Conklin, " Wicked Problems and Social Complexity," chap. 1 in "Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems" (West Sussex, England: John Wiley & Sons, 2006).

10. T.C. Nguyen, " Inventing the Perfect Umbrella," Smithsonian Magazine, Dec. 9, 2013, www.smithsonianmag.com.

11. B.D. Rosso, "Creativity and Constraints: Exploring the Role of Constraints in the Creative Processes of Research and Development Teams," Organization Studies 35, no. 4 (April 2014): 551-585.

12. M. Pillay and J. Davin, " Mining Innovation Puts People First: Designing for Users' Needs," PDF file (Deloitte and Norcat, 2017), www2.deloitte.com; H.T. Kristiansen, "Design Thinking for Innovation in Offshore Ship Bridge Development," Journal of Maritime Research 11, no. 2 (April 2014): 53-60; and " NPS Design Thinking Community," Naval Postgraduate School, accessed July 11, 2022, www.nps.edu.

13. K. Dorst, " Designer Nights Out: Good Urban Planning Can Reduce Drunken Violence," The Conversation, Jan. 5, 2016, www.theconversation.com.

14. B. Murphy Jr., " Google Says It Still Uses the '20 Percent Rule,' and You Should Totally Copy It," Inc., Nov. 1, 2020, www.inc.com.

15. G. Muratovski, "Paradigm Shift: Report on the New Role of Design in Business and Society," She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation 1, no. 2 (winter 2015): 118-139.

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Can Design Thinking Succeed in Your Organization?

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1. R. Martin, "The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage" (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Business Press, 2009); T. Brown and B. Katz, "Change by Design, Revised and Updated: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation" (New York: Harper Business, 2019); and J. Liedtka and T.

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While doing further research on Design Thinking, I came across a really good article by Lisa Carlgren, Maria Elmquist and Ingo Rauth: The Challenges of Using Design Thinking in Industry - Experiences from Five Large Firms, in: Creativity and Innovation Management.

It lists 7 challenges " ...mainly related to the interfaces between the use of DT [Design Thinking] and mainstream operations, as well as the output of DT work.", reproduced here:

1. Misfit with Existing Processes and Structures

2. Resulting Ideas and Concepts are Difficult to Implement

3. Value of DT is Difficult to Prove.

4. DT Principles/Mindsets Clash with Organisational Culture

5. Existing Power Dynamics are Threatened

6. Skills are hard to Acquire

7. Communication Style is Different

Here is a link to the above article:

Carlgren, Lisa, Maria Elmquist, and Ingo Rauth. The Challenges of Using Design Thinking in Industry - Experiences from Five Large Firms, Creativity and Innovation Management 25, no. 3 (September 2016): 344-62. https://doi.org/10.1111/caim.12176.

My first reaction was: How then can we overcome these? But the answer to this question depends so much on individual situations that an answer would be too long. So I decided to look further into the causes, as to provide some insights into how everyone can address their own issues with their own solutions, a form of applied (self-)reflection is then needed. Reflective Practice is one of the Capabilities needed for Design Thinking anyway! (see: Design Thinking Guide)

Below are my insights from studying the issues of implementing Design Thinking in existing organisations (I would like to encourage you to add to, or comment on these):

Design Thinking is used in situations which one (mostly) has not encountered, or solved, before. Design Thinking skills are 'dynamic', their application is tailored to the situation and the task at hand. These two characteristics make the Design Thinking hard to learn and execute well.

Outcomes of Design Thinking do not only depend on learned skills. The quality and effect of Design Thinking (the outcomes) are also dependent on (the freedom and support from) the immediate environment (e.g. corporate culture) in which the skills are applied, and a large dose of serendipity (luck, stamina).

A supportive environment (regarding: processes, structures, culture and communication) for Design Thinking differs significantly from those needed for efficient execution of business-as-usual.

Any change to these may interfere with existing power dynamics, and thus strong resistance to the required changes may be encountered.

The explorative nature of Design Thinking creates undetermined, multiple, uncertain, and rather conceptual outcomes of various quality:

Undetermined: outcomes are only determined by the process, the process is not determined by predetermined outcomes (compare this with a 'project' and Project Management). This makes the initiative difficult to justify in advance from a traditional business point of view of a required ROI.

Uncertain: any (possible) later success is still dependent on many factors that are still unknown and may remain outside one's own control.

Multiple: not one 'solution' is pursued, but multiple (possibly competing) in parallel. A sign of intelligence is: the ability to hold in mind several competing ideas at the same time.

Conceptual: outcomes are not ready to be implemented yet, difficult to explain, justify and 'sell' internally, at an early stage.

When resources (time, money, and attention) are limited, conflicts are likely to occur between activities which (seem to) serve different purposes, timelines and interests. This is likely to be the case between Design Thinking and current business activities.

All these factors combined make it quite difficult to start adopting and implementing Design Thinking practices in existing organisations. I hope these insights help you. S. Fortuin

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Challenges of Implementing Design Thinking in Existing Organisations

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While doing further research on Design Thinking, I came across a really good article by Lisa Carlgren, Maria Elmquist and Ingo Rauth: The Challenges of Using Design Thinking in Industry - Experiences from Five Large Firms, in: Creativity and Innovation Management. It lists 7 challenges " ...mainly rel

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This book summarizes the results of Design Thinking Research carried out at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, USA and Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany. The authors offer readers a closer look at Design Thinking with its processes of innovations and methods. The contents of th…

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The Challenges Posed By Design Thinking—And How To Overcome Them

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Although the advantages of design thinking are now well recognized, this practice still entails some challenges, mostly cultural. To overcome these differences, Associate Professor of Innovation at HEC Paris Business School Sihem BenMahmoud-Jouini has developed tools which help improving dialogue.

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Design thinking can be seen to have its initial roots in business, especially in product design where innovative products are designed to meet people's needs and thereby understand how to facilitate innovation. Participatory Design (also often referred to as co-design) looks to actively involve stakeholders, end-users and the wider project team in the design process. As design thinking was extended to the field of management it was extended beyond design outcomes. As it became confronted by 'wicked problems' in a management setting, so design thinkers looked to become more systemic. Design thinking and systems thinking complement one another, and their integration via systemic design is already being used by some organisations in their interventions.

Design Thinking as a Strategy for Innovation
This page by Linda Naiman shows how design thinking is at the core of effective strategy development and organizational change. It is shown as a methodology used by designers to solve complex problems, and find desirable solutions for clients. Design thinking minimizes the uncertainty and risk of innovation by engaging customers or users through a series of prototypes to learn, test and refine concepts.

5 stages in the design thinking process
This post by Rikke Dam and Teo Siang highlights that design thinking is extremely useful in tackling complex problems that are ill-defined or unknown, by understanding the human needs involved, by re-framing the problem in human-centric ways, by creating many ideas in brainstorming sessions, and by adopting a hands-on approach in prototyping and testing. Understanding these five stages of Design Thinking (Empathise, Define - the problem, Ideate, Prototype, and Test)will empower anyone to apply the Design Thinking methods in order to solve complex problems that occur around us - in our companies, our countries, and even our planet.

The field guide to human-centred design
This IDEO.org publication reveals their process with the key mindsets that underpin how and why we think about design for the social sector, 57 clear-to-use design methods for new and experienced practitioners, and from-the-field case studies of human-centered design in action. More related reports can be found from their IDEO Design Kit page - including a guide for facilitators.

Design Thinking: A Unified Framework For Innovation
This Forbes article by Reuven Cohen provides his reflections of the Stanford University "Design Thinking Boot Camp: From Insights to Innovation"course. As he notes, one example of a design thinking process could have several stages: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test. Within these steps, problems can be framed, the right questions can be asked, more ideas can be created, and the best answers can be chosen. The steps aren't linear; they can occur simultaneously and can be repeated.

Systems thinking and design thinking: complimentary approaches?
This 2015 paper by Grace Mugadza points out that Design Thinking(DT) and Systems Thinking (ST) came about through totally different and unrelated processes. The philosophies of both can be traced back hundreds of years but there has been a recent resurgence in their application. DT as popularized today has its initial roots in business, especially in product design. More recently it has been extended and applied to management where it assumed many of the concepts of Systems Thinking, which, can be seen to have been developed over a longer period of time.

Systems & Design Thinking: A Conceptual Framework for Their Integration
This 2011 paper by John Pourdehnad and colleagues explores the relationship between Systems and Design Thinking. It specifically looks into the role of Design in Systems Thinking and how looking at the world through a systems lens influences design.

Co-design resources: techniques and methods
This useful page by Penny Hagen points to a range of industry articles and academic papers that describe, discuss or demonstrate various co-design and collaborative workshop techniques.

What is Design Thinking, Really?
This 2010 blog post by Venessa Miemis expands on the concept of design thinking as a set of principles, from mindset to process, that can be applied to solve complex problems. It does this through a review of Change by Design, written by IDEO's CEO Tim Brown.

Design thinking diagrams.
A 2017 slideshare presentation by Gena Drahun. Provides a wide collection of diagrams illustrating the concept of Design Thinking.

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Design thinking and co-design - Learning for Sustainability

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Design thinking can be seen to have its initial roots in business, especially in product design where innovative products are designed to meet people's needs and thereby understand how to facilitate innovation. Participatory Design (also often referred to as co-design) looks ... Design thinking and co-design Read More "

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Design Thinking and Sustainability - How to Develop Innovations for Our Common Future

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Embrace - Defining a Point of View - An Intro to Design Thinking

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The founders of Embrace Global tell the story of how they discovered the deep, unmet need they decided to solve. The story picks up after Linus Liang comes back to Stanford to share what he discovered in Nepal. This story illustrates the Define (or Point of View) step in the design thinking process.

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This paper examines the emergence of "design thinking" as a form of technical expertise. It demonstrates that "design thinking" articulates a racialized understanding of labor, judgment, and the subject and attempts to maintain whiteness at the apex of global hierarchies of labor.

"Design thinking" is a form of expertise that poses design not as form giving, but as a form of empathic reason by which executives can plan products, services, and accumulation. Silicon Valley, business schools, and reformers promote it as a form of caring technical expertise by which some guide futures for others. The paper will examine the history of the concept of "design thinking" - a category forged by Silicon Valley designers in the face of mounting competitive pressures on design professions in the United States in the mid-2000s. By drawing on artifacts, documents, public debates about the design profession from this period, I will demonstrate how champions of "design thinking" responded to expanded availability of design labor globally by figuring Asians and machines as the creative subject's Other.

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"Design Thinking": Defending Silicon Valley at the Apex of Global Labor Hierarchies

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This paper examines the emergence of "design thinking" as a form of technical expertise. It demonstrates that "design thinking" articulates a racialized understanding of labor, judgment, and the subject and attempts to maintain whiteness at the apex of global hierarchies of labor.

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Stanford Webinar - Design Thinking = Method, Not Magic

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Design thinking gets a lot of buzz for being a "one size fits all" strategic process to drive innovation. In this webinar Bill Burnett, consulting assistant professor and master in design thinking at Stanford University, as he shares three barriers organizations face when adopting an innovative culture and how to overcome them.

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Today, customers have higher expectations than they ever have before. A recent IBM Institute survey reported that 76% of consumers expect organizations to understand their individual needs, meaning it is increasingly important for companies to be pushing the envelope of how they're connecting with their customers on an individual basis.

Competition is also fiercer than ever. VC firms are pumping ~$127 billion into forward-thinking companies, which means that if you and your organization are not delivering game-changing innovation and connecting with your customers, it's quite possible that somebody else might come in and eat your lunch. Another recent report f rom IBM states that the number one thing that's keeping the C-suite up at night are 'digital invaders'.

When asked "What makes the world's top executives cringe?" one executive said: "the 'Uber syndrome', where a competitor with a completely different business model enters your industry and flattens you." Given this new reality, how can you as a company either unlock the innovation that you need in order to either fend off the competition, or actually become one of these digital invaders yourself?

We invited to share some insights on how they tackle operationalizing innovation in a Whitney Mortimer, Chief Marketing Officer at - one of the world's most innovative companies - recent webinar. Some of the top takeaways follow below.

IDEO Culture & Innovation Methodology

IDEO is a design company, and design is really at the heart of who we are and what we do. We say that our purpose is to create positive impact through design and have disproportionate impact for a relatively small company. We're out in the world, present in hundreds of countries at any given point in time doing research, talking to consumers and stakeholders, which is the driving force behind how we do what we do.

We design and build new ways to serve people. We help organizations innovate, and we build the new businesses and ventures that allow them to do that. We did the first mouse for Apple and other organizations. We did early laptops, we did the first smartphones. We are now working on the future of voting for LA county, the largest voting district in the country. We're working on the future of high school in Peru, and we're even thinking about redesigning the end of life.

The most important elements in any kind of innovation methodology are these two factors:

Multidisciplinary teams - staffed with what we call 'T-shaped' people. The vertical part of the T is the depth of your craft. You may be an engineer and an MBA and potentially you are also an architect, or just one or two of those things. The horizontal part of the T is the degree to which you can collaborate with others through empathy. You can put the very best skilled people in a room, but if they don't have top of the T cross stroke in their ability to work with each other, then it's very difficult for that team to operate as a multidisciplinary team.

An approach grounded in human-centered design - we borrowed from the toolkit of designers to have repeatable activities that we can use over and over again in order to make progress with regard to innovation. We believe that everyone is creative, or at least everyone was creative at some point. We also deeply believe that creative organizations are more agile. They move faster against challenges, be they small or even large existential threats.

Design Thinking

So what is creativity? Very simply stated, it's the capacity to have, embrace, and execute against new ideas continually. We call this design thinking-which fundamentally is the set of activities that support creativity and innovation i.e. the things that we do over and over again in service of innovation.

Creative confidence is fundamentally the mindset that we're looking for that enables creativity and innovation. It's a worldview, it's a stance, it's a belief in oneself, and it's a belief in one's organization, that even when you get stuck or paralyzed that there is a way to move through. You need to consider 3 factors when you're approaching any challenge:

People: how is what I'm going to create desirable to people?

Business: in what ways is it viable?

Technical Requirements: is this feasible?

In many cases, there's a tendency to want to start with the technical, because technology is moving so fast and provides so many opportunities. We believe that you always need to start with the needs of people when it comes to thinking and working like a designer, and there are different ways of impacting those needs.

First is listening and watching with empathy. It sounds easy, it's not. For example, if you think of journey of a patient in an emergency room, can you truly view through the lens the of patient to understand everything that you may experience?

In the old evaluative and predictive model, I would have asked people what they think through surveys or in focus groups. But those findings from a generative point of view can be distorted. So what we're often doing is trying to get inside their minds. What are they feeling? What are they actually doing? Those cues can reveal so much more than if you just rely on cognitive responses to research.

With research, instead of looking at the middle of the bell-shaped curve (i.e. where your market is), we're also often looking at the edges, the extreme users. If you're going to talk to people about footwear, don't go talk to people who love footwear or who love shoes, go talk to a foot fetishist. Perhaps extreme, but ultimately will allow for thinking that pushes the boundaries of what's possible.

Turning Research into Ideas You Can Test

Experimentation comes to life in the form of prototyping at IDEO. Prototypes are a learning opportunity to create a small experiment that we can put in front of people to solicit feedback, which is where the learning comes from. Prototypes can vary from the very rough, very crude, in the early stages of the process to those increasingly refined as we move through the process of diverging and converging.

Prototypes take many forms, and there are versions that are exploratory, versions that are inspirational, versions that are validating, and then there are versions that you create in order to test different scenarios. When you're about to go to market, you need something that's highly refined, and almost precisely works like, looks like the final thing.

Good guidelines for effective prototyping: rough, rapid, basically right. Every prototype is trying to solve for pretty much one, at most, two questions. You are not going to be able to solve for everything, so you want to create prototypes very quickly to start to explore successive questions.

A rule we have at IDEO is to "Never go to a meeting without a prototype." Show me, let me experience something. If you go in with one idea perfectly baked, the only response can be, "love it" or "don't like it." When armed with a couple of prototypes, the conversation becomes more, "What works? What doesn't work? What can you tell me about what would make this better?" That will become a learning opportunity for both, and builds a habit of developing a natural exchange of information that help to advance your ideas.

For more innovation insights, you can view the full webinar on demand .

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How an Experimentation Mindset Drives Innovation at IDEO

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Today, customers have higher expectations than they ever have before. A recent IBM Institute survey reported that 76% of consumers expect organizations to understand their individual needs, meaning it is increasingly important for companies to be pushing the envelope of how they're connecting with their customers on an individual basis.

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The value of Design Thinking

Over the past decade, Design Thinking has become the leading innovation methodology, and the increase in its adoption has enabled us to investigate the benefits of Design Thinking for corporate innovation.

According to the Design Value Index created by the Design Management Institute, design-led companies have outperformed the S&P 500 over the past ten years by an extraordinary 211 percent.

After three years of using Design Thinking, a leading multinational IT company assessed the financial impact of its Design Thinking practice and calculated that it had achieved a 300 percent ROI.

Using Design Thinking, the company:

Cut costs by accelerating projects by as much as 75 percent, resulting in savings of US$20.6 million

Reduced risk and increased project profitability (US$18.6 million)

Streamlined organizational process efficiency (US$9.2 million)

Besides the financial metrics, they also observed additional benefits, which:

Encouraged an empowered, engaged, and happy workforce

Enhanced KPIs such as UI, UX, CX, NPS, and brand energy

Perfected internal processes for HR, sales, and beyond

Jeanne Liedtka of Darden Business School examined 22 organizations investigating what organizations do when they say they utilize Design Thinking, how these observed practices impact the innovation process, and the innovation outcomes.

She concluded that using Design Thinking leads to:

Improved quality of choices and decisions made in the process

Reduced risks and cost of failure

Enhanced likelihood of successful implementation

Increased adaptability

Creation of new capabilities and skills among the people who used Design Thinking-and precisely the skills that are often said to be key nowadays and in the future: communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity.

McKinsey published a study on the value of design in business, concluding that strong Design Thinking performers grow their revenues and shareholder returns at nearly twice the rate of their industry peers.

With this increasing amount of quantitative proof, I think we can all agree that the proper adoption of Design Thinking can lead to tremendous results.
(Please note that I wrote "proper adoption". Watching a TEDtalk on Design Thinking and then having a go at it will probably not lead to the desired results. Although it looks that simple, it is not. Proper initial training and support are crucial!)
Sprinting when Designing? The Benefits of Design Sprints.

Ok, so we all understand the value of design, but why do we now have to sprint while doing it?

Google Ventures, the inventors of the Design Sprint, put it this way:
"We're investors, and we succeed when our companies succeed. To help them solve problems quickly and be self-sufficient, we're optimized our sprint process to deliver the best results in the least time... we short-cut the endless-debate cycle and compress months into a single week."
Benefits for the team:

Team is empowered

A practical way of putting Design Thinking into practice

A clear process for creativity and innovation

Tackles high uncertainty issues (which can usually lead to much debate) quickly

Benefits for the project:

Increased speed and efficiency, which means quickly learning about the desirability of an idea having to build and launch a minimum viable product

Clear direction and focus of a new project based on alignment of the key problem and reliable customer feedback

Buy-in and alignment from key stakeholders, as you only focus on projects that have proven early value creation

Benefits for the company:

Reduced budget: The initial investment is low as the idea is tested quickly, without having to pour a lot of time and money into building a prototype

Lower risk: Kills non-promising and pet projects fast based on valuable data from potential customers/users, instead of based on opinion, with an initial investment of only one week

Good way to get started rapidly with Design Thinking and quickly enjoy some of the benefits outlined above

Champions new ways and models of work that embody speed, agility, and customer-centricity

What's a Design Sprint?

In Sprint, the book that introduced Design Sprints to the public, the Sprint is defined as follows:
"The Sprint is GV's unique five-day process for answering crucial questions through prototyping and testing ideas with customers. It's a "greatest hits" of business strategy, innovation, behavioral science, design, and more - packaged into a step-by-step process that any team can use."
How does a Design Sprint work?

A typical Sprint runs over five days:

Monday: Define and unpack the problem to solve

Tuesday: Generate ideas to solve the problem

Wednesday: Decide which ideas to test

Thursday: Build a prototype to give to your users for testing

Friday: Validate your assumptions and get feedback

These days and the activities within them are highly structured and time-boxed (so time is not wasted), and have been tested to deliver the results you need to move quickly from problem to idea, to prototype, and to validation.

Now, ideally, it's five days, but there are also ways to compact it or spread it out.

As a response to the "Whaaaat?...? Five days...? Are you crazy?" (you guessed it already: especially corporates complain about not having five days to solve their most critical challenges ;-)), four-day variations have emerged.
(Before you dismiss the idea of investing five full days into a workshop with several people as being impossible, ask yourself this: Would you rather spend five days for fast impact or have your project drag along for several months without any progress?)
Some teams condense problem definition and ideation into one day, whereas others stay one day with the problem and then combine ideation and decision-making into the next day. Both ways work. In my experience, both of them need a little more and a different kind of preparation.

Which leads us to the Corporate Design Sprint.

Isn't this just for startups? No! How to do Corporate Design Sprints.

Like so often these days, new ways of working are first created by startups. But corporates need to simply adjust the principles and practices of Design Sprints to a corporate setting.

When implementing Design Sprints in a corporate setting, typical challenges are:

Often a lack of customer-centric culture, but instead a very technology and product-driven way of thinking: "We know better anyhow."

Deeply stuck in daily business, which makes it hard to imagine new ways of working and new ideas for solving problems: "We don't have time for this."

Waterfall, tightly planned workshops, planning before doing culture: "We need a business case first."

Siloed functions: "Not invented here."

So, how can we keep the benefits of the Sprint, while coping with the particularities of a corporate environment?

First, consider when to do a Sprint and when not to. Suitable contexts and challenges are:

You're stuck: Maybe you've tried your usual way, but you can't move forward

Time pressure: Time to market is critical, and you don't have months to discuss

High uncertainty: You don't know whether it's a good idea anyhow, and there is no data available that could tell you. Or, you don't know how to get started or what approach to take

High risk: The project seems unsafe to try, and you need to minimize risk

New problem: You've never faced such a problem before and don't know how to tackle it. There's no evident expertise or an obvious solution

Broad and narrow: Your challenge should be broad enough to allow for creativity and narrow enough to go deep-no boiling the ocean[A3]

It's a human challenge: It's not a purely technological challenge à la "we need to make this smaller, lighter, faster, thinner, stronger, etc.". Sprints are for problems that involve a human dimension and need customer/user feedback, and the uncertainty involves how customers/users/employees will react to a solution.

Now, this focus on new, unconventional challenges, with a high level of uncertainty will increase the natural tendency for planning, which we need to account for in our Corporate Design Sprint approach. What does that mean?

The Corporate Design Sprint process

We use the following approach to adapt Design Sprints to larger and more traditional organizations. A single sprint à la "come in on Monday and we'll start working" has proven to be unhelpful. To allow for the needs as mentioned earlier for planning and uncertainty reduction, we start with preparation work, followed by the actual Design Sprint, which we adapted to a corporate context, and we close the process with a Next Steps Sprint.

Prepare

First, we prepare upfront and align with key stakeholders on the particular problem to solve. We align on the scope of the actual Sprint, define the team needed to solve this specific problem, and we collect and prepare some input upfront. This creates a certain level of comfort among participants and management. In addition, this preparation ensures that you're actually working on a problem that everybody has agreed is a problem worth solving and that the right people are in the room.

Making sure the right people are in the room may require talking to some initial people before finding the core team, as in larger corporations, they will probably know somebody else you should also invite to contribute.

If possible, we do this as a one-week Sprint that might look like in figure 1 below (this one was on a process related challenge). We call this the Preparation Sprint.

The Design Sprint

The upfront preparation and problem framing allow us to bring initial data into the room. Hence, we condense understanding the problem and ideation into one day.

To mitigate the resistance towards a five-day workshop, we engage the larger group of stakeholders only during the first two days, and work the other two days with a smaller core project team, while, finally at the end of the week aligning with internal stakeholders again. In this particular example, we worked on an internal process, i.e., the "customers" were all internal users, and they were involved throughout the actual Sprint and the Preparation Sprint.

The general structure we use is:

Monday: Understand the problem and ideate solutions

Tuesday: Decide

Wednesday and Thursday morning: Prototype (with a smaller core team)

Thursday afternoon: Validate with customers/users

Friday morning: Validate the proposed solution with management

Friday afternoon: Align on deliverables of the Next Steps Sprint based on validation feedback and retrospection.

The Next Steps Sprint

The process closes with a Sprint to define the next actions:

Monday: Review the outcomes of the Design Sprint and ideate on ways forward

Tuesday: Decide and curate a backlog of actions

Wednesday: Prototype a high-level roadmap

Thursday: Validate with key stakeholders and iterate if necessary

Friday: Validate with management and define immediate next action steps.

Conclusion

When design principles are applied to strategy and innovation, the success rate for innovation dramatically improves. Design Thinking has proven to be so powerful because (1) it combines the view of the customer, with what is technically possible, and the needs of the business, and (2) because it relies on a non-linear process, which de-risks and reduces the development and execution time of new ideas.

The Design Sprint approach enables project teams to validate ideas quickly, ensuring that larger investments are only carried out based on sound feedback from potential customers.

The Corporate Design Sprint process put forward here adjusts the concept to a corporate setting taking into account the peculiarities of such a context, which allows corporates to innovate with increased speed and agility, all the while minimizing its risks.

If you are interested in learning more about how we can help bring Design Sprints to your organization, please get in touch.

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Are you still Design Thinking or are you Design Sprinting? How to innovate at digital speed in 2021.

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The value of Design Thinking Over the past decade, Design Thinking has become the leading innovation methodology, and the increase in its adoption has enabled us to investigate the benefits of Design Thinking for corporate innovation. According to the Design Value Index created by the Design Managem

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What Is Ideation? 2023 Guide To The Design Thinking Phase

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Ideation is the process of creating and communicating new ideas. Learn about its techniques and how to prepare an ideation session with this step-by-step guide.

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The method in their madness; Understanding how designers think

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The method in their madness; Understanding how designers think

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What if writing a book was similar to testing a business idea?

The world is full of half-finished books, great ideas that were never put down on paper, and amazing opportunities for collaboration that never happened simply because somebody didn't know where to begin. I know, as I have at least three unfinished books in my Dropbox folders somewhere. I would even dare to say that starting a book is similar to starting a company in that you really need a team around you for support, an open mindset, and the willingness to fail over and over again as you iterate to something valuable.

During my long career helping companies understand the principles of lean startup, design thinking and business model innovation, I have developed an incredibly healthy respect for the experiment. As Alex Osterwalder and I write in our book, Testing Business Ideas: A Field Guide for Rapid Experimentation, "experiments are the means to reduce the risk and uncertainty of your business idea."

For many would-be book authors, the idea of the experiment might bring to mind the different drafts and outlines that are often worked on before a final product emerges (picture one person alone in a dark room huddled over a computer or a trash can filled with used drafts on legal paper).

I found that writing a book in the traditional manner can feel very much like a waterfall project.

But in my experience, there are various types of collaboration and experimentation throughout the entire book-writing process: research, outlining, gauging interest in subject areas, refining concepts, copy editing, book design experimentation - just to name a few.

Our book is a field guide for how to use hands-on approaches for quickly testing business ideas, and while writing it with Alex Osterwalder, we also wanted to apply the principles of design thinking and lean startup methodologies in my creation of it.

I was amazed at the success of applying these principles to the creative process of book writing and planning. In fact, I think they could be applied to anyone looking to write a nonfiction book. I'm not ruling out that it couldn't work for fiction books, but I've found that testing chunks of fiction to be much more difficult to do effectively.

The centerpiece of my experiment was MURAL. It provided the virtual, real-time canvas for me to plan my content and organize the layout of the book with my co-author and designers. My team was located across several different time zones, so we didn't get together in person often during the book creation process.

Here is a rundown of how I used MURAL to collaborate with the team on Testing Business Ideas: A Field Guide for Rapid Experimentation, as well as some important how-to tips I learned along the way.

Planning written content in a visual and collaborative way

From the earliest ideations of the book, to the outline and eventually the chapter-by-chapter builds, I used the following mural.
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This "Book Map" canvas evolved throughout the book planning process, gaining fidelity and detail as we progressed toward publishing.

I referred to it as a Book Map.

As I was working with a remote team for this book project, MURAL provided a single place for us to collaborate and ideate on chapter arrangements and topics. The mural canvas also gave us the ability to think visually about what we were trying to convey in the book.

This mural began to take on a life of its own. It started with some virtual sticky notes at first, then to screenshots of hand drawn sketches from my iPad, to screenshots of my content in Keynote.

Yes, I wrote most of the actual book content in Keynote.

We reordered sections and cut content that no longer fit in the flow. I still have Dropbox folders full of images and spreads that didn't make it into the final book.

Each chapter became its own module, with the vaguer ideas increasing in clarity and fidelity as we tested with readers. My co-author Alex was instrumental in the process, as he has a knack for conceptualizing each spread to make sure it was conveying the right level of information. We also coordinated with the previous designers from Business Model Generation and Value Proposition Design books, Alan Smith and Trish Papadakos. We added a third amazing designer, Chris White and even an professional illustrator for the experiment drawings, Owen Pomrey. That meant we had team members here in the San Francisco Bay Area, but also in Toronto, Canada; the United Kingdom and Lausanne, Switzerland. Don't even get me started on our travel schedules, since team members were based out of these areas, in reality we were traveling quite a bit before the pandemic.

At the same time all of this chapter ideation was taking place, I was also using this time to test out the interest level of various topics on Medium as short form articles. Once I gathered feedback from each article I wrote I could simply place it in the corresponding chapter and we could fine-tune our focus on it, or cast it aside for a lack of impact on the overall goals of the book. Alex was constantly sending out polls on social media and chatting with early adopters in person on his trips.

This rapid and early feedback process would be beneficial for any non-fiction author, as you can see in real-time which topics your audience is most interested in, and possibly avoid some late, painstaking rewrites of your manuscript.

One of my moments of crisis was in the structure of the experiment library. I originally thought that we'd simply use the themes from design thinking of desirability, viability and feasibility to organize it all. We found out rather quickly that this did not work. Some experiments applied to one theme but not others. Other experiments applied to all three themes, and we couldn't duplicate content. Finally, we sorted the experiments into "Discovery" and "Validation", inspired by Steve Blank's work in The Four Steps to the Epiphany.
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Gathering design feedback quickly

We conducted customer interviews, discovery surveys, social media polls and even Value Proposition Canvases for each of our early adopters.

I'd often ask early readers "Who else do you think would benefit from this type of content?" and I'd use MURAL to affinity sort their feedback.

The book was written for corporate innovators, startup founders and "solopreneurs." I sourced these three types of readers on UserTesting.com and had them explain the book covers back to me. We found that some of the imagery and wording that we thought were obvious were not so obvious to the end customer.

Even general impressions of the initial book art, title, and manuscript were extremely helpful for our team. We made several small but important tweaks. For example, the smaller introduction text above the book title tested extremely well. It wasn't an official subtitle really, but the three sentences helped readers know at a glance what the book was about. Normally, a process like this with a distributed team would involve months of back and forth, but by using the technology and the same design-thinking methodologies one would normally use for a new business, the entire learning process was accelerated.

Lessons learned

This entire distributed book experiment was not without its snags and limitations. The biggest lessons that I learned was the importance of time-boxing collaboration sessions and brainstorming. It's fun to go deep into a subject, especially with all of the evidence I was gathering through reader experiments, but at the end of the day you have to commit to a decision and move forward as a group.

Luckily, tools like MURAL make it easier than ever to do so. We could visually see the book come into form and clarity while gathering feedback from different team members and early adopters around the globe.

It was an experiment to test out the very theories of our book as we were creating it. But what I found proves to me even more that by taking the time to turn design thinking and lean startup principles into practice, the business of launching new businesses (and books!) can be a little less scary and a whole lot more fun.

Besides, Alex and I couldn't have written a book about testing without... testing it.

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How to plan a book using design thinking methodology | Mural Blog

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The world is full of half-finished books, great ideas that were never put down on paper, and amazing opportunities for collaboration that never happened simply because somebody didn't know where to begin. I know, as I have at least three unfinished books in my Dropbox folders somewhere.

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R&D Today | RnD Today is the RADMA outreach website to make world-leading knowledge and expertise more widely accessible

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Blind faith or hard evidence - does Design Thinking actually work in R&D? | R&D Today

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Design Thinking is increasingly being adopted by R&D teams but is there hard evidence that it boosts an organisations performance?

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Design thinking as a formula destroys Design as a creative process...
After all, it is only the latest - and a more fashionable version of the ever reducing, ever fragmenting, and ever controlling modern mindset

One of the hottest selling commodities in the marketplace of ideas is 'Design Thinking,' which stands for a set of conceptual and practical processes which its proponents claim can lead to more innovative solutions, but also have further application in every field on earth.

Fulfilling all the requirements of any consumer good, it is a well-designed, sleek, developed-in-the-west, no confusion product. True to its nature modernity has turned a non-rational, spontaneous process into a product and turned that beautiful, live, process into just another formula.

Design thinking is yet another (oxy)moronic buzzword, like 'systems thinking' or 'experiential learning.' All these concepts are best understood as textbook illustrations of the nature of the mindset of modern expertise. First and foremost, they will fragment something that is seamlessly integrated, turn all multi-directional phenomena into linear ones, and then - as if they discovered a solution - put them together in the most absurd way.

Thinking is a linear process whether you do divergent thinking or convergent thinking. The very core of design is to move out of this linearity, familiarity, and predictability and, of course, offer the most appropriate solutions. And the 'systems' referred to in systems thinking is a multi-dimensional phenomenon; again a totally non-linear one.

This in turn reveals a total lack of 'critical thinking,' which is, incidentally, another conceptual delusion. When the whole cognitive foundation of the modern mind, starting from home, and continuing through schooling, university, and the workplace, is built with second-hand information, how can one ever be truly critical?

Let's keep in mind that the ability to design is not exclusive to any one kind of people, least of all professional designers because humans are born designers; every child has the natural ability to find the most appropriate design solutions. In childhood, they exist in the realm of 'process;' that is, until they are handed 'products,' be it readymade toys, knowledge, solutions, and so on.

Designers at work

The later school years reinforce this, ensuring that the child's natural ability for design is systematically eliminated. The difference cannot be overstated; every child belongs to the paradigm of the process, whereas the modern mind, especially the professional mind, inhabits the paradigm of the product.

'Testing' the product

The team

Design is an attitude, a way of being. Designing is a multi-dimensional ability, which used to be outside the realm of reason. Now it has been turned into just another formula that can be taught to unsuspecting and fragile victims. Design has been turned into a play of abstractions, a verbal game. All logical and verbose people take advantage of this and now routinely add design thinking in their curriculum vitae.

When I was a design student in Ahmedabad, I came across a book on creativity by Dr. Pradip Khandwalla, who was the Director of IIM Ahmedabad. That's when I first realized that creativity was a big buzzword in management circles. Those days I would jokingly tell visiting friends that if they wanted to see creativity happening, they should come to NID, but if they wanted to hear about it, they had to go to IIM!

This is not to say that only professionally qualified designers can do design, but to point out that design is essentially rooted in experience and not a mere linguistic/thought process. The most unfortunate part of this is that even design schools have started teaching design thinking as a subject. This is like proverbial dullard asking who Rama was, after listening to a narration of the whole Ramayana.

The very essence of design education is to help you develop your innate ability to design. Design is an adventure into the unknown, where excessive reasoning and readymade knowledge have little role to play. It is a tragedy that even designers themselves rarely delve into design's possibility for self-transformation. Such close-mindedness is in accordance with the very nature of the modern mind, which seeks to turn everything into the realm of the known, to force-fit creativity, spontaneity, and intuition within the frame of reason.

In fact, design education is a good starting point for exploring what really is wrong with the modern educational paradigm. There's an urgent need to examine design education 'critically' and re-evaluate the very fundamentals of the discipline.

Please take a look at these videos by Natasha Jen on design thinking
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_raleGrTdUg
Natasha Jen: Design Thinking is Bullsh*t

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Design thinking as a formula destroys Design as a creative process... After all, it is only the latest - and a more fashionable version of the ever reducing, ever fragmenting, and ever controlling modern mindset One of the hottest selling commodities in the marketplace of ideas is 'Design Thinking,' which stands for a set of conceptual and practical processes which its proponents claim can lead to more innovative solutions, but also have further application in every field on earth.

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While we know a lot about practices that stimulate new ideas, innovation teams often struggle to apply them. Why? Because people's biases and entrenched behaviors get in the way. In this article a Darden professor explains how design thinking helps people overcome this problem and unleash their creativity.

Though ostensibly geared to understanding and molding the experiences of customers, design thinking also profoundly reshapes the experiences of the innovators themselves. For example, immersive customer research helps them set aside their own views and recognize needs customers haven't expressed. Carefully planned dialogues help teams build on their diverse ideas, not just negotiate compromises when differences arise. And experiments with new solutions reduce all stakeholders' fear of change.

At every phase-customer discovery, idea generation, and testing-a clear structure makes people more comfortable trying new things, and processes increase collaboration. Because it combines practical tools and human insight, design thinking is a social technology -one that the author predicts will have an impact as large as an earlier social technology: total quality management.

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While we know a lot about practices that stimulate new ideas, innovation teams often struggle to apply them. Why? Because people's biases and entrenched behaviors get in the way. In this article a Darden professor explains how design thinking helps people overcome this problem and unleash their creativity.

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Why use design thinking?
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The main reason for using this process is to observe and understand user behaviour and learn about any issues or problems. The learnings and information gathered can then be used to design products that ultimately solve those problems or pain points.

When beginning the process, it is easy to assume that a problem exists, but it may not necessarily be fully understood, and that can lead to creating a solution that doesn't meet the consumers' needs, using valuable time and resources. Challenging those assumptions and doing the research is vital in determining the most effective design path to take.

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How to implement design thinking
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A product design team needs to fully understand their users, question existing methods of operation and investigate existing problems or issues. They will actively observe users' practices in different locations, such as in a controlled environment like a lab, and/or in their own homes. For example, there are many insights to be gained by observing a user's interaction with a kitchen appliance in their home, such as frequency of use, setup/location, cleaning/maintenance, storage, etc. The design team will also look at groups that may be directly or indirectly impacted by factors such as noise and the location of the appliance. Groups may include family members, kitchen designers, their power company, and more.

Design thinking is a non-linear process and at its core consists of five separate phases. The phases can be executed and then repeated as necessary throughout the design process. The five phases can be defined as:

The process involves a number of exercises which are to be carried out with users. One key method involves conducting interviews, including one-to-one sessions asking what they think about a particular product, its usage, similar products, and more. Other exercises include completing a study or team members carrying out particular tasks themselves. The process also involves a large amount of observation of users interacting with the product, what their thought processes are, etc.

All the information gathered is recorded and collated in what is known as a 'journey map'. This helps the design team to find insights and formulate additional questions about how to help the user in certain ways.

It also helps to determine if the product is being designed for the right reasons and with the features that are needed. The consumer should not be misled in any way, and additional features shouldn't be added for the sake of it. Additional features may be appropriate in some instances, however, they may simply waste time and provide little benefit overall. It is more beneficial to refine existing features and solve any underlying problems before adding more complexity to the product.

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Prototyping and Testing
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The prototyping phase is a chance to experiment by way of creating several scaled down versions of the product and to investigate and analyse solutions that have been derived from the previous phases. The objective here is to select one solution that best fits each problem that was previously identified.

This phase provides the design team with a good understanding of the problems and potential solutions, along with a better idea of how users interact with the product in a simulated real-world environment.

Once the ideal solutions have been identified in the prototype phase, it is time for testing. The prototypes may be tested within the immediate team, the extended team, or further afield outside of the company.

The results gained from rigorous testing of the complete product validate learnings and assumptions. They are often used to redefine previous problems, or in fact lead to looping back to a previous stage in the process and proceeding with another iteration.

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User-centred design (or human-centred design)
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A key part of the design thinking process includes user-centred design, (or human-centred design). UCD is a process whereby we ensure the product is effective in carrying out the tasks for which it was designed for, is usable, and most importantly, meets the needs of the consumer and that their experience of the product is a pleasant and positive one.

When designing a new product, an effective design needs to meet a host of requirements and concerns. The UCD process needs to address these concerns, which include, but are not limited to; reliability, usability, cost and efficiency, aesthetics, etc. Overall, effective design contains two key components - finding and solving the right problem and meeting the consumer's needs and capabilities. From here, teams need to use the UCD process to both find the right problem and then find the right solution. When doing this, they will likely use the 'double diamond' approach.

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The Double Diamond approach
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The 'Double Diamond' is a universal symbol and is a visual representation of the design thinking process. While there are many different versions and similar kite shaped process diagrams date back to the 1960s, the Double Diamond symbol was popularised by the British Design Council in 2005. The two merging diamond shapes represent the convergence and divergence in both the problem and solution spaces.

Today, the Double Diamond is widely recognised and used in design work circles and often used as a starting point or framework to base design thinking around for a project.

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Why use design thinking?‍ The main reason for using this process is to observe and understand user behaviour and learn about any issues or problems. The learnings and information gathered can then be used to design products that ultimately solve those problems or pain points.

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When it comes to design thinking, the bloom is off the rose. Billed as a set of tools for innovation, design thinking has been enthusiastically and, to some extent, uncritically adopted by firms and universities alike as an approach for the development of innovative solutions to complex problems. But skepticism about design thinking has now begun to seep out onto the pages of business magazines and educational publications.

The criticisms are several: that design thinking is poorly defined; that the case for its use relies more on anecdotes than data; that it is little more than basic commonsense, repackaged and then marketed for a hefty consulting fee. As some of these design thinking concepts have sloshed into the world of policy, and social change efforts have been re-cast as social innovation, the queasiness around the approach has also begun to surface in the field of public policy.

However, most critics have missed the main problem with design thinking. It is, at its core, a strategy to preserve and defend the status-quo - and an old strategy at that. Design thinking privileges the designer above the people she serves, and in doing so limits participation in the design process. In doing so, it limits the scope for truly innovative ideas, and makes it hard to solve challenges that are characterized by a high degree of uncertainty - like climate change - where doing things the way we always have done them is a sure recipe for disaster.

A New Name for an Old Method

To understand why design thinking is fundamentally conservative, it's important to look at its antecedents. Although it is often advertised as a method that is as innovative as the solutions it promises to produce, it bears an uncanny resemblance to an earlier model of problem-solving, celebrated in the 1970s and 1980s for the superior solutions it was supposed to produce. Called the "rational-experimental" approach to problem solving, it was a simplified and popularized version of the scientific method, in much the same way that design thinking is a stylized - some say "dumbed down" - version of the methods designers use. It, too, was enthusiastically embraced by managers and policy makers, and was invoked to reshape practices in firms and government.

The similarities between the steps in the two methods are so literal that design thinking can come across as a knock-off. Rational-experimental problem solving was built around a series of stages, each leading up to the identification of a solution. Likewise, design thinking is generally described as being made up of modes, stepping stones in the design process, with each mode reflecting a different aspect of design thinking.

Rational-experimental problem solving begins with a presumption that the search for a solution starts by relying on existing data about the problem. Design thinking, in a slight divergence from the original model, suggests instead that the designer herself should generate information about the problem, by drawing on her experience of the people who will be affected by the design through the empathetic connection that she forges with them. This mode is called, in the "can-do" imperative tense that design thinkers favor, "empathize."

That is where the procedural differences between the two approaches end. The next step in both approaches, called "definition" or "define," is to define the problem or design challenge. Then, both approaches move toward developing a theory about how to solve the problem or design challenge. In rational-experimental thinking, this step is labeled the "hypothesis" phase, while design-thinking calls this phase "ideate." Next, both methods advise trying out the proposed solution. It's called "implementation" in the older approach whereas the newer version exhorts adherents to "prototype." (Though similar, the latter requires more Post-It notes.) The final step in both methods is to evaluate the effectiveness of the experiment. In both the "evaluation" phase of the rational-experimental model and in the "test" mode of design thinking, this step sets in motion the iterative aspect of these approaches to problem solving, with adherents encouraged to use the information they glean from this phase to return to earlier phases of the process in order to refine either their hypotheses and their solutions, or both.

Protecting the Powerful

Both design thinking and the rational-experimental approach implicitly establish problem solving as the remit of the powerful, especially when it comes design for social ends. They turn the everyday ability to solve a problem into a rarified practice, limited only to those who self-consciously follow a specialized methodology. In fact, problem-solving is always messy and most solutions are shaped by political agendas and resource constraints. The solutions that win out are not necessarily the best - they are generally those that are favored by the powerful or at least by the majority. Both rational experimentation and design thinking provide cover for this political calculus. They make a process that is deeply informed by social and economic structures seem merely technical or aesthetic.

There has been long been a push to make problem-solving and design more open and democratic. Experiments with participatory policy design - from participatory budgeting to public consultations on policies ranging from zoning ordinances to bureaucratic reforms - have long trundled alongside more restrictive practices policy design. Likewise, designers and social innovators have sought feedback from the populations they target, and have even looked to harvest the creative ideas generated by users who have improved products by tinkering with them. However, even in these more open processes, the designer or policy maker ultimately decides which ideas and preferences are included in the solution.

One difference between design thinking and rational-experimental problem solving is that the former names and celebrates the ambiguity that is a precursor to any creative design solution. In some ways, that's a good thing. However, it reaffirms the privileged role of the designer, positioning her as the vessel through which all the implicit understandings that make it into the final design must first pass. She is the instrument that transforms messy ambiguity into the clean lines of an elegant solution. Because the input she brings into the design process can't be articulated, she is to some extent liberated from the requirement to explain and defend the rationale for her design choices.

Moreover, because the designer herself generates the tacit understandings she uses by connecting empathetically with potential users - the "empathize" mode - whatever needs of product users and communities she perceives are refracted through her personal experience and priorities. As any ethnographer worth her salt will admit, this subjectivity is inevitable, and that is why disciplines that rely on empathetic engagement for data collection stress the importance of paying attention to the researcher's identity and political positioning. The design thinking method does not stipulate rigorous attention to positionality, however. This omission signals that the designer, as creative visionary, is somehow suspended above the fray of bias, blind spots, and political pressure.

Preserving the Status Quo

The trouble with privileging the role of the designer, or even a small circle of designers, in this way is that it radically narrows the potential for innovation. The value of ambiguity stems from the array of meanings that bump up against each other when problem is still undetermined, and from the opportunities for new connections that those collisions evoke. Design thinkers celebrate these connections, especially those that span very different perspectives, disciplines, and categories of things, and view this kind of abductive reasoning as core to creativity.

When the designer acts as a gatekeeper for the meanings that are included in the design process, the potential for connections becomes limited not only to what the designer views as significant, but also to the relationships she can imagine. If the design space were flung open to meanings that users and communities view as significant, we would surely read fewer stories of design interventions gone wrong - such as whimsically designed water pumps that were abandoned to rust because they were unusable, innovative distribution systems for mosquito nets that prevent most people from accessing them, and the distortionary effect of shoes distributed to the poor as a marketing pitch to the rich, to name just a few.

The political dimensions of design thinking are problematic enough on their own, but the method is particularly ill-suited to problems in rapidly changing areas or with lots of uncertainty, since once a design is complete the space that the method opens for ambiguity and new alternatives is shut down. Climate change is one such area. The natural environment is changing at an astonishing rate, in ways that are likely to be unprecedented in human history, and that we are unable to fully predict, with each new scientific discovery revealing that we have far underestimated the complexity of the systems that are at play and the shifts on the horizons may very well mean the end of our existence. Yet, design-thinking approaches, adopted with much fanfare to deal with the challenge, have offered formulaic and rigid solutions. Design thinking has allowed us to celebrate conventional solutions as breakthrough innovations and to continue with business as usual.

Unsuited to Uncertainty

After Hurricane Sandy caused more than $60 billions of damages in the New York region, the Obama administration launched the Rebuild by Design competition to generate new solutions for reconstruction that would rehabilitate devastated infrastructure and protect the region from the fierce storms that Hurricane Sandy and the best climate science presaged. The competition billed itself as using "collaborative, design-driven problem-solving to help communities and cities build resilience," a process that would allow urban areas to "overcome existing creative and regulatory barriers by cultivating collaboration between designers, researchers, community members, government officials and subject-matter experts." True to form, the 10 teams of international designers selected to participate in the competition held numerous community consultations, where they gleaned information about what mattered most to residents in the recovery process. The design teams combined this feedback with data about the physical damage and the economic prospects of the region in several iterative cycles of design and produced half a dozen designs that were allocated funding for implementation.

The lion's share of the almost $1 billion on offer in the competition was awarded to the Big U, a proposal for a ten-mile segmented wall, made of landscaped bridging berms and moveable gates, to protect the lower half of Manhattan and the very valuable real estate locate there. Now rebranded as the Dryline and projected to cost anywhere between $1 billion and $3 billion to complete, the wall would protect the city against the ravages of storm the size of Sandy, but likely not much larger. Current projections of storm-force sea-level rise suggest that the wall will guard against storm surges only through 2050, after which point the walls of the Dryline may turn into the sides of bathtub, holding floodwater inside the city. In the short three intervening decades, valuable real estate will continue to be built behind the seeming protection of the wall, increasing the risks to the city when the barriers are inevitably breached. The first phase of construction on the Dryline will be in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, alongside one of the last pockets of affordable housing on the island, and the worry is that as the manicured berm adds a new public park to the area, residents - many of whom participated in good faith in the repeated community consultations - will be displaced from their neighborhoods by a wave not of water but of gentrification.

In selecting the Big U/Dryline, Rebuild by Design affirmed the political, economic, and physical status-quo. The design thinking process yielded a wall, an ordinary if costly piece of infrastructure that will hold back the waters for a while and allow residents to pretend that the sea most projections believe will flood a substantial portion of Manhattan will remain in its basin. Behind the ramparts, the city will be able to hum along as usual, with the value of real estate continuing to rise, and with the poor and middle class continuing to face displacement from the expensive heart of Manhattan to the outer edges of New York.

A Radically Open Alternative

Happily, the Rebuild by Design process also produced a solution that might offer an alternative to design thinking as the premier vehicle for innovation. The Living Breakwaters proposal is to create a "necklace" of small islands along south shore of Staten Island, one of the areas that suffered the worst erosion effects of Superstorm Sandy. Breakwaters are generally piles of rubble, amassed to slow waves barreling to shore, but the proposal, which was awarded comparatively modest seed funding, suggests using them to revive marine ecologies and to turn them into hosts for all kinds of life, including plant, animal, and human. The breakwaters are constructed with concrete boxes that offer lodging for oysters, seals, fish, algae, and other marine species, and they provide a physical and symbolic platform for educational and economic engagement with the ecosystem. With its floating schools, the project prioritizes the needs of the next generation, and positions the breakwaters as part of an ecological heritage that the youngest can claim and fashion. The premise of the proposal is that the way to address climate change is not to barricade against it, but instead to embrace the change that it represents and to reimagine catastrophe as an opportunity to create a new ecological future.

Both the design process and the solution itself are radically open. Residents in the area continue to engage in the design process, not as providers of feedback to designers but as lay designers themselves. They help shape both the physical elements of the solution and the social and economic projects that they support. The water hubs, envisioned in the proposal as a land-based necklace of physical spaces that follows the arc of the breakwaters, are deliberately left undetermined in the design, inviting residents to define both their form and their function. The project is radically agnostic about the water hubs, and contemplates uses in the different centers as wide ranging as a business incubator, a lighthouse, a lab for the study of wildlife, a kayak depot, and a place of contemplation. Non-human life forms also assume an active role in the process by taking up residence in the breakwaters and remolding and expanding the physical "housing" components that the project provides them, and even attracting new species to the area, with the promise of abundant food and even perhaps balmier waters. By keeping the design process open, the Living Breakwaters project deliberately resists the closure that is so characteristic of completed design thinking solutions. The project entertains the possibility that the breakwaters will have to be reinvented as the seas around them rise. In much the same way that the project shelters the young, it protects nascent ideas by providing a protected space for the on-going and collaborative engagement with the ambiguity and uncertainly that climate change creates.

The aperture embodied in the Living Breakwaters project offers an alternative to the closure built into design thinking. It illustrates a design process where the designer is dethroned and where design is less a step-by-step march through a set of stages and more of a space where people can come together and interpret the ways that changing conditions challenge the meanings, patterns, and relationships that they had long taken for granted. That process of interpretation can be unpredictable, sometimes unwieldy in both form and in duration, impossible to chart, and often only visible in retrospect. But it is precisely this inchoate messiness that makes interpretation generative: the insights people stumble upon by accident or patch together on the fly not only provide the basis for innovative solutions. They also allow a complete re-imagination of what counts as a solution to begin with.

Elsewhere, I have called this approach "interpretive engagement," and have described it as a process of collaborative and wide-ranging interpretation, where participants revisit the understandings they have about themselves and others, as well as about the changing world they live in. It represents a commitment to a process with no clear beginning and end, with a goal that is often no more explicitly defined than imaging and articulating new ways to meet changes that are still murky and immeasurable.

Interpretive engagement is not without tension, and the politics that shape design choices are dredged out in the back-and-forth between participants and often forcefully challenged. But this kind of interpretive engagement offers the possibility for radical innovation, not merely because the solutions it surfaces are often highly creative, but also because the solutions tend to be open and receptive to incremental adjustment. This openness extends and shelters interpretive engagement, because it welcomes people affected by the solution into the ongoing interpretive design process and invites them to amend the solution to better meet their need at any given moment.

The open, continuously transformed and transformative solutions supported by interpretive engagement represent a break with traditional approaches to problem solving - whether the approach is rational-experimental or design thinking. They allow us to engage with change, instead of barricading ourselves against it.

For companies, social innovators, and political actors, the recommendation to embrace a messy, inclusive process of interpretative engagement, to say nothing of championing open solutions that sustain and encourage participatory creativity with their design, may seem unworkable or profligate. But, as New Yorkers may discover, perhaps sooner than expected, the barricades that neat design thinking steps produce are no match for changes that we cannot yet imagine or fully comprehend.

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Design Thinking Is Fundamentally Conservative and Preserves the Status Quo

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When it comes to design thinking, the bloom is off the rose. Billed as a set of tools for innovation, design thinking has been enthusiastically and, to some extent, uncritically adopted by firms and universities alike as an approach for the development of innovative solutions to complex problems. But skepticism about design thinking has now begun to seep out onto the pages of business magazines and educational publications.

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You'd have to be psycho to not know what problem you're solving for in a design sprint.

The concept of problem framing has been around for a while.

For the uninitiated, problem framing is the process of describing and interpreting a problem to arrive at a problem statement. It's considered an important step in problem solving, as slight changes in framing usually lead to different considerations towards a potential solution.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Jacob Getzels empirically demonstrated the central role of problem framing in creativity and art over 40 years ago. Since then, it's been written about extensively in publications like Harvard Business Review and Forbes.

In short, you have a number of options available to you as a design sprint facilitator to problem frame your way to a particular challenge.

But what if you only have a couple of hours to target that 'right problem' with a small group of influential people that are funding your efforts? Or, maybe your time is limited to 60 minutes with the only person that can give proper direction and approval of your design sprint. What are your options then for problem framing?

Here are a few suggestions I have for those that are pressed for time and need clarity on that problem or challenge. Please note that these suggestions assume the "right" people are involved.

1. The W4 Method (30 minutes)

Find yourself a whiteboard (online or physical), a diverse crowd and a large enough room to prevent interruptions. Cell phones are off for those that want to attend.

Divide the whiteboard into four equal spaces, and label them Who, What, Why, and Where. For groups of four or more people, divide into sub-groups and assign each a quadrant.

In 5 minutes, each person uses individual sticky notes to write down answers for the following:

Who - Who has this problem?

What - What is the nature of the problem?

Why - Why is the problem worth solving?

Where - Where does this problem happen?

Come back and put the post-its on the whiteboard in their appropriate quadrants. Do an affinity diagramming exercise and dot vote the most important ones.

Finally, each participant attempts to construct a problem statement, using the top voted 'who, what, why and where' from the previous exercise. Voting is optional here, as the discussion between everyone is more important to gain proper perspective for moving forward.

2. Constraintstorming + Effort/Impact (60 minutes)

Brainstorming is a technique that's promoted as a no-judgement, eccentrically positive approach to generating ideas. However, recent research has shown that individuals are better at divergent thinking (thinking broadly to generate a diverse set of ideas) and groups are better at convergent thinking (selecting which ideas are worth pursuing).

I've found that the approach of "constraintstorming" is far more effective at discovering different problems to be solved at the group level, rather than thinking of potential solutions first. Here's how it's done:

1. On sticky notes, have everyone use 5 minutes to specify the main problem you and/or your team are addressing.

2. Put these problems up on a whiteboard. Eliminate any duplicates or confusing statements.

3. Look over the stated problems, and start writing known constraints (both internal and external) for each one on sticky notes. Things like time, budget and feasibility are easy answers. Encourage everyone to go deeper and get specific.

4. Have everyone put up their stickies next to the problems the align with, affinity diagram everything, and dot/marker vote the ones that the group feels are the most important constraints for each problem.

5. Hold a short discussion on which of the top voted constraints are flexible vs. inflexible, and which ones align best with the "problem" they're assigned to.

6. Finally, place each problem on a 2x2 Effort/Impact grid to assess its importance to the group... using the previous constrainstorming exercise as an assessor of solution difficulty.

3. Pain Point Mapping. (45 minutes)
Bullseye diagramming helps prioritize problems within a round target area, with the most important ones at the center. Given the center has limited space, this method helps teams visualize what problems matter most to the company. Here's how.

1. On sticky notes, take 5 minutes to document problems that are 'expensive', 'time consuming' or 'unnecessary/redundant'.

2. Once completed, everyone puts their stickies up on a wall and affinity diagrams them by category and type.

3. Do a round of dot voting to determine which problems seen them most expensive, time consuming, or unnecessary.

4. Ask the most important people/person in the room to put a price on the highest voted item(s). If they were to fund a solution for a particular problem, which one would it be, and how much would they pay?

5. Based on the specified amount for a solution, have the most important people/person start placing those stickies that have a price tag onto a shooting target diagram.

6. The sticky closest to the bullseye (center of the shooting diagram) is likely the target you should be going after.

It's worth noting that many of the Monday activities with a normal design sprint process can act as a catalyst for finding the right problem to solve for. Starting at the end to project future success, or making a map of the problem in advance, can introduce clients and companies to the concepts and activities of a design sprint before the official week even starts.

Whatever route you decide to take, be sure to have several meaningful conversations with your clients and stakeholders before doing any sort of problem framing. Having the right kind of respectful, professional relationship to build on is vital for any group activity to have any real shot of working.
What about your problem framing endeavors? Have any to share?
Let me know what you do to prepare for a design sprint by leaving your comments below.

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A simplified approach to Design Sprint problem framing.

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The concept of problem framing has been around for a while. For the uninitiated, problem framing is the process of describing and interpreting a problem to arrive at a problem statement. It's considered an important step in problem solving, as slight changes in framing usually lead to different considerations towards a potential solution.

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The value of Design Thinking

Over the past decade, Design Thinking has become the leading innovation methodology, and the increase in its adoption has enabled us to investigate the benefits of Design Thinking for corporate innovation.

According to the Design Value Index created by the Design Management Institute, design-led companies have outperformed the S&P 500 over the past ten years by an extraordinary 211 percent.

After three years of using Design Thinking, a leading multinational IT company assessed the financial impact of its Design Thinking practice and calculated that it had achieved a 300 percent ROI.

Using Design Thinking, the company:

Cut costs by accelerating projects by as much as 75 percent, resulting in savings of US$20.6 million

Reduced risk and increased project profitability (US$18.6 million)

Streamlined organizational process efficiency (US$9.2 million)

Besides the financial metrics, they also observed additional benefits, which:

Encouraged an empowered, engaged, and happy workforce

Enhanced KPIs such as UI, UX, CX, NPS, and brand energy

Perfected internal processes for HR, sales, and beyond

Jeanne Liedtka of Darden Business School examined 22 organizations investigating what organizations do when they say they utilize Design Thinking, how these observed practices impact the innovation process, and the innovation outcomes.

She concluded that using Design Thinking leads to:

Improved quality of choices and decisions made in the process

Reduced risks and cost of failure

Enhanced likelihood of successful implementation

Increased adaptability

Creation of new capabilities and skills among the people who used Design Thinking-and precisely the skills that are often said to be key nowadays and in the future: communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity.

McKinsey published a study on the value of design in business, concluding that strong Design Thinking performers grow their revenues and shareholder returns at nearly twice the rate of their industry peers.

With this increasing amount of quantitative proof, I think we can all agree that the proper adoption of Design Thinking can lead to tremendous results.
(Please note that I wrote "proper adoption". Watching a TEDtalk on Design Thinking and then having a go at it will probably not lead to the desired results. Although it looks that simple, it is not. Proper initial training and support are crucial!)
Sprinting when Designing? The Benefits of Design Sprints.

Ok, so we all understand the value of design, but why do we now have to sprint while doing it?

Google Ventures, the inventors of the Design Sprint, put it this way:
"We're investors, and we succeed when our companies succeed. To help them solve problems quickly and be self-sufficient, we're optimized our sprint process to deliver the best results in the least time... we short-cut the endless-debate cycle and compress months into a single week."
Benefits for the team:

Team is empowered

A practical way of putting Design Thinking into practice

A clear process for creativity and innovation

Tackles high uncertainty issues (which can usually lead to much debate) quickly

Benefits for the project:

Increased speed and efficiency, which means quickly learning about the desirability of an idea having to build and launch a minimum viable product

Clear direction and focus of a new project based on alignment of the key problem and reliable customer feedback

Buy-in and alignment from key stakeholders, as you only focus on projects that have proven early value creation

Benefits for the company:

Reduced budget: The initial investment is low as the idea is tested quickly, without having to pour a lot of time and money into building a prototype

Lower risk: Kills non-promising and pet projects fast based on valuable data from potential customers/users, instead of based on opinion, with an initial investment of only one week

Good way to get started rapidly with Design Thinking and quickly enjoy some of the benefits outlined above

Champions new ways and models of work that embody speed, agility, and customer-centricity

What's a Design Sprint?

In Sprint, the book that introduced Design Sprints to the public, the Sprint is defined as follows:
"The Sprint is GV's unique five-day process for answering crucial questions through prototyping and testing ideas with customers. It's a "greatest hits" of business strategy, innovation, behavioral science, design, and more - packaged into a step-by-step process that any team can use."
How does a Design Sprint work?

A typical Sprint runs over five days:

Monday: Define and unpack the problem to solve

Tuesday: Generate ideas to solve the problem

Wednesday: Decide which ideas to test

Thursday: Build a prototype to give to your users for testing

Friday: Validate your assumptions and get feedback

These days and the activities within them are highly structured and time-boxed (so time is not wasted), and have been tested to deliver the results you need to move quickly from problem to idea, to prototype, and to validation.

Now, ideally, it's five days, but there are also ways to compact it or spread it out.

As a response to the "Whaaaat?...? Five days...? Are you crazy?" (you guessed it already: especially corporates complain about not having five days to solve their most critical challenges ;-)), four-day variations have emerged.
(Before you dismiss the idea of investing five full days into a workshop with several people as being impossible, ask yourself this: Would you rather spend five days for fast impact or have your project drag along for several months without any progress?)
Some teams condense problem definition and ideation into one day, whereas others stay one day with the problem and then combine ideation and decision-making into the next day. Both ways work. In my experience, both of them need a little more and a different kind of preparation.

Which leads us to the Corporate Design Sprint.

Isn't this just for startups? No! How to do Corporate Design Sprints.

Like so often these days, new ways of working are first created by startups. But corporates need to simply adjust the principles and practices of Design Sprints to a corporate setting.

When implementing Design Sprints in a corporate setting, typical challenges are:

Often a lack of customer-centric culture, but instead a very technology and product-driven way of thinking: "We know better anyhow."

Deeply stuck in daily business, which makes it hard to imagine new ways of working and new ideas for solving problems: "We don't have time for this."

Waterfall, tightly planned workshops, planning before doing culture: "We need a business case first."

Siloed functions: "Not invented here."

So, how can we keep the benefits of the Sprint, while coping with the particularities of a corporate environment?

First, consider when to do a Sprint and when not to. Suitable contexts and challenges are:

You're stuck: Maybe you've tried your usual way, but you can't move forward

Time pressure: Time to market is critical, and you don't have months to discuss

High uncertainty: You don't know whether it's a good idea anyhow, and there is no data available that could tell you. Or, you don't know how to get started or what approach to take

High risk: The project seems unsafe to try, and you need to minimize risk

New problem: You've never faced such a problem before and don't know how to tackle it. There's no evident expertise or an obvious solution

Broad and narrow: Your challenge should be broad enough to allow for creativity and narrow enough to go deep-no boiling the ocean[A3]

It's a human challenge: It's not a purely technological challenge à la "we need to make this smaller, lighter, faster, thinner, stronger, etc.". Sprints are for problems that involve a human dimension and need customer/user feedback, and the uncertainty involves how customers/users/employees will react to a solution.

Now, this focus on new, unconventional challenges, with a high level of uncertainty will increase the natural tendency for planning, which we need to account for in our Corporate Design Sprint approach. What does that mean?

The Corporate Design Sprint process

We use the following approach to adapt Design Sprints to larger and more traditional organizations. A single sprint à la "come in on Monday and we'll start working" has proven to be unhelpful. To allow for the needs as mentioned earlier for planning and uncertainty reduction, we start with preparation work, followed by the actual Design Sprint, which we adapted to a corporate context, and we close the process with a Next Steps Sprint.

Prepare

First, we prepare upfront and align with key stakeholders on the particular problem to solve. We align on the scope of the actual Sprint, define the team needed to solve this specific problem, and we collect and prepare some input upfront. This creates a certain level of comfort among participants and management. In addition, this preparation ensures that you're actually working on a problem that everybody has agreed is a problem worth solving and that the right people are in the room.

Making sure the right people are in the room may require talking to some initial people before finding the core team, as in larger corporations, they will probably know somebody else you should also invite to contribute.

If possible, we do this as a one-week Sprint that might look like in figure 1 below (this one was on a process related challenge). We call this the Preparation Sprint.

The Design Sprint

The upfront preparation and problem framing allow us to bring initial data into the room. Hence, we condense understanding the problem and ideation into one day.

To mitigate the resistance towards a five-day workshop, we engage the larger group of stakeholders only during the first two days, and work the other two days with a smaller core project team, while, finally at the end of the week aligning with internal stakeholders again. In this particular example, we worked on an internal process, i.e., the "customers" were all internal users, and they were involved throughout the actual Sprint and the Preparation Sprint.

The general structure we use is:

Monday: Understand the problem and ideate solutions

Tuesday: Decide

Wednesday and Thursday morning: Prototype (with a smaller core team)

Thursday afternoon: Validate with customers/users

Friday morning: Validate the proposed solution with management

Friday afternoon: Align on deliverables of the Next Steps Sprint based on validation feedback and retrospection.

The Next Steps Sprint

The process closes with a Sprint to define the next actions:

Monday: Review the outcomes of the Design Sprint and ideate on ways forward

Tuesday: Decide and curate a backlog of actions

Wednesday: Prototype a high-level roadmap

Thursday: Validate with key stakeholders and iterate if necessary

Friday: Validate with management and define immediate next action steps.

Conclusion

When design principles are applied to strategy and innovation, the success rate for innovation dramatically improves. Design Thinking has proven to be so powerful because (1) it combines the view of the customer, with what is technically possible, and the needs of the business, and (2) because it relies on a non-linear process, which de-risks and reduces the development and execution time of new ideas.

The Design Sprint approach enables project teams to validate ideas quickly, ensuring that larger investments are only carried out based on sound feedback from potential customers.

The Corporate Design Sprint process put forward here adjusts the concept to a corporate setting taking into account the peculiarities of such a context, which allows corporates to innovate with increased speed and agility, all the while minimizing its risks.

If you are interested in learning more about how we can help bring Design Sprints to your organization, please get in touch.

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Are you still Design Thinking or are you Design Sprinting? How to innovate at digital speed in 2021.

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The value of Design Thinking Over the past decade, Design Thinking has become the leading innovation methodology, and the increase in its adoption has enabled us to investigate the benefits of Design Thinking for corporate innovation. According to the Design Value Index created by the Design Managem

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Solve any business problem with this approach.

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Design Kit is IDEO.org's platform to learn human-centered design, a creative approach to solving the world's most difficult problems.

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Written by Estefanía Ciliotta

Design has shifted immensely since its beginnings - from craftsmanship to a way of thinking and being. Michael Arnold Mages, our conversation series curator, defined design as a fundamental act of humans and design thinking as a way to know the world - through objects, by objects, with objects.

Regarding the specific topic of this conversation, Michael brought up Arturo Escobar's book and approach to designing for the Zapatista Pluriverse - where many worlds fit. This way of seeing design incorporates ways of being.

With this initial framework, we dove deeper into the panelists' discussion. Dimeji shared his perspective on collective history and how it has influenced the way we think and work today as designers, and this collective history is deeply intertwined and impacting the lives of others.

He also raised the concern regarding design thinking for being too problem-solving-oriented when perhaps, designers should be paying more attention to problem tracing and finding since current problems are more complex and wicked.

As designers living in and designing for a multicultural society, we need to ask ourselves more questions before jumping to conclusions, we need to be more critical thinkers and provocative.

image: Dimeji Onafuwa's approach to looking beyond the traditional design thinking model. The central spheres are the "typical" steps; the white text is his critique of each step from a broader perspective.

In addition, Dimeji shared some of the Pluriversal Principles:

Be egalitarian

Use a multimodal approach

Act as an ally

Lend your upstream privilege

Adopt collective agency

Steward the rights of others

Fight symbolic violence

Stay with the problem

To add to this pluriversal view, we need to consider people's perspectives regarding tradition and sacredness. Hajira Qazi's research approach incorporates sacredness in transition design and calls for systems-level change for transitioning to more equitable and sustainable futures, arguing that the things we design, design back on us.

She also raises a new view for design thinking and argues that instead of focusing only on innovative approaches, design thinking should consider traditional views and approaches towards the sacred, as traditions may offer radical creativity to solving modern problems by providing centuries worth of wisdom, culture-specific know-how, and experience.

Finally, Alexandra To added to these pluralistic views of design by sharing her research on design for empowerment and joy. She believes that HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) and Game Design can provide an interesting approach to thinking about racial justice.

She argues that as technology continues to develop, gaps between communities with access and without access continue to enlarge, thus, technology perpetuates marginalization of already marginalized groups. Alexandra is looking to combat this marginalization through design interventions and tools to provide and enable visibility, awareness, and community empowerment.

One of her projects, for example, focuses on participatory workshops to imagine speculative futures by coping with daily experiences of interpersonal racism using social technology (CARE Project). This project's goal is to provide participants not only with visibility to the issue but also with safety and dignity.

Design Thinking is not apolitical

Designers make judgments and decisions that influence people's lives... that is politics and design needs to be aware of it and take responsibility for it.

Human interaction is complex - culture and contexts

Traditional design methods are not enough. We need to incorporate new ways and approaches, new ways of thinking of design.

Embrace Diversity and Design for Dignity and Empowerment

Storytelling is key for accessing and participating with each other

Whoever holds the story holds the perspective. As designers, we should build and enable platforms that share different perspectives of the same story.

We need to Reframe Design Education

Design not for problem-solving, but we should be teaching a design approach that is more of a social collective process that is beyond problem-solving.
Some questions we may want to continue to think about as we develop the design practice are:

How might we redesign the practice without the influence of western/single-sided perspective?

How can we blend in a new way of being in a new world?

The future that we are designing is designing others' futures too, so how might we do it in a more responsible way?

How might we incorporate different perspectives and traditions into design and design approaches?

Sacred vs. Profanity: how might we build a bridge between them to not see them as two completely opposite things?

Written by Estefanía Ciliotta
Center for Design, Northeastern University

Michael Arnold Mages is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art + Design. His research interests include developing a rich understanding of the ways that service design, technology, and the material environment facilitate human conversation. Professor Arnold Mages is especially interested in creating work that supports participants' understanding of their own intersectional identity as a component of a conversation and creating work that can support conversations that are difficult, or high-stakes, or where one or more participants are in a leveraged position.

Dr. Dimeji Onafuwa is a designer, artist, and researcher with several years of UX design and research, transition design, service design, and social design experience. He has worked as a design studio owner, UX consultant, and researcher. After working as a senior design researcher at Microsoft, where he explored the future of work, Dimeji recently joined Google as a senior researcher in the Cloud Commerce space. Dimeji also teaches courses on Design and the Pluriverse at Emily Carr University in Vancouver, BC. Dimeji earned a Ph.D. in Design from Carnegie Mellon University. His doctoral study at CMU sought to understand commons-based approaches to user experience on platforms. To investigate this topic, he worked with various collectives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Portland, Oregon. Before his Ph.D., Dimeji also earned an MBA in management from UNC Charlotte and BAs in design and studio art from Concord University. Dimeji recently co-founded Common Cause Collective, an interdisciplinary group of designers exploring transition design methodologies for social impact in the Pacific Northwest. He has published papers, written a book chapter on design for the greater good, given talks, and conducted workshops on design's role in social justice.

Hajira Qazi is an accountant-turned designer currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Transition Design. She worked for four years in finance and then in a nonprofit organization, where she first began to recognize the value of systems-level approaches to design. In 2016, she joined the School of Design Master of Arts program and received her Master of Professional Studies in 2018. Her doctoral research is centered on how conceptions of the sacred can inform an alternative worldview that moves away from the consumeristic aspects traditionally associated with design towards design that fosters resilient and cohesive societies. Past work and research interests include participatory design, decolonization, and design for political change.

Alexandra To is an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University jointly appointed in the Art + Design (Games) department and the Khoury College of Computer Science. Her core research interests are in designing social technologies to empower people in vulnerable and marginalized contexts using qualitative methods to gather stories and participatory methods to design for the future. Her most recent research focuses on designing social technologies to empower support-seeking and coping with interpersonal racism. Alexandra is an activist, a critical race scholar, and an award-winning game designer. She previously received her Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.S. and M.S. in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University. She has published work at CHI, CHI Play, DiGRA, FDG, UIST, CSCW, and DIS.

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Center for Design @ Northeastern University

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Rethinking Design Thinking in the Pluriverse

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Written by Estefanía Ciliotta Design has shifted immensely since its beginnings - from craftsmanship to a way of thinking and being. Michael Arnold Mages, our conversation series curator, defined design as a fundamental act of humans and design thinking as a way to know the world - through objects, by objects, with objects.

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Design Kit is IDEO.org's platform to learn human-centered design, a creative approach to solving the world's most difficult problems.

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Discover ideation - the 3rd phase of design thinking, where teams puts their heads together to generate ideas through brainstorming, sketching, and more.

Ideation is the third phase of the Design Thinking process, and, as the name suggests, is all about generating ideas and solutions. It's where the team puts their heads together to think, and churns out the ideas that will ultimately create the end product. The aim of an ideation session is to create a large number of ideas that the team can filter through and cut down to the best, most innovative, and practical solution.

But ideating can take much more than just sitting in a room and throwing ideas around with the team. Creating a fruitful ideation session can be tough if you're not well equipped. If you are well equipped, however, and are familiar with techniques such as BrainSketching, Brainwriting and The Worst Possible Idea, you can generate world-class ideas in no time at all. Now who doesn't want that?!

In this article, we'll teach you some processes and guidelines which will help you facilitate and prepare for productive, effective, innovative, and fun ideation sessions. But first, let's get the basics covered...

What is Design Thinking?

Design thinking is a non-linear iterative process that teams employ to understand users and create strong products and services. This process challenges assumptions, redefines problems and creates innovative solutions to prototype and test. All in all it involves five phases- Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test.

The Design Thinking process is great for tackling problems that are hard to follow or unknown. This process helps the team to reframe the problem in a human centric way and create a product or service that feels intuitive for the end user.

However, if you're interested in generating those ideas right now, then all you need to know is that ideating is where the idea generation portion of the process begins - and it's very exciting.

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What is ideation?

Ideation is the third stage in the design thinking process and promotes open thinking and risk taking in order to create strong and unique ideas.

Ideation is different to that of a typical idea planning session in that it allows independent thinking with collaboration. You see, in a typical idea planning sessions team members tend to get bogged down by listening to a superior's plan. Once they've heard so much from the superior, all their ideas are set in one direction and their individual strengths and creativity get lost. This leads to the team generating pet ideas that support one main idea and missing out on the strengths of each individual member which should be utilised.

It's not about coming up with the 'right' idea, it's about generating the broadest range of possibilities." - Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford

Ideations instill the value that the first solution is not always the right solution - and that sometimes the best ideas come from combining multiple ideas and sharing different perspectives. Sometimes this happens through working alone, then together and then voting to create a democratic process that factors in each individual, other times it comes from moving around, asking the audience and collecting opinions.

Whatever the case, the most important component of ideation is that there is no judgement in the space and that everyone is striving to achieve the end goal as a team, not to win the right answer individually. In this space, team members are encouraged to push their ideas and imagination far and wide.

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What does ideating help the team to achieve:

Ask the right questions.

Think about solutions with a strong focus on the users and their needs.

Increase their innovation potential.

Work collaboratively in a more supportive environment.

Understand the strengths of each team member.

Generate a large quantity of varied ideas.

Save time.

Uncover unexpected areas of innovation.

The best exercise for ideation:

So let's jump into our favorite way to ideate. There are many ways to go forward with generating ideas which we'll cover below but first let's start with our absolute favorite. We've found that defining our point of view and then rephrasing our problems to create active, unique solutions using the How Might We method has done wonders for us during this phase. Here's how to get started:

Define your point of view:

First thing is first, you have to define your point of view. You can't create a strong product or service unless you've worked through who the user is, what their needs are and what you know about them. Draw out a diagram to generate these insights to fuel your brainstorm session. We've filled out the one below to give you an idea of how to generate these understanding.

A good rule of thumb is to generate your answers to each stage as so: [ User . . . (descriptive)] needs [ Need . . . (verb)] because [ Insight . . . (compelling)]

Here's an example of how to fill out the diagram:

Before you move forward make sure that your point of view:

Is narrow enough to follow.

Frames the most important aspect for the user

Is valid, insightful, actionable, unique, narrow, meaningful, and exciting.

What is a How Might We?

Now after you've worked through the core of your user and what their needs are you need to work out how to resolve the problems they might be facing. The best way to do this is to rephrase the problem as a How Might We...

‍This is where we take the problem and reword it so our challenge becomes a chance for positive thinking and generating ideas that can not only fix the problem but take the product or service that much further.

How to generate How Might We statements:

1. Begin with your point of view on the problem you are facing. This could be something like "Catering is too expensive for the events"

2. Rephrase the problem into a How Might We...

3. "How Might We..save costs on catering for our events"

4. Then ask the team to brainstorm on ways to resolve the problem

5. Active solutions could be things like "By asking the participants to do a potluck", "By finding a new catering company", "By having a company cooking day", "By not catering the event at all and implementing a lunch hour"

6. This way you can get so many positive solutions and really open up the possibilities.

After you've done this you should have tons of ideas flowing and be collecting lots of ways to turn your challenge into something that can be incredibly beneficial.

Interested in other ways of ideating? Try these:

Brainstorm

Brainstorming means to talk openly with the group and work off the synergy that has been created. The brainstorming technique works by taking each other's ideas and building off of them to create a final idea. This works well in an environment with trust where participants feel they can speak freely without being judged.

Braindump

This is very similar to brainstorming - but rather than talking freely with the team the braindump is done by participants writing on post-it notes individually and then sharing with the team.

Brainwrite

Brainwriting overlaps with brain dumping but participants here should write down their ideas on paper for a set amount of time (we suggest 3 minutes) and then pass their sheet one space to the left to their team member. This team member then elaborates on the other participants' ideas. After a few minutes more the participants pass their papers around again and this continues until a full circle has been made.

Brainwalk

Brainwalking utilises movement to spark creativity. Rather than passing a paper around a circle - participants walk around the room to different ideation stations where they then elaborate on other participants' ideas.

Analogies

Analogies can be a wonderful ideation technique as they bring a better understanding forward through drawing parallels. By comparing what you are trying to solve for with different objects and scenarios - you can generate out-of-the-box ideas based on understanding the topic in different ways. For example drawing a comparison between a heart and a pump.

Creative Pause

This one is great if you feel that you have built up a negative thought process around the product or service or feel stuck in a one-track thought. Pausing mindfully and taking a break from the traps you might have laid out for yourself can do wonders for sparking better ideas.

Crowdstorm

Crowdstorming means turning to the audience to spark ideas and evaluate the ones that you have come up with. By using surveys, reviews and social media, crowdstorming gives you a good basis of what to build your ideas on. While sometimes this falls short of bringing the absolute best idea forward, it can do excellent things for insight.

Cheatstorm

Cheatstorming is a great way to see what competitors are up to. Unlike most other methods mentioned cheatstorming doesn't rely on churning out ideas from scratch but looking at what others are doing and leveraging those ideas. Cheatstorming can be thought of as cognitive sustainability - reusing what has come before.

Bodystorm

This is a technique where participants act out the role of the user. Embodying the user in the scenario the team is trying to solve for can generate insight and spark ideas that can lead to a stronger product or service. Feeling physically involved rather than theorising the problems can have a great beneficial effect.

Prototyping

Yep, that's right - prototyping itself can be a great ideation technique. When you begin building, ideas come to you naturally.

Before going forward with Ideating remember to: ‍

Whenever you embark on a new process or strategy it's important to set a mission. This will help to align the team and make sure that every participant knows what is expected of them. The mission for a great ideation session is to focus on imagination and to push this far and wide. Strong ideation sessions come from team members taking risk, using their imagination and seeing the possibilities as limitless. In order for this to happen three points must be completely understood throughout the team.

1. The space is judgement free - We want to fuel creativity and imagination, that means that there will be some out-of-the-box ideas. The team should support all thoughts and encourage participants to share. Embarrassment has no place in a great ideation session.

2. Quantity is more important than quality - Throw perfectionism out of the window. The aim is to put a lot of ideas on the table. Opt for 20 bad ideas over 2 good ones.

3. The outcome is always a team win - There is no individual winner in an ideation session, the end result that the team goes with is a win for everyone. The focus shouldn't be to come up with the idea that the team chooses but more to dump all of the ideas you have on the table and see where that leads.

These points are fundamental to the success of an ideation workshop. If team members feel that they can't think freely for fear of being judged then your session won't be enjoyable and you'll only reap half of the benefits. Ideation sessions should be a space to let your imagination run wild, the aim should be to produce tons of ideas rather than hit the nail on the head or "win" the best idea.

"You can't have a good brainstorm without setting it up right-having everyone feeling safe and heard. A key element is trust, consistent with IDEO's culture of trust. Bullies and blowhards are not tolerated." - Peter Macdonald, design lead at IDEO.

Create the right environment: ‍

For a good, productive ideation session the atmosphere in the room needs to be right. Here are some things to keep in mind when deciding where to set up:

Lots of natural light, if possible!

Big whiteboards (or empty walls for magic paper)

Distraction-free atmosphere (aka no laptops, or colleagues interrupting your meeting!)

Spacious (but not too large that participants have to raise their voice to be heard)

Close to facilities for bathroom and coffee breaks

The right type of environment is really at the crux of a good session. Instead of using a boardroom with someone sitting at the head of the table taking the lead - create a space where everyone can feel equal and comfortable. Offer snacks, water and create a calm atmosphere that will allow the participants to do their best work. Creating can be hard if there is an anxious feeling in the room. The ideal room must have sufficient space for the participants to feel comfortable, but not so big that participants can't communicate easily. These tips may seem small, but don't underestimate what a comfortable space can do for some brain power!

Get into the right headspace:

If you're used to working independently this step is especially important. It can be difficult for those who are used to focusing on just applying their own thoughts to an end goal to jump into collaborative working. Spend a few minutes getting acclimated. Some icebreaker techniques for this are:

Sound Ball - This one is great for clearing out some of the shyness and helping the team feel comfortable around each other. It's also based on creating different sounds which helps to get that imagination flowing.

Knife, Baby and Angry Cat - This exercise is great to build focus while also easing any nervousness.

30 Circles - A wonderful exercise that also helps the team to use their imagination and step out of their comfort zone.

‍

Brainstorming sessions can run out of steam pretty quickly if the time constraints are not set to keep the conversation flowing. Your session shouldn't go on tangents and shouldn't feel stunted. We find that setting 15-20 minutes for each topic you need to cover works well, depending on how many you need to get through.

PRO TIP: Use a Time Timer so everyone can see the time and has a visual indicator. This will save time and ease any anxiety as all participants will fill in the loop and you won't have to keep announcing the time.

During the ideation session:

Implement the "always say yes" improvisation technique:

Some of the best ideas come from building off of other ideas. The general consensus is that generating lots of ideas creates space to inspire even better, more out-of-the-box ideas.

Stay with us here - sometimes an interesting idea is put forward, but it's still not quite right and needs tweaking. If you don't follow the idea until the end you might be missing out on some ideation GOLD. So adopt the improvisation technique of saying "Yes, and...". Implementing this can do wonders for encouraging participants to build on their thoughts and take their ideas in lots of wonderful directions. This helps to put a positive spin on the contribution and encourages others to feel confident with their ideas.

With all of the excitement of ideating, it can be easy to head off into multiple tangents about saving ideas and benefiting other areas of work with x, y and z. While it is great that excitement can build, staying on topic is crucial. It's important for the facilitator to gently guide the participants back to the topic at hand. We find that noting tangential ideas on a whiteboard can help ease the team as they feel their points won't be forgotten, a great method to follow is The Parking Lot method. With their mind clear of distractions they can focus on the topic at hand.

Concentrate the ideas:

Brainstorming works best when it is visual. Encourage sketching and condensing information into short headlines to keep track of everyone's thoughts. Long text that rambles on should be avoided. You want to keep everything as simple and clear as possible so everyone can follow each idea. If teammates are talking, grab a Sharpie and jot down their thoughts in a more concise manner.

Please note that all ideas should be shared one at a time. This allows the scribe to write them, or the participant to be heard as they post their idea to the board.

‍

If the brainstorm has gone well then you should have TONS of ideas. You should have a mix of some practical, easy, difficult and some verging on absolute surrealism. It can be tempting to remove all the ideas that seem too far fetched but DON'T go with your instinct to scrap the out-there ideas. Really out-of-the-box ideas are sometimes the ones verging on genius.

Try giving your team different coloured voting dots so they can vote according to different categories. You can try labelling each colour to signify a category, for example these could be: the lowest hanging fruit, what you think would bring you closest to a realistic place and the idea that excites you the most.

Characteristics needed for strong ideation:

Anyone can create a strong ideation session but having the below characteristics will really set you much further ahead and get you to those golden ideas.

Adapting - Being able to tune into what the tasks needs of you and getting the hang of new tasks quickly.

Connecting - Being able to connect themes and ideas to generate more that will add to the bigger picture.

Disrupting - Being able to think through commonly held beliefs and assumptions to find deeper meanings and answers.

Flipping - Turning dead-ends into positive outcomes (HMW is GREAT for this)

Creating - Being able to think far and wide and not feel hindered by what is considered realistic.

Experimenting - Be willing and eager to test out the ideas that you are generating.

Trusting - Being able to share the ideas in an environment where you can trust those who surround you.

Curiosity - Understanding that there is no such thing as a bad question and asking many questions to gain more knowledge and insight.

Supporting - Encouraging team members to take risks, being a supportive member of the team.

We're so glad you followed us to the end of how to ACE an ideation session - but don't just stop there - there's so much more that can help get those creative juices flowing. Try multiple ways of ideating to find out what fits your team best and let us know how you get on down below!

Content Creator for AJ&Smart

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Design Thinking Phase 3: Ideation Tips and Advice | Workshopper

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Discover ideation - the 3rd phase of design thinking, where teams puts their heads together to generate ideas through brainstorming, sketching, and more. Ideation is the third phase of the Design Thinking process, and, as the name suggests, is all about generating ideas and solutions.

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In 2009, Airbnb was close to going bust. Like so many startups, they had launched but barely anyone noticed. The company's revenue was flatlined at $200 per week. Split between three young founders living in San Francisco, this meant near indefinite losses on zero growth. As everyone knows, venture investors look for companies that show hockey stick graphs, and according to co-founder Joe Gebbia, his company had a horizontal drumstick graph. The team was forced to max out their credit cards.

At the time, Airbnb was part of Y Combinator. One afternoon, the team was poring over their search results for New York City listings with Paul Graham, trying to figure out what wasn't working, why they weren't growing. After spending time on the site using the product, Gebbia had a realization. "We noticed a pattern. There's some similarity between all these 40 listings. The similarity is that the photos sucked. The photos were not great photos. People were using their camera phones or using their images from classified sites. It actually wasn't a surprise that people weren't booking rooms because you couldn't even really see what it is that you were paying for."

Graham tossed out a completely non-scalable and non-technical solution to the problem: travel to New York, rent a camera, spend some time with customers listing properties, and replace the amateur photography with beautiful high-resolution pictures. The three-man team grabbed the next flight to New York and upgraded all the amateur photos to beautiful images. There wasn't any data to back this decision originally. They just went and did it. A week later, the results were in: improving the pictures doubled the weekly revenue to $400 per week. This was the first financial improvement that the company had seen in over eight months. They knew they were onto something.

This was the turning point for the company. Gebbia shared that the team initially believed that everything they did had to be 'scalable.' It was only when they gave themselves permission to experiment with non-scalable changes to the business that they climbed out of what they called the 'trough of sorrow.'

"We had this Silicon Valley mentality that you had to solve problems in a scalable way because that's the beauty of code. Right? You can write one line of code that can solve a problem for one customer, 10,000 or 10 million. For the first year of the business, we sat behind our computer screens trying to code our way through problems. We believed this was the dogma of how you're supposed to solve problems in Silicon Valley. It wasn't until our first session with Paul Graham at Y Combinator where we basically... the first time someone gave us permission to do things that don't scale, and it was in that moment, and I'll never forget it because it changed the trajectory of the business"

Gebbia's experience with upgrading photographs proved that code alone can't solve every problem that customers have. While computers are powerful, there's only so much that software alone can achieve. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs tend to become comfortable in their roles as keyboard jockeys. However, going out to meet customers in the real world is almost always the best way to wrangle their problems and come up with clever solutions.

Gebbia went on to share how an early design school experience also shaped his thinking about customer development, "If we were working on a medical device, we would go out into the world. We would go talk with all of the stakeholders, all of the users of that product, doctors, nurses, patients and then we would have that epiphany moment where we would lay down in the bed in the hospital. We'd have the device applied to us, and we would sit there and feel exactly what it felt like to be the patient, and it was in that moment where you start to go aha, that's really uncomfortable. There's probably a better way to do this." This experience pushed Gebbia to make 'being a patient' a core value of their design team.

The desire to always be the patient is immediately felt by all new team members. "Everybody takes a trip in their first or second week in the company and then they document it. We have some structured questions that they answer and then they actually share back to the entire company. It's incredibly important that everyone in the company knows that we believe in this so much, we're going to pay for you to go take a trip on your first week."

While Airbnb is data driven, they don't let data push them around. Instead of developing reactively to metrics, the team often starts with a creative hypothesis, implements a change, reviews how it impacts the business and then repeats that process.

Gebbia shares, "I'm not sure how useful data is if you don't have meaningful scale to test it against. It may be misleading. The way that we do things is that if we have an idea for something, we now kind of build it into the culture of this idea that it is okay to do something that doesn't scale. You go be a pirate, venture into the world and get a little test nugget, and come back and tell us the story that you found."

Individual team members at Airbnb make small bets on new features, and then measure if there's a meaningful return on the bet. If there's a payoff, they send more pirates in that direction. This structure encourages employees to take measured, productive risks on behalf of the company that can lead to the development of major new features. It allows Airbnb to move quickly and continually find new opportunities.

We're trying to create an environment where people can see a glimmer of something and basically throw dynamite on it and blow it up to become something bigger than anyone could have ever imagined.

As part of the onboarding process at Airbnb, the company encourages new employees to ship new features on their first day at the company. It earns them their sea legs and shows that great ideas can come from anywhere. This approach yields results in unexpected ways. For example, one Airbnb designer was assigned what seemed like the small task of reevaluating the "star" function. In the original Airbnb product, users could 'star' properties to add them to a wish list - a basic feature. Gebbia recounts the story:

"Our new designer comes back and says I have it. I go what do you mean you have it? You only spent the day on it. He goes, well, I think the stars are the kinds of things you see in utility-driven experiences. He explained our service is so aspirational. Why don't we tap into that? He goes I'm going to change that to a heart. I go, wow, okay. It's interesting, and we can ship it so we did. When we ship it, we put code in it so we can track it and see how behavior changed."

Sure enough, the simple change from a star to a heart increased engagement by over 30%. In short, let people be pirates, ship stuff and try new things.

When you're building product at a startup you're always moving a million miles an hour. It's tough. You need to ship. Gebbia tries to balance this reality with the need to think in new ways by constantly pushing his team to think bigger. He notes, "Anytime somebody comes to me with something, my first instinct when I look at it is to think bigger. That's my instinctual piece of advice. Think bigger. Whatever it is, blow it out of proportion and see where that takes you. Come back to me when you've thought about that times 100. Show me what that looks like."

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How Design Thinking Transformed Airbnb from a Failing Startup to a Billion Dollar Business

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In 2009, Airbnb was close to going bust. Like so many startups, they had launched but barely anyone noticed. The company's revenue was flatlined at $200 per week. Split between three young founders living in San Francisco, this meant near indefinite losses on zero growth.

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As a practice, design thinking is characterized by openness, curiosity and acceptance of diverse ... [+]
Shutterstock

Everywhere you turn nowadays, people bring up design thinking as the panacea to invite customer experiences into the game. The 2017 EY report "Demystifying design thinking: becoming part of the movement", for example, urged organizations to "embrace design thinking and embed it into their operating models". 10 years after the movement emerged, specialists are seeing design thinking as THE catalyst to boost professionals' involvement in their clients' experience, be it in the fields of health, design, agriculture, architecture, high tech, software... and even foreign policy! Design thinking provides the necessary impetus to ensure the customer experience is considered before programs are built: "Startups and software companies were some of the first to embrace design thinking as a way to build an entire company," continues the report. It concludes that this approach towards product development improves the chances of success and is more efficient than traditional models.

But what exactly is design thinking - beyond a way of solving wicked problems? Well, in a nutshell, it's an approach that focuses on the users and other stakeholders and that emphasizes experimentation and iteration. The principle is to use empathy to frame and define problems from a user's or a stakeholder's perspective and to create innovative products, services and processes to solve such problems. To do this, it requires managers to be embedded in the experience of the users and to experiment the solutions envisioned frequently and early in the process. A typical design thinking project follows five steps: empathize with users; define their issues; ideate for solutions; create prototypes; and test them with the users. It's particularly suitable to addressing complex problems and solving the challenges a fast-moving world is facing as linear approaches often miss the target.
Design Thinking Provokes Cultural Collisions
However, research by myself and senior academic Lisa Carlgren reveals that design thinking implementation in organization has enjoyed mixed results and several challenges remain unanswered. We have studied implementation stories through a cultural perspective lens. The resulting paper, "When Cultures collide: What Can we Learn from Frictions in the Implementation of Design Thinking?" was published in a special issue of Journal of Product Innovation Management earlier this year. Our five-year research project focused on 13 international firms in sectors ranging from software and food to healthcare and high tech which have adopted design thinking. We undertook hundreds of in-depth interviews with design thinking practitioners and experts, using qualitative ethnographic approaches to better understand the cultural tensions. As a result, we propose a cultural archetype of design thinking and identify the challenges that such archetype generates when confronted with the culture of the adopting organization.
The Challenges Posed By Emotion, Time And Centralization
As a practice, design thinking is characterized by openness, curiosity and acceptance of diverse backgrounds and competencies - an inclusive atmosphere where everyone's opinion counts. Its emphasis is on empathy and emotional binding with the users and more generally the members of the project. However, our research shows that in several cultures an employee displaying his or her emotions and intuitions may be perceived as being inappropriate in organizations with a low tolerance for emotional outbursts.

Then there is the question of time. One employee tells us: "Companies intend to have a very short-term focus and design thinking takes time. You need to be able to invest and I think that doesn't always work." Another comments: "People have busy schedules, there is a life of short-cuts and hacks. No time and mind space for doing design thinking. They constantly want shorter versions of DT: one day, half a day, two hours, one hour..." This time pressure has negative consequences on implementing qualitative, long-term design thinking policies.

A centralized work culture also challenges design thinking and the flat hierarchy it requires. Indeed, design thinking is oriented towards decentralization since teams need high degrees of autonomy and trust to achieve creative goals. This thinking promotes a "rule-breaking" attitude to boost autonomy and instills a feeling that anything is acceptable in order to increase creativity. Therefore, challenges arise when control, power, and responsibility in the organization are concentrated at the top and when the control is tight, with many formal rules and procedures that guide behavior. Thus, cultural mismatches associated with such issues have affected the outcome of design thinking work and its perceived advantages
How To Overcome Cultural Mismatches
To counter all these mismatches, our work proposes a cultural archetype which we are convinced can help create awareness and foster dialogue to understand and limit potential tensions due to these mismatches. Managers can help create this awareness by setting goals for an ideal culture where design thinking is used. It can also help identify hindrances and enablers and their indicators.

This requires what we call "bilingual managers" who can marry design and business, thus championing design thinking in the business world. If you are looking for a broad culture change, for example, your managers need to consider your current systems and policies to identify those which reinforce unwanted values. How could design thinking be a catalyst to change these values directly or indirectly? Being aware of both the design thinking's cultural characteristics and the factors in your organization that are impossible to change can allow you to create alternative strategies, such as creating microclimates. Identifying pockets where design thinking has a chance of succeeding can be the bedrock for scaling and building legitimacy at the heart of your business.

But, beware. Culture is just one part of the design thinking business approach and it doesn't fully explain why it often fails. Factors like promotions and over-commercialization have also led to disappointing results. Design thinking can work but it remains just one piece in the business innovation puzzle.
Sihem BenMahmoud-Jouini Daniel Brown is Chief Editor at HEC Paris. is Associate Professor of Innovation at HEC Paris.

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The Challenges Posed By Design Thinking-And How To Overcome Them

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Although the advantages of design thinking are now well recognized, this practice still entails some challenges, mostly cultural. To overcome these differences, Associate Professor of Innovation at HEC Paris Business School Sihem BenMahmoud-Jouini has developed tools which help improving dialogue.

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In 2009, Airbnb was close to going bust. Like so many startups, they had launched but barely anyone noticed. The company's revenue was flatlined at $200 per week. Split between three young founders living in San Francisco, this meant near indefinite losses on zero growth. As everyone knows, venture investors look for companies that show hockey stick graphs, and according to co-founder Joe Gebbia, his company had a horizontal drumstick graph. The team was forced to max out their credit cards.

At the time, Airbnb was part of Y Combinator. One afternoon, the team was poring over their search results for New York City listings with Paul Graham, trying to figure out what wasn't working, why they weren't growing. After spending time on the site using the product, Gebbia had a realization. "We noticed a pattern. There's some similarity between all these 40 listings. The similarity is that the photos sucked. The photos were not great photos. People were using their camera phones or using their images from classified sites. It actually wasn't a surprise that people weren't booking rooms because you couldn't even really see what it is that you were paying for."

Graham tossed out a completely non-scalable and non-technical solution to the problem: travel to New York, rent a camera, spend some time with customers listing properties, and replace the amateur photography with beautiful high-resolution pictures. The three-man team grabbed the next flight to New York and upgraded all the amateur photos to beautiful images. There wasn't any data to back this decision originally. They just went and did it. A week later, the results were in: improving the pictures doubled the weekly revenue to $400 per week. This was the first financial improvement that the company had seen in over eight months. They knew they were onto something.

This was the turning point for the company. Gebbia shared that the team initially believed that everything they did had to be 'scalable.' It was only when they gave themselves permission to experiment with non-scalable changes to the business that they climbed out of what they called the 'trough of sorrow.'

"We had this Silicon Valley mentality that you had to solve problems in a scalable way because that's the beauty of code. Right? You can write one line of code that can solve a problem for one customer, 10,000 or 10 million. For the first year of the business, we sat behind our computer screens trying to code our way through problems. We believed this was the dogma of how you're supposed to solve problems in Silicon Valley. It wasn't until our first session with Paul Graham at Y Combinator where we basically... the first time someone gave us permission to do things that don't scale, and it was in that moment, and I'll never forget it because it changed the trajectory of the business"

Gebbia's experience with upgrading photographs proved that code alone can't solve every problem that customers have. While computers are powerful, there's only so much that software alone can achieve. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs tend to become comfortable in their roles as keyboard jockeys. However, going out to meet customers in the real world is almost always the best way to wrangle their problems and come up with clever solutions.

Gebbia went on to share how an early design school experience also shaped his thinking about customer development, "If we were working on a medical device, we would go out into the world. We would go talk with all of the stakeholders, all of the users of that product, doctors, nurses, patients and then we would have that epiphany moment where we would lay down in the bed in the hospital. We'd have the device applied to us, and we would sit there and feel exactly what it felt like to be the patient, and it was in that moment where you start to go aha, that's really uncomfortable. There's probably a better way to do this." This experience pushed Gebbia to make 'being a patient' a core value of their design team.

The desire to always be the patient is immediately felt by all new team members. "Everybody takes a trip in their first or second week in the company and then they document it. We have some structured questions that they answer and then they actually share back to the entire company. It's incredibly important that everyone in the company knows that we believe in this so much, we're going to pay for you to go take a trip on your first week."

While Airbnb is data driven, they don't let data push them around. Instead of developing reactively to metrics, the team often starts with a creative hypothesis, implements a change, reviews how it impacts the business and then repeats that process.

Gebbia shares, "I'm not sure how useful data is if you don't have meaningful scale to test it against. It may be misleading. The way that we do things is that if we have an idea for something, we now kind of build it into the culture of this idea that it is okay to do something that doesn't scale. You go be a pirate, venture into the world and get a little test nugget, and come back and tell us the story that you found."

Individual team members at Airbnb make small bets on new features, and then measure if there's a meaningful return on the bet. If there's a payoff, they send more pirates in that direction. This structure encourages employees to take measured, productive risks on behalf of the company that can lead to the development of major new features. It allows Airbnb to move quickly and continually find new opportunities.

We're trying to create an environment where people can see a glimmer of something and basically throw dynamite on it and blow it up to become something bigger than anyone could have ever imagined.

As part of the onboarding process at Airbnb, the company encourages new employees to ship new features on their first day at the company. It earns them their sea legs and shows that great ideas can come from anywhere. This approach yields results in unexpected ways. For example, one Airbnb designer was assigned what seemed like the small task of reevaluating the "star" function. In the original Airbnb product, users could 'star' properties to add them to a wish list - a basic feature. Gebbia recounts the story:

"Our new designer comes back and says I have it. I go what do you mean you have it? You only spent the day on it. He goes, well, I think the stars are the kinds of things you see in utility-driven experiences. He explained our service is so aspirational. Why don't we tap into that? He goes I'm going to change that to a heart. I go, wow, okay. It's interesting, and we can ship it so we did. When we ship it, we put code in it so we can track it and see how behavior changed."

Sure enough, the simple change from a star to a heart increased engagement by over 30%. In short, let people be pirates, ship stuff and try new things.

When you're building product at a startup you're always moving a million miles an hour. It's tough. You need to ship. Gebbia tries to balance this reality with the need to think in new ways by constantly pushing his team to think bigger. He notes, "Anytime somebody comes to me with something, my first instinct when I look at it is to think bigger. That's my instinctual piece of advice. Think bigger. Whatever it is, blow it out of proportion and see where that takes you. Come back to me when you've thought about that times 100. Show me what that looks like."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Design Thinking Transformed Airbnb from a Failing Startup to a Billion Dollar Business

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In 2009, Airbnb was close to going bust. Like so many startups, they had launched but barely anyone noticed. The company's revenue was flatlined at $200 per week. Split between three young founders living in San Francisco, this meant near indefinite losses on zero growth.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
“Everybody loves an innovation, an idea that sells.“ But how do we arrive at such ideas that sell? And is it possible to learn how to become an innovator? Over the years Design Thinking – a program or

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In 2009, Airbnb was close to going bust. Like so many startups, they had launched but barely anyone noticed. The company's revenue was flatlined at $200 per week. Split between three young founders living in San Francisco, this meant near indefinite losses on zero growth. As everyone knows, venture investors look for companies that show hockey stick graphs, and according to co-founder Joe Gebbia, his company had a horizontal drumstick graph. The team was forced to max out their credit cards.

At the time, Airbnb was part of Y Combinator. One afternoon, the team was poring over their search results for New York City listings with Paul Graham, trying to figure out what wasn't working, why they weren't growing. After spending time on the site using the product, Gebbia had a realization. "We noticed a pattern. There's some similarity between all these 40 listings. The similarity is that the photos sucked. The photos were not great photos. People were using their camera phones or using their images from classified sites. It actually wasn't a surprise that people weren't booking rooms because you couldn't even really see what it is that you were paying for."

Graham tossed out a completely non-scalable and non-technical solution to the problem: travel to New York, rent a camera, spend some time with customers listing properties, and replace the amateur photography with beautiful high-resolution pictures. The three-man team grabbed the next flight to New York and upgraded all the amateur photos to beautiful images. There wasn't any data to back this decision originally. They just went and did it. A week later, the results were in: improving the pictures doubled the weekly revenue to $400 per week. This was the first financial improvement that the company had seen in over eight months. They knew they were onto something.

This was the turning point for the company. Gebbia shared that the team initially believed that everything they did had to be 'scalable.' It was only when they gave themselves permission to experiment with non-scalable changes to the business that they climbed out of what they called the 'trough of sorrow.'

"We had this Silicon Valley mentality that you had to solve problems in a scalable way because that's the beauty of code. Right? You can write one line of code that can solve a problem for one customer, 10,000 or 10 million. For the first year of the business, we sat behind our computer screens trying to code our way through problems. We believed this was the dogma of how you're supposed to solve problems in Silicon Valley. It wasn't until our first session with Paul Graham at Y Combinator where we basically... the first time someone gave us permission to do things that don't scale, and it was in that moment, and I'll never forget it because it changed the trajectory of the business"

Gebbia's experience with upgrading photographs proved that code alone can't solve every problem that customers have. While computers are powerful, there's only so much that software alone can achieve. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs tend to become comfortable in their roles as keyboard jockeys. However, going out to meet customers in the real world is almost always the best way to wrangle their problems and come up with clever solutions.

Gebbia went on to share how an early design school experience also shaped his thinking about customer development, "If we were working on a medical device, we would go out into the world. We would go talk with all of the stakeholders, all of the users of that product, doctors, nurses, patients and then we would have that epiphany moment where we would lay down in the bed in the hospital. We'd have the device applied to us, and we would sit there and feel exactly what it felt like to be the patient, and it was in that moment where you start to go aha, that's really uncomfortable. There's probably a better way to do this." This experience pushed Gebbia to make 'being a patient' a core value of their design team.

The desire to always be the patient is immediately felt by all new team members. "Everybody takes a trip in their first or second week in the company and then they document it. We have some structured questions that they answer and then they actually share back to the entire company. It's incredibly important that everyone in the company knows that we believe in this so much, we're going to pay for you to go take a trip on your first week."

While Airbnb is data driven, they don't let data push them around. Instead of developing reactively to metrics, the team often starts with a creative hypothesis, implements a change, reviews how it impacts the business and then repeats that process.

Gebbia shares, "I'm not sure how useful data is if you don't have meaningful scale to test it against. It may be misleading. The way that we do things is that if we have an idea for something, we now kind of build it into the culture of this idea that it is okay to do something that doesn't scale. You go be a pirate, venture into the world and get a little test nugget, and come back and tell us the story that you found."

Individual team members at Airbnb make small bets on new features, and then measure if there's a meaningful return on the bet. If there's a payoff, they send more pirates in that direction. This structure encourages employees to take measured, productive risks on behalf of the company that can lead to the development of major new features. It allows Airbnb to move quickly and continually find new opportunities.

We're trying to create an environment where people can see a glimmer of something and basically throw dynamite on it and blow it up to become something bigger than anyone could have ever imagined.

As part of the onboarding process at Airbnb, the company encourages new employees to ship new features on their first day at the company. It earns them their sea legs and shows that great ideas can come from anywhere. This approach yields results in unexpected ways. For example, one Airbnb designer was assigned what seemed like the small task of reevaluating the "star" function. In the original Airbnb product, users could 'star' properties to add them to a wish list - a basic feature. Gebbia recounts the story:

"Our new designer comes back and says I have it. I go what do you mean you have it? You only spent the day on it. He goes, well, I think the stars are the kinds of things you see in utility-driven experiences. He explained our service is so aspirational. Why don't we tap into that? He goes I'm going to change that to a heart. I go, wow, okay. It's interesting, and we can ship it so we did. When we ship it, we put code in it so we can track it and see how behavior changed."

Sure enough, the simple change from a star to a heart increased engagement by over 30%. In short, let people be pirates, ship stuff and try new things.

When you're building product at a startup you're always moving a million miles an hour. It's tough. You need to ship. Gebbia tries to balance this reality with the need to think in new ways by constantly pushing his team to think bigger. He notes, "Anytime somebody comes to me with something, my first instinct when I look at it is to think bigger. That's my instinctual piece of advice. Think bigger. Whatever it is, blow it out of proportion and see where that takes you. Come back to me when you've thought about that times 100. Show me what that looks like."

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How Design Thinking Transformed Airbnb from a Failing Startup to a Billion Dollar Business

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In 2009, Airbnb was close to going bust. Like so many startups, they had launched but barely anyone noticed. The company's revenue was flatlined at $200 per week. Split between three young founders living in San Francisco, this meant near indefinite losses on zero growth.

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As a practice, design thinking is characterized by openness, curiosity and acceptance of diverse ... [+]
Shutterstock

Everywhere you turn nowadays, people bring up design thinking as the panacea to invite customer experiences into the game. The 2017 EY report "Demystifying design thinking: becoming part of the movement", for example, urged organizations to "embrace design thinking and embed it into their operating models". 10 years after the movement emerged, specialists are seeing design thinking as THE catalyst to boost professionals' involvement in their clients' experience, be it in the fields of health, design, agriculture, architecture, high tech, software... and even foreign policy! Design thinking provides the necessary impetus to ensure the customer experience is considered before programs are built: "Startups and software companies were some of the first to embrace design thinking as a way to build an entire company," continues the report. It concludes that this approach towards product development improves the chances of success and is more efficient than traditional models.

But what exactly is design thinking - beyond a way of solving wicked problems? Well, in a nutshell, it's an approach that focuses on the users and other stakeholders and that emphasizes experimentation and iteration. The principle is to use empathy to frame and define problems from a user's or a stakeholder's perspective and to create innovative products, services and processes to solve such problems. To do this, it requires managers to be embedded in the experience of the users and to experiment the solutions envisioned frequently and early in the process. A typical design thinking project follows five steps: empathize with users; define their issues; ideate for solutions; create prototypes; and test them with the users. It's particularly suitable to addressing complex problems and solving the challenges a fast-moving world is facing as linear approaches often miss the target.
Design Thinking Provokes Cultural Collisions
However, research by myself and senior academic Lisa Carlgren reveals that design thinking implementation in organization has enjoyed mixed results and several challenges remain unanswered. We have studied implementation stories through a cultural perspective lens. The resulting paper, "When Cultures collide: What Can we Learn from Frictions in the Implementation of Design Thinking?" was published in a special issue of Journal of Product Innovation Management earlier this year. Our five-year research project focused on 13 international firms in sectors ranging from software and food to healthcare and high tech which have adopted design thinking. We undertook hundreds of in-depth interviews with design thinking practitioners and experts, using qualitative ethnographic approaches to better understand the cultural tensions. As a result, we propose a cultural archetype of design thinking and identify the challenges that such archetype generates when confronted with the culture of the adopting organization.
The Challenges Posed By Emotion, Time And Centralization
As a practice, design thinking is characterized by openness, curiosity and acceptance of diverse backgrounds and competencies - an inclusive atmosphere where everyone's opinion counts. Its emphasis is on empathy and emotional binding with the users and more generally the members of the project. However, our research shows that in several cultures an employee displaying his or her emotions and intuitions may be perceived as being inappropriate in organizations with a low tolerance for emotional outbursts.

Then there is the question of time. One employee tells us: "Companies intend to have a very short-term focus and design thinking takes time. You need to be able to invest and I think that doesn't always work." Another comments: "People have busy schedules, there is a life of short-cuts and hacks. No time and mind space for doing design thinking. They constantly want shorter versions of DT: one day, half a day, two hours, one hour..." This time pressure has negative consequences on implementing qualitative, long-term design thinking policies.

A centralized work culture also challenges design thinking and the flat hierarchy it requires. Indeed, design thinking is oriented towards decentralization since teams need high degrees of autonomy and trust to achieve creative goals. This thinking promotes a "rule-breaking" attitude to boost autonomy and instills a feeling that anything is acceptable in order to increase creativity. Therefore, challenges arise when control, power, and responsibility in the organization are concentrated at the top and when the control is tight, with many formal rules and procedures that guide behavior. Thus, cultural mismatches associated with such issues have affected the outcome of design thinking work and its perceived advantages
How To Overcome Cultural Mismatches
To counter all these mismatches, our work proposes a cultural archetype which we are convinced can help create awareness and foster dialogue to understand and limit potential tensions due to these mismatches. Managers can help create this awareness by setting goals for an ideal culture where design thinking is used. It can also help identify hindrances and enablers and their indicators.

This requires what we call "bilingual managers" who can marry design and business, thus championing design thinking in the business world. If you are looking for a broad culture change, for example, your managers need to consider your current systems and policies to identify those which reinforce unwanted values. How could design thinking be a catalyst to change these values directly or indirectly? Being aware of both the design thinking's cultural characteristics and the factors in your organization that are impossible to change can allow you to create alternative strategies, such as creating microclimates. Identifying pockets where design thinking has a chance of succeeding can be the bedrock for scaling and building legitimacy at the heart of your business.

But, beware. Culture is just one part of the design thinking business approach and it doesn't fully explain why it often fails. Factors like promotions and over-commercialization have also led to disappointing results. Design thinking can work but it remains just one piece in the business innovation puzzle.
Sihem BenMahmoud-Jouini Daniel Brown is Chief Editor at HEC Paris. is Associate Professor of Innovation at HEC Paris.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Challenges Posed By Design Thinking-And How To Overcome Them

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Although the advantages of design thinking are now well recognized, this practice still entails some challenges, mostly cultural. To overcome these differences, Associate Professor of Innovation at HEC Paris Business School Sihem BenMahmoud-Jouini has developed tools which help improving dialogue.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
As a practice, design thinking is characterized by openness, curiosity and acceptance of diverse ... [+]
Shutterstock

Everywhere you turn nowadays, people bring up design thinking as the panacea to invite customer experiences into the game. The 2017 EY report "Demystifying design thinking: becoming part of the movement", for example, urged organizations to "embrace design thinking and embed it into their operating models". 10 years after the movement emerged, specialists are seeing design thinking as THE catalyst to boost professionals' involvement in their clients' experience, be it in the fields of health, design, agriculture, architecture, high tech, software... and even foreign policy! Design thinking provides the necessary impetus to ensure the customer experience is considered before programs are built: "Startups and software companies were some of the first to embrace design thinking as a way to build an entire company," continues the report. It concludes that this approach towards product development improves the chances of success and is more efficient than traditional models.

But what exactly is design thinking - beyond a way of solving wicked problems? Well, in a nutshell, it's an approach that focuses on the users and other stakeholders and that emphasizes experimentation and iteration. The principle is to use empathy to frame and define problems from a user's or a stakeholder's perspective and to create innovative products, services and processes to solve such problems. To do this, it requires managers to be embedded in the experience of the users and to experiment the solutions envisioned frequently and early in the process. A typical design thinking project follows five steps: empathize with users; define their issues; ideate for solutions; create prototypes; and test them with the users. It's particularly suitable to addressing complex problems and solving the challenges a fast-moving world is facing as linear approaches often miss the target.
Design Thinking Provokes Cultural Collisions
However, research by myself and senior academic Lisa Carlgren reveals that design thinking implementation in organization has enjoyed mixed results and several challenges remain unanswered. We have studied implementation stories through a cultural perspective lens. The resulting paper, "When Cultures collide: What Can we Learn from Frictions in the Implementation of Design Thinking?" was published in a special issue of Journal of Product Innovation Management earlier this year. Our five-year research project focused on 13 international firms in sectors ranging from software and food to healthcare and high tech which have adopted design thinking. We undertook hundreds of in-depth interviews with design thinking practitioners and experts, using qualitative ethnographic approaches to better understand the cultural tensions. As a result, we propose a cultural archetype of design thinking and identify the challenges that such archetype generates when confronted with the culture of the adopting organization.
The Challenges Posed By Emotion, Time And Centralization
As a practice, design thinking is characterized by openness, curiosity and acceptance of diverse backgrounds and competencies - an inclusive atmosphere where everyone's opinion counts. Its emphasis is on empathy and emotional binding with the users and more generally the members of the project. However, our research shows that in several cultures an employee displaying his or her emotions and intuitions may be perceived as being inappropriate in organizations with a low tolerance for emotional outbursts.

Then there is the question of time. One employee tells us: "Companies intend to have a very short-term focus and design thinking takes time. You need to be able to invest and I think that doesn't always work." Another comments: "People have busy schedules, there is a life of short-cuts and hacks. No time and mind space for doing design thinking. They constantly want shorter versions of DT: one day, half a day, two hours, one hour..." This time pressure has negative consequences on implementing qualitative, long-term design thinking policies.

A centralized work culture also challenges design thinking and the flat hierarchy it requires. Indeed, design thinking is oriented towards decentralization since teams need high degrees of autonomy and trust to achieve creative goals. This thinking promotes a "rule-breaking" attitude to boost autonomy and instills a feeling that anything is acceptable in order to increase creativity. Therefore, challenges arise when control, power, and responsibility in the organization are concentrated at the top and when the control is tight, with many formal rules and procedures that guide behavior. Thus, cultural mismatches associated with such issues have affected the outcome of design thinking work and its perceived advantages
How To Overcome Cultural Mismatches
To counter all these mismatches, our work proposes a cultural archetype which we are convinced can help create awareness and foster dialogue to understand and limit potential tensions due to these mismatches. Managers can help create this awareness by setting goals for an ideal culture where design thinking is used. It can also help identify hindrances and enablers and their indicators.

This requires what we call "bilingual managers" who can marry design and business, thus championing design thinking in the business world. If you are looking for a broad culture change, for example, your managers need to consider your current systems and policies to identify those which reinforce unwanted values. How could design thinking be a catalyst to change these values directly or indirectly? Being aware of both the design thinking's cultural characteristics and the factors in your organization that are impossible to change can allow you to create alternative strategies, such as creating microclimates. Identifying pockets where design thinking has a chance of succeeding can be the bedrock for scaling and building legitimacy at the heart of your business.

But, beware. Culture is just one part of the design thinking business approach and it doesn't fully explain why it often fails. Factors like promotions and over-commercialization have also led to disappointing results. Design thinking can work but it remains just one piece in the business innovation puzzle.
Sihem BenMahmoud-Jouini Daniel Brown is Chief Editor at HEC Paris. is Associate Professor of Innovation at HEC Paris.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Challenges Posed By Design Thinking-And How To Overcome Them

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Although the advantages of design thinking are now well recognized, this practice still entails some challenges, mostly cultural. To overcome these differences, Associate Professor of Innovation at HEC Paris Business School Sihem BenMahmoud-Jouini has developed tools which help improving dialogue.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Design Kit is IDEO.org's platform to learn human-centered design, a creative approach to solving the world's most difficult problems.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Recently design thinking has gained momentum in the business world through mentions in the Harvard Business Review and publications. As a thing, design thinking has been described as anything from "a unified framework for innovation" to the "essential tool for simplifying and humanising."

Being in the news though doesn't make design thinking anything new. Unlike the radical outcomes it promises, design thinking as an approach has been slowly evolving since the 1960's. Over the past fifty plus years, design thinking [or design really; let's be honest] has appropriated many of the best tools and techniques from creative fields, social and computer sciences.
What sets design thinking apart?
Design thinking has an amalgamation of approaches, which makes it unique - they may be why - design thinking is applied as an umbrella term for multi-disciplinary, human-centeredprojects that involve research and rapid ideation (idea generation). Most recently as an approach, it has begun to monitor and measure itself in a quantified way. A trick its learnt from the business and economics sectors.
What is this article on about?
Well, as promised this story is dedicated to some of the key players that added to what is labelled design thinking. In general they've done a lot more than contribute here. Many of them have added to the field of design, and pushed it into the territory of improving designing beyond tangible artefacts toward constructing complex systems.

Please consider this a first stop to your own journey into design thinking. I know there is a lot to take in here, but down the bottom there is a download link with a timeline that tracks the dependencies and developments of design thinking. Please, please, please get in touch with any omissions, additions, thoughts. If you start reading this and think "this is basic, I know this already" I challenge you to read the of work by Stephanie Di Russo I was recently introduced to.

1960-1980

Over this twenty year span design was able to re-define not only what it was; but what it could be applied to. This relatively short but very dense period saw the birth of two vastly different approaches to design across the globe.

In 60's America, professions like industrial design and product design made their first small steps to distance themselves from engineering and the sciences. They didn't get very far. Industrial design was still mostly based on quantifiable facts, things that could be proven, measured, and improved on. In many instances a designers workplace was in a university laboratory or on a factory floor - not the trendy studio loft above the best coffee shop in town.

Subjects like ergonomics and Design Science determined design decisions, and designers had highly specialised ways of working.

Design Science as an example was spearheaded by all-round inventor Buckminister Fuller at MIT in the mid fifties. Rare for that period, Fuller created design teams comprised of experts from across disciplines to tackle systemic failures. In his own words Fuller called Design Science:

"...the effective application of the principles of science to the conscious design of our total environment in order to help make the Earth's finite resources meet the needs of all humanity without disrupting the ecological processes of the planet" Buckminister Fuller

He created systematic methods to evaluate, design and solve problems. His goals were grand. He wanted to use the potential of science and technology to intentionally advance the well being and standard of living of everyone. Utopian. Technological. Solutions.

What he did in the 50's and 60's resonates with the design thinking of today because his teams were not designer's but people who were expert enough in their fields to contribute to the goal of a project. This is in contrast to human-centered or participatory design seen in Europe ...we'll get to that later.

Picking his team's from the world best universities, Fuller's teams were elite, exclusive and process driven. In Fuller's approach success was measured so that projects were replicable.

At the same time as an absolute counter to Fuller, Scandinavian cooperative design was also getting off the ground. Unlike the teams of experts assembling in America to fix the world, the Scandinavians invited everyone to become involved in discussions on design.

Instead of being closed off and selective, here designers played the role of facilitators or guides, with everyone from experts to workers and inhabitants co-designing products and services they would want to use.

Many highly innovative projects like Utopia, NJMF, DEMOkratiske Styringssystemer, DEMOS, TIPS and DUE were developed to help workers, unions, workplaces and even government departments tackle the changing workplace environment as a reaction to the introduction of new technologies.

Scandinavian cooperative design was grounded on the belief that every worker "has the right and duty to participate in decisions concerning" what systems are developed and how those systems are designed. DEMOS

Feeding directly into what we call service design today, this way of working relied heavily on designers. They created environments for 'designing-by-doing,' using tools like ' mock-up envisionment ', future circles, organisational games, co-operative prototyping, ethnographic field research, and democratic dialogue to generate new ideas or improve on existing ones. Highly involved and iterative, this mode of presenting and working through designs acted as provocations or discussion starters between all the workshop participants.

What set them apart at this stage was they focused on: "knowing with the users" "giving the users a voice" "learning together by doing" "scenarios, acting it out" "exploratory research and development"... the start of what we call participatory design or co-design today.

Not limited to creating physical artefacts, often the Scandinavian approach saw designer as facilitators co-creating new systems, services and even policies with the people who would be using them in the end.

By the mid 1980's Scandinavian cooperative design made it across the Atlantic to the United States where it became known more widely as participatory design. Over the years, Scandinavian cooperative design has also been known as the Collective Resource Approach and more recently Cooperative Experimental System Development.

What I have to point out here is for anyone born after the 1980's - yup, I'm one of them - is that this block of time between the 1960's and the 1980's was the first real instance of humans designing non-tangible things like software and interactions. What is quite fascinating is that at this early stage of making non-physical designs, the design profession called on social sciences like psychology and anthropology to help them understand how people reacted to fundamentally new ways of doing things via a machine. Human-computer interaction design (HCI) is still using the same processes taken from cooperative design and cognitive psychology today to create and test new interfaces and interactions. From the 60's to the 80's cooperative design, and cognitive psychology imparted direct observation, interviews and participatory design techniques to a designers toolkit.

Buckminister Fuller In 1956 he officially began teaching Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science (CADS) at MIT's Creative engineering Laboratory. His labs applied scientific methods to generating designs. Buckminister's approach built on the knowledge of elite teams of engineers, industrial designers, materials scientists and chemists to innovate. He's known for geodesic domes, the Dymaxion car, Triton city, the "Fly's Eye" Dome and terms like "Spaceship Earth" and synergetic.

"A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist."

Scandinavian co-operative design was a vastly different approach to global design at the time. Unfortunately the language barrier makes this design movement not as well documented as others of the time. Scandinavian cooperative design from the 60's led to many developments in human computer interactions and service design. The Scandinavian approach that is still present and distinctive today, having the same goals it had over 50 years ago of being inclusive and democratic. If you want to learn more look into Susanne Bødker, Pelle Ehn, Dan Sjögren, Yngve Sundblad Kristen Nygaard, Olav-Terje Bergo, Åke Sandberg, Morten Kyng, Lars Mathiassen, and Niels Erik Andersen

"Participation is a fundamental process, not only for democracy, but also for learning" Bødker et al. (2000)

Herbert Simon Published The sciences of the artificial in 1969 which gives design a new range of classifications and parameters. Simon argued that everything designed should be seen as artificial - as opposed to natural.

"The engineer, and more generally the designer, is concerned with how things ought to be - how they ought to be in order to attain goals, and to function."

"Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones."

Victor Papanek Arrived on the design scene with Design for the Real World in 1971. Highly critical of the design profession he integrated Anthropology into his design practice in an attempt to design socially and ecologically responsible things. In the course of his career that lasted into the late 1990s Papanek applied the principles of socially responsible design in collaborative projects with concerns such as UNESCO and the World Health Organization.

"Design must be an innovative, highly creative, cross-disciplinary tool responsive to the needs of men. It must be more research-oriented, and we must stop defiling the earth itself with poorly-designed objects and structures."

Horst Rittel and his counterpart Melvin M. Webber first coined the term Wicked problems in 1972, he is one of the first researchers to try to define design theory while concentrating on design methods. Unlike his predecessors he championed the importance of human experience and perception when designing. For the first time Phenomenology was introduced to the designing of experiences.

1980-1990

During the second wave of design thinking, the focus was solely on what it was that set highly creative people apart from everyone else. It was a moment in time were researchers like Nigel Cross and Donald Schön performed in depth investigations into design processes and how designers got the ideas that no one else did. They observed designers while they were alone and working together in teams. Taking from the social sciences they took note of optimal conditions, individual and collective habits and most importantly the mindsets that designers employed to come up with consistently creative ideas. These investigations of design process later opened the doors for other professions to emulate brainstorming and other creative thinking techniques.

Nigel Cross was a researcher in the field of Human-computer interaction before he began investigating design methodology. His seminal book Designerly ways of Knowing looks at what makes the way designers think and make decisions different to other professions a great influence which helped in the construction of design thinking.

"Everyone can - and does - design. We all design when we plan for something new to happen, whether that might be a new version of a recipe, a new arrangement of the living room furniture, or a new lay tour of a personal web page. [...] So design thinking is something inherent within human cognition; it is a key part of what makes us human."

Donald Schön With a background in philosophy and urban planning much of Schön's work argues against the technical-rationality of design profession seen in the 1960's.The Reflective Practitioner highlights the importance of self-reflection to a successful design process. His work greatly influenced not only design but the field of organisational learning.

"The reflective practitioner allows himself to experience surprise, puzzlement, or confusion in a situation which he finds uncertain or unique. He reflects on the phenomenon before him, and on the prior understandings which have been implicit in his behaviour. He carries out an experiment which serves to generate both a new understanding of the phenomenon and a change in the situation."

1990-2005

During this period, design broadened its scope for the second time. In the early 1990's design expanded scope beyond creating tangible artefacts for the second time, focusing intently on interactions and services. This shift was supported by Buchanan's seminal paperWicked Problems in Design Thinkingwhich explored the potential of design to tackle complex, ambiguous challenges.

By 2003 a selection of universities across Europe and Carnegie Mellon in the states began teaching service design to students. The rise of service design, and their emerging methodologies that focused on complex problems created an environment for a new wave of design tools; including tools for non-designers to participate in design.

Richard Buchanan By connecting the theories of Rittel and Simon with the design practice of Ezio Manzini, Buchanan re-opened the discussion of wicked problems and the role of design in solving them. In 1992 he published Wicked Problems in Design Thinking he drew a path from design thinking to innovation and it's application. In his later writing on design thinking in Design as a New Liberal Art he noted that design as a profession is "integrative" perhaps because of its lack of specializations, it has the potential to connect many disciplines.

Design has no subject matter - that's what make this a powerful discipline. We MAKE our subject matter

Liz Sanders The founder of, Sanders is a pioneer in applied design research. Many of the tools, techniques and methods being used in human-centered design and design thinking today can be attributed to her. Not a designer by trade, her background is in experimental psychology and anthropology. She is also the co-author of Convivial Toolbox, a practical how-to guide for anyone interested in generative design research.

This human-centered design revolution is causing us to rethink the design process. In order to drive the human-centered design revolution, we need to tap into the imaginations and dreams not only of designers, but also of everyday people. New design spaces are emerging in response to everyday people's needs for creativity.

IDEO forms out of a three-way merger. Around the same time as Buchanan was building his case for design thinking, IDEO formed out of a three-way merger. With solid footing, over the course of the next ten years IDEO attracted some highly influential people to join them, from both academia and design practice.

Unlike other design firms at the time they also invited experts from disparate fields like anthropology, business strategy, education or healthcare to guide and augment their design teams and processes. Their tactic to create multidisciplinary teams had the collective gaining recognition with several awards within a few years of starting.

They have since managed to popularise the terms design thinking and human-centred design, launched educational programs at d.school, authored several books, and embed members at prestigious universities world-wide.

Kelley Brothers David and Tom are both authors of best-selling books, long term members of IDEO's management and educators. David and Tom have skills that span from design to business management. They collaborated on Creative Confidence a book about unleashing creativity.

"It turns out that creativity isn't some rare gift to be enjoyed by the lucky few - it's a natural part of human thinking and behavior. In too many of us it gets blocked. But it can be unblocked. And unblocking that creative spark can have far-reaching implications for yourself, your organization, and your community." Tom Kelley

Tim Brown As an Industrial designer and IDEO's CEO, Brown has been a great advocate for Design Thinking and innovation. He has written many articles promoting design thinking for non designers, and Change by Design.

In order to survive in today's complex world, organizations need to generate, embrace, and execute on new ideas. That takes creativity and a creatively capable workforce. It's the secret sauce, or in evolutionary terms, it's what keeps you fit. Organizations without it can't compete.

Jane Fulton Suri With a background in both psychology and architecture Jane has been instrumental in co-authoring many of IDEOs human-centered design tools. To quote her IDEO bio "She evolved techniques for empathic observation and experience prototyping that are now employed widely in the design and innovation of products, services, and environments, as well as systems, organizations, and strategies." Her book Thoughless Acts? shows the link between direct observation and design inspiration. Most recently she authored the Little Book of Design Ethics.

"Design research both inspires imagination and informs intuition through a variety of methods with related intents: to expose patterns underlying the rich reality of people's behaviors and experiences, to explore reactions to probes and prototypes, and to shed light on the unknown through iterative hypothesis and experiment."

Bill Moggridge Was a British designer with a background in Interaction design and on of the co founders of IDEO. He designed the first ever laptop and was a pioneer in applying a human-centred approach to designing objects and emerging technologies. He has authored books that focus on Interaction design, Designing Interactions is one of them - a 764-page introduction to and history of interaction design comprising 40-plus interviews with designers and entrepreneurs, from Douglas Engelbart to Will Wright to Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

I don't think that anyone has really told (people) what design is. It doesn't occur to most people that everything is designed - that every building and everything they touch in the world is designed. Even foods are designed now. So in the process of helping people understand this, making them more aware of the fact that the world around us is something that somebody has control of, perhaps they can feel some sense of control, too. I think that's a nice ambition.

2002-NOW

Since design thinking began being mentioned almost 20 years ago, it has undergone many iterations; only recently gaining recognition. Design consultancies including IDEO, smart design and 'frog' have led the way in adapting design thinking for business purposes.

The growth of the service design field has created new tools and processes that involve co-creation and participatory design. This shift toward collaborative design and multidisciplinary teams has focused on opening internalised creative processes and mindsets to make them more transparent and usable for everyone.

An alternative design group that complement design thinking, applying a more Scandinavian approach than a business-model focus. Fuad-Luke, Sanders and Manzini are pioneers in using co-design or participatory design with the goal or social, economic or environmental impact. They each design with everyday people (often called end-users) to disrupt large scale systems and paradigms with grass-root innovation and vernacular knowledge.

Alistair Fuad-Luke Is a self professed design facilitator, educator, writer and activist currently teaching emerging design practices. His projects emphasise openness, collaboration and co-design with communities and individuals, social well-being and alternative economies. His books Design Activism and The Eco-Design Handbook comment on the role of design in sustainability.

The real JOY of design is to deliver fresh perspectives, improved well-being and an intuitive sense of balance with the wider world. The real SPIRIT of design elicits some higher meaning. The real POWER of design is that professionals and laypeople can co-design in amazingly creative ways. The real BEAUTY of design is its potential for secular, pluralistic expression. The real STRENGTH of design is this healthy variance of expression. The real RELEVANCE of design is its ability to be proactive. The real PASSION of design is in its philosophical, ethical and practical debate.

Ezio Manzini One of the founders of DESIS and supporters of slow design, Manzini's works are grounded in participatory design for sustainability. Utilising many service design tools his books and projects including Sustainable Everyday and Design, When Everybody Designs focus on inclusive ideation and testing for sustainability. Similar to the style of Scandinavian cooperative design in Manzini's work, the designer is the mediator.

"Design for social innovation is everything that expert design can do to activate, sustain and orient processes of social change towards sustainability."

Deborah Szebeko. At the age of 23 Szebeko founded British-based social design agency of ThinkPublic who specialises in design and innovation within the public sector and NGO's. With a focus on co-design and a focus on social issues, thinkpublic has won several awards.

We use a mixture of design processes. We've got a diversity of designers, including service designers, graphics designers, information designers, programmers, marketers, social scientists, positive psychologists, and even anthropologists. This diversity of experts bring different techniques related to their disciplines, and this mixture creates a unique design process - we call it a co-design process - whereby we capture public views.

As a final note I would like to acknowledge some of the women of design thinking I have found on my obscure hunts through white papers and internet searches. I am convinced that there are more. Help me find them.
Angelika Dilschmann, Ewa Gunnarsson, Susanne Bødker, Kerstin Frenckner, Caroline Nordquist, Kerstin Severinson Eklundh Constance Abernathy who won the Harlanne Roberts

Check out the pdf here if you want to take a closer look

This article is based on the design thinking course taught in Monash University's Faculty of Art Design and Architecture. It wouldn't be complete without a reading list now would it? (née Herdman) studied textile design at the Purdue University, where she met Victor Papanek, whom she married in 1966. Like many wives of successful designers and architects, Harlanne played an important role. She typed and critiqued the first edition of Design for the Real World. First Dymaxion Award for Artist/Scientist, and attended Black Mountain College. was a trained architect that directed Buckminster Fuller's office in New York and then founded a private architecture firm. from UTOPIA.
Cohen, Reuven. "Design Thinking: A Unified Framework For Innovation." Forbes. March 14, 2014.

Ellett, John. " How Design Thinking Can Improve Your Marketing Plan: Lessons From IBM Design Studio. "

Fulton Suri, Jane, and IDEO. Thoughtless Acts?: Observations on Intuitive Design. California: Chronicle Books LCC, 2005.

Jane Fulton Suri - Finding Inspiration Through the Power Of Observation." YouTube. Accessed March 19, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FT3qmJEvs0.

Brown, Tim, and Barry Kātz. Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation. New York: Harper Business, 2009.

Buchanan, Richard. " Wicked Problems in Design Thinking." Design Issues 8, no. 2 (1992): 5.

Cross, Nigel. " From a Design Science to a Design Discipline: Understanding Designerly Ways of Knowing and Thinking. " Design Research Now: 41-54.

" Design Science. " Eight Strategies for Comprehensive Anticipatory. Accessed March 19, 2016.

De Russo, Stephanie. "A Brief History of Design Thinking: How Design Thinking Came to 'Be'." I think ∴ I design. 2013. Accessed March 21, 2016. https://ithinkidesign.wordpress. com/2012/06/08/a-brief-historyof-design-thinking-howdesign-thinking-came-to-be/.

De Russo, Stephanie. "A Brief History of Design Thinking: How Design Thinking Came to 'Be'." I think ∴ I design. 2013. Accessed March 21, 2016. https://ithinkidesign.wordpress.com/2012/01/18/a-brief-history-of-design-thinking-the-theory-p1/.

De Russo, Stephanie. "A Brief History of Design Thinking: How Design Thinking Came to 'Be'." I think ∴ I design. 2013. Accessed March 21, 2016. https://ithinkidesign.wordpress.com/2012/03/31/a-brief-history-of-design-thinking-the-theory-p2/.

De Russo, Stephanie. "Understanding the behaviour of design thinking in complex environments." 2016. https://www.academia.edu/24919250/Understanding_the_behaviour_of_design_thinking_in_complex_environments.

Fuad-Luke, Alastair. The Eco-design Handbook: A Complete Sourcebook for the Home and Office. London: Thames & Hudson, 2004.

Fuad-Luke, Alastair. Design Activism: Beautiful Strangeness for a Sustainable World. London: Earthscan, 2009.

Kelley, David, and Tom Kelley. Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential within Us All.

Kolko, Jon. "Design Thinking Comes of Age." Harvard Business Review. 2015. Accessed March 19, 2016.

Manzini, Ezio, and François Jégou. Sustainable Everyday: Scenarios of Urban Life. Milano: Ambiente, 2003. Manzini, Ezio.

Manzini, Ezio. Design, When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation. Translated by Rachel Coad. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015.

Mitchell, Julian. "Yeezy Season: Kanye West And The Art Of Design Thinking." Forbes. November 30, 2015. Accessed March 19, 2016.

Papanek, Victor J. Design for the Real World; Human Ecology and Social Change. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.

Rittel, Horst W. J., and Melvin M. Webber. " Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning. " Policy Sci Policy Sciences 4, no. 2 (1973): 155-69.

Sanders, Liz. "" MakeTools. 2014.

Sanders, Elizabeth B., and Pieter Jan Stappers. Convivial Design Toolbox: Generative Research for the Front End of Design. Amsterdam: BIS , 2012.

Schön, Donald A. The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. New York: Basic Books, 1983.

Simon, Herbert A. Sciences of the Artificial. Cambridge, MA, 1970.

Sundblad, Yngve. " UTOPIA: Participatory Design from Scandinavia to the World. " IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology History of Nordic Computing 3, 2011, 176-86.

Turnali, Kaan. "Empathy, Design Thinking, And An Obsession With Customer-Centric Innovation." Forbes. January 17, 2016.

"Co-Creation, Service Design, Product Design, Digital Innovation, Patient Experience, Partnerships & Training." Thinkpublic.

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Design thinking origin story plus some of the people who made it all happen

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Recently design thinking has gained momentum in the business world through mentions in the Harvard Business Review and publications. As a thing, design thinking has been described as anything from "a unified framework for innovation" to the "essential tool for simplifying and humanising." Being in the news though doesn't make design thinking anything new.

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1. R. Martin, "The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage" (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Business Press, 2009); T. Brown and B. Katz, "Change by Design, Revised and Updated: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation" (New York: Harper Business, 2019); and J. Liedtka and T. Ogilvie, "Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Tool Kit for Managers" (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

2. M. Kupp, J. Anderson, and J. Reckhenrich, "Why Design Thinking in Business Needs a Rethink," MIT Sloan Management Review 59, no. 1 (fall 2017): 42; and B. Nussbaum, "Design Thinking Is a Failed Experiment. So What's Next?" Fast Company, April 5, 2011, www.fastcompany.com.

3. D. Leonard and J.F. Rayport, "Spark Innovation Through Empathic Design," Harvard Business Review 75, no. 6 (November-December 1997): 102-115.

4. J. Liedtka, "Perspective: Linking Design Thinking With Innovation Outcomes Through Cognitive Bias Reduction," Journal of Product Innovation Management 32, no. 6 (November 2015): 925-938; Leonard and Rayport, "Spark Innovation Through Empathic Design," 102-113; W. Visser, " Schön: Design as a Reflective Practice," Collection 2 (2010): 21-25; and C. Bason and R.D. Austin, "The Right Way to Lead Design Thinking," Harvard Business Review 97, no. 2 (March-April 2019): 82-91.

5. D. Dunne, "Implementing Design Thinking in Organizations: An Exploratory Study," Journal of Organization Design 7, no. 1 (December 2018): 1-16.

6. Visser, "Schön: Design as a Reflective Practice," 21-25.

7. F.E. Smulders, "Co-Operation in NPD: Coping With Different Learning Styles," Creativity and Innovation Management 13, no. 4 (December 2004): 263-273.

8. K. Dorst, "Frame Innovation: Create New Thinking by Design" (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2015).

9. J. Conklin, " Wicked Problems and Social Complexity," chap. 1 in "Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems" (West Sussex, England: John Wiley & Sons, 2006).

10. T.C. Nguyen, " Inventing the Perfect Umbrella," Smithsonian Magazine, Dec. 9, 2013, www.smithsonianmag.com.

11. B.D. Rosso, "Creativity and Constraints: Exploring the Role of Constraints in the Creative Processes of Research and Development Teams," Organization Studies 35, no. 4 (April 2014): 551-585.

12. M. Pillay and J. Davin, " Mining Innovation Puts People First: Designing for Users' Needs," PDF file (Deloitte and Norcat, 2017), www2.deloitte.com; H.T. Kristiansen, "Design Thinking for Innovation in Offshore Ship Bridge Development," Journal of Maritime Research 11, no. 2 (April 2014): 53-60; and " NPS Design Thinking Community," Naval Postgraduate School, accessed July 11, 2022, www.nps.edu.

13. K. Dorst, " Designer Nights Out: Good Urban Planning Can Reduce Drunken Violence," The Conversation, Jan. 5, 2016, www.theconversation.com.

14. B. Murphy Jr., " Google Says It Still Uses the '20 Percent Rule,' and You Should Totally Copy It," Inc., Nov. 1, 2020, www.inc.com.

15. G. Muratovski, "Paradigm Shift: Report on the New Role of Design in Business and Society," She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation 1, no. 2 (winter 2015): 118-139.

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Can Design Thinking Succeed in Your Organization?

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1. R. Martin, "The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage" (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Business Press, 2009); T. Brown and B. Katz, "Change by Design, Revised and Updated: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation" (New York: Harper Business, 2019); and J. Liedtka and T.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Recently design thinking has gained momentum in the business world through mentions in the Harvard Business Review and publications. As a thing, design thinking has been described as anything from "a unified framework for innovation" to the "essential tool for simplifying and humanising."

Being in the news though doesn't make design thinking anything new. Unlike the radical outcomes it promises, design thinking as an approach has been slowly evolving since the 1960's. Over the past fifty plus years, design thinking [or design really; let's be honest] has appropriated many of the best tools and techniques from creative fields, social and computer sciences.
What sets design thinking apart?
Design thinking has an amalgamation of approaches, which makes it unique - they may be why - design thinking is applied as an umbrella term for multi-disciplinary, human-centeredprojects that involve research and rapid ideation (idea generation). Most recently as an approach, it has begun to monitor and measure itself in a quantified way. A trick its learnt from the business and economics sectors.
What is this article on about?
Well, as promised this story is dedicated to some of the key players that added to what is labelled design thinking. In general they've done a lot more than contribute here. Many of them have added to the field of design, and pushed it into the territory of improving designing beyond tangible artefacts toward constructing complex systems.

Please consider this a first stop to your own journey into design thinking. I know there is a lot to take in here, but down the bottom there is a download link with a timeline that tracks the dependencies and developments of design thinking. Please, please, please get in touch with any omissions, additions, thoughts. If you start reading this and think "this is basic, I know this already" I challenge you to read the of work by Stephanie Di Russo I was recently introduced to.

1960-1980

Over this twenty year span design was able to re-define not only what it was; but what it could be applied to. This relatively short but very dense period saw the birth of two vastly different approaches to design across the globe.

In 60's America, professions like industrial design and product design made their first small steps to distance themselves from engineering and the sciences. They didn't get very far. Industrial design was still mostly based on quantifiable facts, things that could be proven, measured, and improved on. In many instances a designers workplace was in a university laboratory or on a factory floor - not the trendy studio loft above the best coffee shop in town.

Subjects like ergonomics and Design Science determined design decisions, and designers had highly specialised ways of working.

Design Science as an example was spearheaded by all-round inventor Buckminister Fuller at MIT in the mid fifties. Rare for that period, Fuller created design teams comprised of experts from across disciplines to tackle systemic failures. In his own words Fuller called Design Science:

"...the effective application of the principles of science to the conscious design of our total environment in order to help make the Earth's finite resources meet the needs of all humanity without disrupting the ecological processes of the planet" Buckminister Fuller

He created systematic methods to evaluate, design and solve problems. His goals were grand. He wanted to use the potential of science and technology to intentionally advance the well being and standard of living of everyone. Utopian. Technological. Solutions.

What he did in the 50's and 60's resonates with the design thinking of today because his teams were not designer's but people who were expert enough in their fields to contribute to the goal of a project. This is in contrast to human-centered or participatory design seen in Europe ...we'll get to that later.

Picking his team's from the world best universities, Fuller's teams were elite, exclusive and process driven. In Fuller's approach success was measured so that projects were replicable.

At the same time as an absolute counter to Fuller, Scandinavian cooperative design was also getting off the ground. Unlike the teams of experts assembling in America to fix the world, the Scandinavians invited everyone to become involved in discussions on design.

Instead of being closed off and selective, here designers played the role of facilitators or guides, with everyone from experts to workers and inhabitants co-designing products and services they would want to use.

Many highly innovative projects like Utopia, NJMF, DEMOkratiske Styringssystemer, DEMOS, TIPS and DUE were developed to help workers, unions, workplaces and even government departments tackle the changing workplace environment as a reaction to the introduction of new technologies.

Scandinavian cooperative design was grounded on the belief that every worker "has the right and duty to participate in decisions concerning" what systems are developed and how those systems are designed. DEMOS

Feeding directly into what we call service design today, this way of working relied heavily on designers. They created environments for 'designing-by-doing,' using tools like ' mock-up envisionment ', future circles, organisational games, co-operative prototyping, ethnographic field research, and democratic dialogue to generate new ideas or improve on existing ones. Highly involved and iterative, this mode of presenting and working through designs acted as provocations or discussion starters between all the workshop participants.

What set them apart at this stage was they focused on: "knowing with the users" "giving the users a voice" "learning together by doing" "scenarios, acting it out" "exploratory research and development"... the start of what we call participatory design or co-design today.

Not limited to creating physical artefacts, often the Scandinavian approach saw designer as facilitators co-creating new systems, services and even policies with the people who would be using them in the end.

By the mid 1980's Scandinavian cooperative design made it across the Atlantic to the United States where it became known more widely as participatory design. Over the years, Scandinavian cooperative design has also been known as the Collective Resource Approach and more recently Cooperative Experimental System Development.

What I have to point out here is for anyone born after the 1980's - yup, I'm one of them - is that this block of time between the 1960's and the 1980's was the first real instance of humans designing non-tangible things like software and interactions. What is quite fascinating is that at this early stage of making non-physical designs, the design profession called on social sciences like psychology and anthropology to help them understand how people reacted to fundamentally new ways of doing things via a machine. Human-computer interaction design (HCI) is still using the same processes taken from cooperative design and cognitive psychology today to create and test new interfaces and interactions. From the 60's to the 80's cooperative design, and cognitive psychology imparted direct observation, interviews and participatory design techniques to a designers toolkit.

Buckminister Fuller In 1956 he officially began teaching Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science (CADS) at MIT's Creative engineering Laboratory. His labs applied scientific methods to generating designs. Buckminister's approach built on the knowledge of elite teams of engineers, industrial designers, materials scientists and chemists to innovate. He's known for geodesic domes, the Dymaxion car, Triton city, the "Fly's Eye" Dome and terms like "Spaceship Earth" and synergetic.

"A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist."

Scandinavian co-operative design was a vastly different approach to global design at the time. Unfortunately the language barrier makes this design movement not as well documented as others of the time. Scandinavian cooperative design from the 60's led to many developments in human computer interactions and service design. The Scandinavian approach that is still present and distinctive today, having the same goals it had over 50 years ago of being inclusive and democratic. If you want to learn more look into Susanne Bødker, Pelle Ehn, Dan Sjögren, Yngve Sundblad Kristen Nygaard, Olav-Terje Bergo, Åke Sandberg, Morten Kyng, Lars Mathiassen, and Niels Erik Andersen

"Participation is a fundamental process, not only for democracy, but also for learning" Bødker et al. (2000)

Herbert Simon Published The sciences of the artificial in 1969 which gives design a new range of classifications and parameters. Simon argued that everything designed should be seen as artificial - as opposed to natural.

"The engineer, and more generally the designer, is concerned with how things ought to be - how they ought to be in order to attain goals, and to function."

"Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones."

Victor Papanek Arrived on the design scene with Design for the Real World in 1971. Highly critical of the design profession he integrated Anthropology into his design practice in an attempt to design socially and ecologically responsible things. In the course of his career that lasted into the late 1990s Papanek applied the principles of socially responsible design in collaborative projects with concerns such as UNESCO and the World Health Organization.

"Design must be an innovative, highly creative, cross-disciplinary tool responsive to the needs of men. It must be more research-oriented, and we must stop defiling the earth itself with poorly-designed objects and structures."

Horst Rittel and his counterpart Melvin M. Webber first coined the term Wicked problems in 1972, he is one of the first researchers to try to define design theory while concentrating on design methods. Unlike his predecessors he championed the importance of human experience and perception when designing. For the first time Phenomenology was introduced to the designing of experiences.

1980-1990

During the second wave of design thinking, the focus was solely on what it was that set highly creative people apart from everyone else. It was a moment in time were researchers like Nigel Cross and Donald Schön performed in depth investigations into design processes and how designers got the ideas that no one else did. They observed designers while they were alone and working together in teams. Taking from the social sciences they took note of optimal conditions, individual and collective habits and most importantly the mindsets that designers employed to come up with consistently creative ideas. These investigations of design process later opened the doors for other professions to emulate brainstorming and other creative thinking techniques.

Nigel Cross was a researcher in the field of Human-computer interaction before he began investigating design methodology. His seminal book Designerly ways of Knowing looks at what makes the way designers think and make decisions different to other professions a great influence which helped in the construction of design thinking.

"Everyone can - and does - design. We all design when we plan for something new to happen, whether that might be a new version of a recipe, a new arrangement of the living room furniture, or a new lay tour of a personal web page. [...] So design thinking is something inherent within human cognition; it is a key part of what makes us human."

Donald Schön With a background in philosophy and urban planning much of Schön's work argues against the technical-rationality of design profession seen in the 1960's.The Reflective Practitioner highlights the importance of self-reflection to a successful design process. His work greatly influenced not only design but the field of organisational learning.

"The reflective practitioner allows himself to experience surprise, puzzlement, or confusion in a situation which he finds uncertain or unique. He reflects on the phenomenon before him, and on the prior understandings which have been implicit in his behaviour. He carries out an experiment which serves to generate both a new understanding of the phenomenon and a change in the situation."

1990-2005

During this period, design broadened its scope for the second time. In the early 1990's design expanded scope beyond creating tangible artefacts for the second time, focusing intently on interactions and services. This shift was supported by Buchanan's seminal paperWicked Problems in Design Thinkingwhich explored the potential of design to tackle complex, ambiguous challenges.

By 2003 a selection of universities across Europe and Carnegie Mellon in the states began teaching service design to students. The rise of service design, and their emerging methodologies that focused on complex problems created an environment for a new wave of design tools; including tools for non-designers to participate in design.

Richard Buchanan By connecting the theories of Rittel and Simon with the design practice of Ezio Manzini, Buchanan re-opened the discussion of wicked problems and the role of design in solving them. In 1992 he published Wicked Problems in Design Thinking he drew a path from design thinking to innovation and it's application. In his later writing on design thinking in Design as a New Liberal Art he noted that design as a profession is "integrative" perhaps because of its lack of specializations, it has the potential to connect many disciplines.

Design has no subject matter - that's what make this a powerful discipline. We MAKE our subject matter

Liz Sanders The founder of, Sanders is a pioneer in applied design research. Many of the tools, techniques and methods being used in human-centered design and design thinking today can be attributed to her. Not a designer by trade, her background is in experimental psychology and anthropology. She is also the co-author of Convivial Toolbox, a practical how-to guide for anyone interested in generative design research.

This human-centered design revolution is causing us to rethink the design process. In order to drive the human-centered design revolution, we need to tap into the imaginations and dreams not only of designers, but also of everyday people. New design spaces are emerging in response to everyday people's needs for creativity.

IDEO forms out of a three-way merger. Around the same time as Buchanan was building his case for design thinking, IDEO formed out of a three-way merger. With solid footing, over the course of the next ten years IDEO attracted some highly influential people to join them, from both academia and design practice.

Unlike other design firms at the time they also invited experts from disparate fields like anthropology, business strategy, education or healthcare to guide and augment their design teams and processes. Their tactic to create multidisciplinary teams had the collective gaining recognition with several awards within a few years of starting.

They have since managed to popularise the terms design thinking and human-centred design, launched educational programs at d.school, authored several books, and embed members at prestigious universities world-wide.

Kelley Brothers David and Tom are both authors of best-selling books, long term members of IDEO's management and educators. David and Tom have skills that span from design to business management. They collaborated on Creative Confidence a book about unleashing creativity.

"It turns out that creativity isn't some rare gift to be enjoyed by the lucky few - it's a natural part of human thinking and behavior. In too many of us it gets blocked. But it can be unblocked. And unblocking that creative spark can have far-reaching implications for yourself, your organization, and your community." Tom Kelley

Tim Brown As an Industrial designer and IDEO's CEO, Brown has been a great advocate for Design Thinking and innovation. He has written many articles promoting design thinking for non designers, and Change by Design.

In order to survive in today's complex world, organizations need to generate, embrace, and execute on new ideas. That takes creativity and a creatively capable workforce. It's the secret sauce, or in evolutionary terms, it's what keeps you fit. Organizations without it can't compete.

Jane Fulton Suri With a background in both psychology and architecture Jane has been instrumental in co-authoring many of IDEOs human-centered design tools. To quote her IDEO bio "She evolved techniques for empathic observation and experience prototyping that are now employed widely in the design and innovation of products, services, and environments, as well as systems, organizations, and strategies." Her book Thoughless Acts? shows the link between direct observation and design inspiration. Most recently she authored the Little Book of Design Ethics.

"Design research both inspires imagination and informs intuition through a variety of methods with related intents: to expose patterns underlying the rich reality of people's behaviors and experiences, to explore reactions to probes and prototypes, and to shed light on the unknown through iterative hypothesis and experiment."

Bill Moggridge Was a British designer with a background in Interaction design and on of the co founders of IDEO. He designed the first ever laptop and was a pioneer in applying a human-centred approach to designing objects and emerging technologies. He has authored books that focus on Interaction design, Designing Interactions is one of them - a 764-page introduction to and history of interaction design comprising 40-plus interviews with designers and entrepreneurs, from Douglas Engelbart to Will Wright to Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

I don't think that anyone has really told (people) what design is. It doesn't occur to most people that everything is designed - that every building and everything they touch in the world is designed. Even foods are designed now. So in the process of helping people understand this, making them more aware of the fact that the world around us is something that somebody has control of, perhaps they can feel some sense of control, too. I think that's a nice ambition.

2002-NOW

Since design thinking began being mentioned almost 20 years ago, it has undergone many iterations; only recently gaining recognition. Design consultancies including IDEO, smart design and 'frog' have led the way in adapting design thinking for business purposes.

The growth of the service design field has created new tools and processes that involve co-creation and participatory design. This shift toward collaborative design and multidisciplinary teams has focused on opening internalised creative processes and mindsets to make them more transparent and usable for everyone.

An alternative design group that complement design thinking, applying a more Scandinavian approach than a business-model focus. Fuad-Luke, Sanders and Manzini are pioneers in using co-design or participatory design with the goal or social, economic or environmental impact. They each design with everyday people (often called end-users) to disrupt large scale systems and paradigms with grass-root innovation and vernacular knowledge.

Alistair Fuad-Luke Is a self professed design facilitator, educator, writer and activist currently teaching emerging design practices. His projects emphasise openness, collaboration and co-design with communities and individuals, social well-being and alternative economies. His books Design Activism and The Eco-Design Handbook comment on the role of design in sustainability.

The real JOY of design is to deliver fresh perspectives, improved well-being and an intuitive sense of balance with the wider world. The real SPIRIT of design elicits some higher meaning. The real POWER of design is that professionals and laypeople can co-design in amazingly creative ways. The real BEAUTY of design is its potential for secular, pluralistic expression. The real STRENGTH of design is this healthy variance of expression. The real RELEVANCE of design is its ability to be proactive. The real PASSION of design is in its philosophical, ethical and practical debate.

Ezio Manzini One of the founders of DESIS and supporters of slow design, Manzini's works are grounded in participatory design for sustainability. Utilising many service design tools his books and projects including Sustainable Everyday and Design, When Everybody Designs focus on inclusive ideation and testing for sustainability. Similar to the style of Scandinavian cooperative design in Manzini's work, the designer is the mediator.

"Design for social innovation is everything that expert design can do to activate, sustain and orient processes of social change towards sustainability."

Deborah Szebeko. At the age of 23 Szebeko founded British-based social design agency of ThinkPublic who specialises in design and innovation within the public sector and NGO's. With a focus on co-design and a focus on social issues, thinkpublic has won several awards.

We use a mixture of design processes. We've got a diversity of designers, including service designers, graphics designers, information designers, programmers, marketers, social scientists, positive psychologists, and even anthropologists. This diversity of experts bring different techniques related to their disciplines, and this mixture creates a unique design process - we call it a co-design process - whereby we capture public views.

As a final note I would like to acknowledge some of the women of design thinking I have found on my obscure hunts through white papers and internet searches. I am convinced that there are more. Help me find them.
Angelika Dilschmann, Ewa Gunnarsson, Susanne Bødker, Kerstin Frenckner, Caroline Nordquist, Kerstin Severinson Eklundh Constance Abernathy who won the Harlanne Roberts

Check out the pdf here if you want to take a closer look

This article is based on the design thinking course taught in Monash University's Faculty of Art Design and Architecture. It wouldn't be complete without a reading list now would it? (née Herdman) studied textile design at the Purdue University, where she met Victor Papanek, whom she married in 1966. Like many wives of successful designers and architects, Harlanne played an important role. She typed and critiqued the first edition of Design for the Real World. First Dymaxion Award for Artist/Scientist, and attended Black Mountain College. was a trained architect that directed Buckminster Fuller's office in New York and then founded a private architecture firm. from UTOPIA.
Cohen, Reuven. "Design Thinking: A Unified Framework For Innovation." Forbes. March 14, 2014.

Ellett, John. " How Design Thinking Can Improve Your Marketing Plan: Lessons From IBM Design Studio. "

Fulton Suri, Jane, and IDEO. Thoughtless Acts?: Observations on Intuitive Design. California: Chronicle Books LCC, 2005.

Jane Fulton Suri - Finding Inspiration Through the Power Of Observation." YouTube. Accessed March 19, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FT3qmJEvs0.

Brown, Tim, and Barry Kātz. Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation. New York: Harper Business, 2009.

Buchanan, Richard. " Wicked Problems in Design Thinking." Design Issues 8, no. 2 (1992): 5.

Cross, Nigel. " From a Design Science to a Design Discipline: Understanding Designerly Ways of Knowing and Thinking. " Design Research Now: 41-54.

" Design Science. " Eight Strategies for Comprehensive Anticipatory. Accessed March 19, 2016.

De Russo, Stephanie. "A Brief History of Design Thinking: How Design Thinking Came to 'Be'." I think ∴ I design. 2013. Accessed March 21, 2016. https://ithinkidesign.wordpress. com/2012/06/08/a-brief-historyof-design-thinking-howdesign-thinking-came-to-be/.

De Russo, Stephanie. "A Brief History of Design Thinking: How Design Thinking Came to 'Be'." I think ∴ I design. 2013. Accessed March 21, 2016. https://ithinkidesign.wordpress.com/2012/01/18/a-brief-history-of-design-thinking-the-theory-p1/.

De Russo, Stephanie. "A Brief History of Design Thinking: How Design Thinking Came to 'Be'." I think ∴ I design. 2013. Accessed March 21, 2016. https://ithinkidesign.wordpress.com/2012/03/31/a-brief-history-of-design-thinking-the-theory-p2/.

De Russo, Stephanie. "Understanding the behaviour of design thinking in complex environments." 2016. https://www.academia.edu/24919250/Understanding_the_behaviour_of_design_thinking_in_complex_environments.

Fuad-Luke, Alastair. The Eco-design Handbook: A Complete Sourcebook for the Home and Office. London: Thames & Hudson, 2004.

Fuad-Luke, Alastair. Design Activism: Beautiful Strangeness for a Sustainable World. London: Earthscan, 2009.

Kelley, David, and Tom Kelley. Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential within Us All.

Kolko, Jon. "Design Thinking Comes of Age." Harvard Business Review. 2015. Accessed March 19, 2016.

Manzini, Ezio, and François Jégou. Sustainable Everyday: Scenarios of Urban Life. Milano: Ambiente, 2003. Manzini, Ezio.

Manzini, Ezio. Design, When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation. Translated by Rachel Coad. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015.

Mitchell, Julian. "Yeezy Season: Kanye West And The Art Of Design Thinking." Forbes. November 30, 2015. Accessed March 19, 2016.

Papanek, Victor J. Design for the Real World; Human Ecology and Social Change. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.

Rittel, Horst W. J., and Melvin M. Webber. " Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning. " Policy Sci Policy Sciences 4, no. 2 (1973): 155-69.

Sanders, Liz. "" MakeTools. 2014.

Sanders, Elizabeth B., and Pieter Jan Stappers. Convivial Design Toolbox: Generative Research for the Front End of Design. Amsterdam: BIS , 2012.

Schön, Donald A. The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. New York: Basic Books, 1983.

Simon, Herbert A. Sciences of the Artificial. Cambridge, MA, 1970.

Sundblad, Yngve. " UTOPIA: Participatory Design from Scandinavia to the World. " IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology History of Nordic Computing 3, 2011, 176-86.

Turnali, Kaan. "Empathy, Design Thinking, And An Obsession With Customer-Centric Innovation." Forbes. January 17, 2016.

"Co-Creation, Service Design, Product Design, Digital Innovation, Patient Experience, Partnerships & Training." Thinkpublic.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Design thinking origin story plus some of the people who made it all happen

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Recently design thinking has gained momentum in the business world through mentions in the Harvard Business Review and publications. As a thing, design thinking has been described as anything from "a unified framework for innovation" to the "essential tool for simplifying and humanising." Being in the news though doesn't make design thinking anything new.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Once an ideation session has finished, it's time to collect, categorize, refine and narrow down the best idea, solution or strategy. Here are the best selection methods. They're Sticky note voting, the Four Categories method, the Bingo Selection method and the Idea Affinity Diagram. The Six Thinking Hats and the Now Wow How Matrix will help you apply the idea criteria, which are right for your current design challenge. Here, you'll learn how to work in the best way through the pile of ideas which you've generated and select the best ones.
Converging

At some point in your ideation session, you'll have reached a critical mass of ideas, and it will become unproductive to try to keep pushing for more. This is different from the natural creative slumps that teams experience throughout ideation sessions, and means it is a good point to stop and focus on pruning. This is referred to as the "convergent stage"-where ideas are evaluated, compared, ranked, clustered and even ditched in an attempt to pull together a few great ideas to act on. Hang onto those unused ideas, though; they may prove useful in future ideation sessions as stokers or idea triggers. Right now, the aim is spotting potential winners, or combinations of winning attributes, from a number of ideas.

Dot Voting
Best practice:

You write all of the ideas which have been generated in the ideation session down on individual sticky notes.

Then you give all participants a number of votes (around 3-4 should do) to choose and write down their personal favorite ideas.

Participants vote by using stickers or simply using a marker to make a dot on the ideas they like.

You can also use variations in color in order to let participants vote on which ideas they like the most or which they dislike the most.

You can invent other voting attributes when it makes sense.

This process allows every member to have an equal say in the shortlisted ideas.

Print and download our sticky note voting template to help you get started using the method:

Four Categories Method

The Four Categories method entails dividing ideas according to their relative abstractness, ranging from the most rational choice to the "long shot". The four categories are: the rational choice, the most likely to delight, the darling and the long shot.

Best practice: Ideation participants decide upon one or two ideas for each of these categories. This method ensures that the team covers all grounds, from the most practical to the ideas with the most potential to deliver innovative solutions.

Do you want to learn how you can get started using the Four Categories method? Then download and print our template:

Bingo Selection

Best practice: Similarly, the Bingo Selection method inspires participants to divide ideas. However, in this method, the facilitator should encourage the participants to split ideas according to a variety of form factors, such as their potential applications in a physical prototype, a digital prototype and an experience prototype.

Print and download our Bingo Selection template to help you get started using the method:

Idea Affinity Diagrams

Use affinity diagrams or similar activities to cluster similar ideas together and make connections between them that will help you uncover patterns or themes that may be promising.

Best practice: Paste up all the ideas which you've collected in your ideation sessions-and then, as a group, make sense of these by clustering ideas which share attributes, eliminating duplicates and forming idea themes or concept themes. This will help you in the process of selecting the best ideas or idea themes.

Print and download our Affinity Diagram template to help you get started using the method-which you can see in action in the above picture:

Idea Selection Criteria

You should ensure that ideas that have made it through sticky note voting and other elimination exercises in the convergence sessions (just described above) are evaluated, based on these selection criteria, and you should rank them according to how they meet these criteria. These idea selection criteria will help you at this stage to provide a guide for choosing ideas which fit well into your goals, your research about your users and their needs and your insights about them which you've condensed into your problem statement-which is also called your Point of View.

Does it fit with people's needs? Is there demand?

Does it really meet the goals set initially?

Does it meet the requirements in our problem statement/Point Of View?

Does it answer our " How Might We " questions in a satisfying way?

Is it different enough from what exists to add additional value?

Do we have access to the budget-enough to implement even partially?

Is the technology available?

Will we be able to roll it out with the available resources?

Can we get approval from decision makers?

Print and download our Idea Selection Criteria template to help you get started considering the most important criteria when you select your best ideas.

Now Wow How

The Now Wow How Matrix provides a mechanism for evaluating ideas on a scale of:

Now: ideas that can be implemented immediately but which lack novelty.

Wow: ideas that can be implemented and are innovative.

How: ideas that could possibly be implemented in the future.

The Now Wow How Matrix should contain two axes, with the vertical representing difficulty of implementation and the horizontal axis representing the degree of innovation. On the 2 x 2 grid formed, the three categories are located at the bottom left (now), bottom right (wow) and top right (how), with the top-left block left blank to represent ideas which are impossible to implement. It provides an easy-to-follow formula for evaluating the viability of ideas as well as their innovativeness. Provide participants with colored dot stickers, each representing one of the categories, allowing group participants to vote on where they think ideas should be pitched on the scale. You can also develop custom graphs with finer levels of gradation for a broader scale assessment of the many ideas.

Print and download our Now Wow How template to help you get started using the method:

Idea Selection - Apply Edward De Bono's Six Thinking Hats

The Six Thinking Hats technique provides a range of thinking styles to apply to idea selection. It involves purposely evaluating and considering ideas through various mindsets so as to uncover the widest range of possible angles on the ideas being assessed. It helps break participants out of their set styles of thinking and forces them to look at the ideas being assessed from multiple viewpoints and assessment criteria.

White Hat: The White Hat calls for information which is known or needed. It's all about this: "The facts, and nothing but the facts."

Yellow Hat: The Yellow Hat symbolizes optimism, confidence and brightness. Under this hat, you explore the positives and probe for value and benefit.

Black Hat: The Black Hat is all about judgment. When you put on this hat, you're the devil's advocate where you try to figure out what or why something may not work. It's now your job to spot the difficulties and dangers and ask where things might go wrong. This is probably the most powerful and useful of the hats, but it's a problem if you overuse it.

Red Hat: The Red Hat calls for feelings, hunches and intuition. When you use this hat, you should focus on expressing emotions and feelings and share fears, likes, dislikes, loves and hates.

Green Hat: The Green Hat focuses on creativity: the possibilities, alternatives and new ideas. It's your opportunity to express new concepts and new insights.

Blue Hat: The Blue Hat is used to manage the thinking process. It's your control mechanism that ensures the Six Thinking Hats guidelines are observed.

Print and download our Six Thinking Hats template to help you get started using the method:

When assessing ideas, we can use the Six Thinking Hats to evaluate them from a range of angles in order to avoid cognitive bias in decision making and to evaluate ideas fairly, based on a holistic outlook.

Lean Startup Machine Idea Validation Board

Lean methodologies-with their roots in Toyota's production system-are making their way into every sector due to their light footprint and potential to speed up decision-making and project cycles dramatically. The crux of the methodology centers on testing assumptions as early as possible in order to avoid venturing too far down the wrong paths. The Lean Startup Machine is a three-day intensive series of workshops by Trevor Owens, which emerged out of the movement instigated by Eric Ries' book Lean Startup. The Lean Startup Machine Validation Board is a tool which enables the validation of ideas based on the lean startup methodology.

The premise of this approach is starting off with a set of related hypotheses:

We interrogate and test these three related hypotheses. If we cannot validate them, we pivot on them so as to move towards a more valid set of hypotheses that will help build an innovation foundation, one which is viable and addresses a real need.

Project Cycle Example

Google Ventures 5-day design sprints series details their process of rapidly assessing new opportunity areas, generating ideas, selecting those ideas and then testing them. Their Day 2: Diverge and Day 3: Decide serve as illustrations of how ideation's divergent and convergent phases play themselves out in a technology startup environment.

What to Do With the Winning Ideas?

With a series of ideas (the third stage in the Design Thinking process) ready to be prototyped (the fourth stage in Design Thinking) for further testing (the fifth stage) and validation, you're ready to move on to these next stages of the Design Thinking journey. Make sure you have significantly different ideas that make it to the last few so that you can test and explore a few different routes to a winner. Ideas that are very similar can be batch prototyped, with some variation in prototype iterations.

The five stages of Design Thinking are not sequential steps, but different "modes" you can put yourself in, to iterate on your problem definition, ideas or prototype, or to learn more about your users at any point during the project.

The Take Away

Once an ideation session has finished, it's time to collect, categorize, refine and narrow down the best idea, solution or strategy. Here, we've explained how to use the best selection methods: Dot voting, the Four Categories method, the Bingo Selection method and the Idea Affinity Diagram. The Six Thinking Hats and the Now Wow How Matrix will help you apply the idea criteria which are right for your current design challenge. These methods will help you work through the pile of ideas which you've generated and select the best ones, which you can start prototyping and testing.

References & Where to Learn More

Haakon Faste, Chainstorming! Cheatstorming! 2013.

Dave Gray, , 2010.

Dave Gray, How-Now-Wow Matrix.

Edward De Bono, Six Thinking Hats.

Eric Ries, The Lean Startup Book, Movement, Methodology.

Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz: Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days, 2016

Jake Knapp, The product design sprint: diverge (day 2), Google Ventures, 2012.

Jake Knapp, The product design sprint: decide (day 3), Google Ventures, 2012.

Lean Enterprise Institute, What is Lean?.

IDEA HCD CONNECT, Participatory Co-Design, The HCD Toolkit.

Images

Hero Image: © amnestystudent, CC BY 2.0.

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How to Select the Best Idea by the End of an Ideation Session

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Once an ideation session has finished, it's time to collect, categorize, refine and narrow down the best idea, solution or strategy. Here are the best selection methods. They're Sticky note voting, the Four Categories method, the Bingo Selection method and the Idea Affinity Diagram.

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Design thinking helps solve complex problems through a non-linear process that is based on understanding of customers or empathy, further used to question assumptions, reframe the problem and then generate an innovative solution, validated with users.

Since the problem being solved is rarely the designer's own problem, successful solution is preconditioned by deep understanding, empathy for the customer, i.e. answers to who is the customer, what are their needs, what is the environment and context surrounding these needs. The best solutions come from the best insights into human needs.

The first step towards this goal is research:

Observe customers;

Engage with customers, talk to them;

Immerse, put oneself into customer's shoes.

Good research should unveil how customers think and act: what they want, what they value, what they hear in their environment, what they say, how they act, what are their needs, how they feel, even if it is different from what they say or do. Insights especially valid for problem solving are not easy to perceive, because researchers unconsciously disregard, filter out, some pieces of information. This is why it is important to be extra careful, listen and observe without judgement, questioning everything, curious the whole time and listening, actively. Research work, as well as synthesis of the results afterwards is, ideally, a group exercise.

Empathy map is a great tool to synthesise research results, as it helps organise, group retrieved data, creating easily one holistic view of the customer and their needs. This is how insights valuable for future problem-solving work are recognised.

Number of different, both simple and more complex templates for empathy mapping can be found online. However, anyone can make their Empathy map.

Work area (e.g. whiteboard or a bigger sheet of paper) is divided into four quadrants representing four areas:

A customer is placed in the centre with an illustration and/or some basic information. The four quadrants around the customer are populated by information retrieved. Thoughts (or beliefs) and feelings could not be directly observed, but they are inferred from observed verbal and non-verbal signs. Areas of what is seen and heard can be added, depicting the environmental influence, or the context.

Empathy map template examples: www.nngroup.com; Dave Gray, xplain.com from www.gamestorming.com

Empathy map includes also identified needs and insights.

Needs are recognised from patterns or contradictions observed in research mapping. They are physical and emotional necessities. Needs will help better define the problem, but it is important to articulate them as needs, not presuming the solution.

Insights are inconsistencies or surprising facts worth being noted as these can also be valuable when defining the problem.

Empathy map created this way presents deep insight into the customer, their surroundings and needs, and what needs to be achieved to solve the problem.

Empathy map is often the first step towards creation of a persona, a fictious representation of a customer type, based on research. As an archetype, a persona is like a picture of a real person, while actually it is a personification of the research findings, merging together traits and actions of a certain customer category relevant for the problem being solved. Persona is a tool used in ideation process helping communication towards the solution. It helps to ask the right questions and get adequate answers e.g.: How would Petar, Ana, Maria (personas) act, experience xx?

Persona is defined with:

Name, picture;

Details about education, family, lifestyle, interests, values, goals, needs, limitations, wishes, attitudes and behaviour patterns;

Description of a typical day or behaviour relevant for the problem being solved, also a story told to make persona livelier, not a mere research product.

Good persona can easily be imagined in different environments and scenarios. Visually it can be organised in various forms. Ready-made templates can be downloaded from the internet, or just arranged as suitable. Some customer-focused companies keep their personas as life-sized figures in the offices, as a reminder of the customers they are working for.

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Empathy Map and Persona - Design Thinking Tools - BCoaching

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Design thinking helps solve complex problems through a non-linear process that is based on understanding of customers or empathy, further used to question assumptions, reframe the problem and then generate an innovative solution, validated with users. Since the problem being solved is rarely the designer's own problem, successful solution is preconditioned by deep understanding, empathy for the customer, i.e.

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Innovation and efficiency can often be at odds, but organizations must excel at both to succeed. Geoff Tanner has been an IDEO client for over 10 years while working at various companies in different capacities, including his most recent role as Senior Vice President, Growth and Consumer Engagement at The J.M. Smucker Company. Hear about his experience balancing innovation and efficiency through design while encouraging collaboration across teams, and how this has recently helped Smucker brave the unfamiliar and ultimately bring game-changing ideas to market faster.

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Using Design to Help Companies Create Resilient, Innovative Organizations

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Innovation and efficiency can often be at odds, but organizations must excel at both to succeed. Geoff Tanner has been an IDEO client for over 10 years while working at various companies in different capacities, including his most recent role as Senior Vice President, Growth and Consumer Engagement at The J.M.

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Embrace - Defining a Point of View - An Intro to Design Thinking

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The founders of Embrace Global tell the story of how they discovered the deep, unmet need they decided to solve. The story picks up after Linus Liang comes back to Stanford to share what he discovered in Nepal. This story illustrates the Define (or Point of View) step in the design thinking process.

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Embrace - Defining a Point of View - An Intro to Design Thinking

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The founders of Embrace Global tell the story of how they discovered the deep, unmet need they decided to solve. The story picks up after Linus Liang comes back to Stanford to share what he discovered in Nepal. This story illustrates the Define (or Point of View) step in the design thinking process.

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Design Thinking for Social Innovation (SSIR)

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By working closely with the clients and consumers, design thinking allows high-impact solutions to social problems to bubble up from below rather than being imposed from the top.

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Employers look for more than just a good degree. Candidates are expected to be able to creatively solve problems, manage change, demonstrate commercial awareness, and collaborate and communicate at different levels.

Increasingly, universities are helping their students gain these skills through team-based projects, utilising innovation to solve real-world problems. Created with direct input from students and packed with advice and guidance from leading industry experts, this textbook walks readers through the steps necessary to deliver a team-based project, facilitating the development of key employability skills along the way.

Readers can also connect with each other and create their own projects and teams via the book’s LinkedIn group.

Suitable for undergraduates and postgraduates across all disciplines undertaking team-based modules and courses, as well as those studying independently, Design Thinking for Student Projects is the essential guide to learning practical Design Thinking and employability skills.

Tony Morgan is an Associate Professor in Innovation Management Practice at the University of Leeds.
Lena J. Jaspersen is a University Academic Fellow in Innovation Management at the University of Leeds.

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Design Thinking for Student Projects is the essential guide to learning practical Design Thinking and employability skills. Tony Morgan is an Associate Professor in Innovation Management Practice at the University of Leeds.Lena J. Jaspersen is a University Academic Fellow in Innovation Management at the University of Leeds.

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In an area outside Hyderabad, India, between the suburbs and the countryside, a young woman-we'll call her Shanti-fetches water daily from the always-open local borehole that is about 300 feet from her home. She uses a 3-gallon plastic container that she can easily carry on her head. Shanti and her husband rely on the free water for their drinking and washing, and though they've heard that it's not as safe as water from the Naandi Foundation-run community treatment plant, they still use it. Shanti's family has been drinking the local water for generations, and although it periodically makes her and her family sick, she has no plans to stop using it.

Shanti has many reasons not to use the water from the Naandi treatment center, but they're not the reasons one might think. The center is within easy walking distance of her home-roughly a third of a mile. It is also well known and affordable (roughly 10 rupees, or 20 cents, for 5 gallons). Being able to pay the small fee has even become a status symbol for some villagers. Habit isn't a factor, either. Shanti is forgoing the safer water because of a series of flaws in the overall design of the system.

Although Shanti can walk to the facility, she can't carry the 5-gallon jerrican that the facility requires her to use. When filled with water, the plastic rectangular container is simply too heavy. The container isn't designed to be held on the hip or the head, where she likes to carry heavy objects. Shanti's husband can't help carry it, either. He works in the city and doesn't return home until after the water treatment center is closed. The treatment center also requires them to buy a monthly punch card for 5 gallons a day, far more than they need. "Why would I buy more than I need and waste money?" asks Shanti, adding she'd be more likely to purchase the Naandi water if the center allowed her to buy less.

The community treatment center was designed to produce clean and potable water, and it succeeded very well at doing just that. In fact, it works well for many people living in the community, particularly families with husbands or older sons who own bikes and can visit the treatment plant during working hours. The designers of the center, however, missed the opportunity to design an even better system because they failed to consider the culture and needs of all of the people living in the community.

This missed opportunity, although an obvious omission in hindsight, is all too common. Time and again, initiatives falter because they are not based on the client's or customer's needs and have never been prototyped to solicit feedback. Even when people do go into the field, they may enter with preconceived notions of what the needs and solutions are. This flawed approach remains the norm in both the business and social sectors.

As Shanti's situation shows, social challenges require systemic solutions that are grounded in the client's or customer's needs. This is where many approaches founder, but it is where design thinking-a new approach to creating solutions-excels.

Traditionally, designers focused their attention on improving the look and functionality of products. Classic examples of this type of design work are Apple Computer's iPod and Herman Miller's Aeron chair. In recent years designers have broadened their approach, creating entire systems to deliver products and services.

Design thinking incorporates constituent or consumer insights in depth and rapid prototyping, all aimed at getting beyond the assumptions that block effective solutions. Design thinking-inherently optimistic, constructive, and experiential-addresses the needs of the people who will consume a product or service and the infrastructure that enables it.

Businesses are embracing design thinking because it helps them be more innovative, better differentiate their brands, and bring their products and services to market faster. Nonprofits are beginning to use design thinking as well to develop better solutions to social problems. Design thinking crosses the traditional boundaries between public, for-profit, and nonprofit sectors. By working closely with the clients and consumers, design thinking allows high-impact solutions to bubble up from below rather than being imposed from the top.
Design Thinking at Work
Jerry Sternin, founder of the Positive Deviance Initiative and an associate professor at Tufts University until he died last year, was skilled at identifying what and critical of what he called outsider solutions to local problems. Sternin's preferred approach to social innovation is an example of design thinking in action. ¹ In 1990, Sternin and his wife, Monique, were invited by the government of Vietnam to develop a model to decrease in a sustainable manner high levels of malnutrition among children in 10,000 villages. At the time, 65 percent of Vietnamese children under age 5 suffered from malnutrition, and most solutions relied on government and UN agencies donations of nutritional supplements. But the supplements-the outsider solution-never delivered the hoped-for results. ² As an alternative, the Sternins used an approach called positive deviance, which looks for existing solutions (hence sustainable) among individuals and families in the community who are already doing well. ³

The Sternins and colleagues from Save the Children surveyed four local Quong Xuong communities in the province of Than Hoa and asked for examples of "very, very poor" families whose children were healthy. They then observed the food preparation, cooking, and serving behaviors of these six families, called "positive deviants," and found a few consistent yet rare behaviors. Parents of well-nourished children collected tiny shrimps, crabs, and snails from rice paddies and added them to the food, along with the greens from sweet potatoes. Although these foods were readily available, they were typically not eaten because they were considered unsafe for children. The positive deviants also fed their children multiple smaller meals, which allowed small stomachs to hold and digest more food each day.

The Sternins and the rest of their group worked with the positive deviants to offer cooking classes to the families of children suffering from malnutrition. By the end of the program's first year, 80 percent of the 1,000 children enrolled in the program were adequately nourished. In addition, the effort had been replicated within 14 villages across Vietnam. ⁴

The Sternins' work is a good example of how positive deviance and design thinking relies on local expertise to uncover local solutions. Design thinkers look for work-arounds and improvise solutions-like the shrimps, crabs, and snails-and they find ways to incorporate those into the offerings they create. They consider what we call the edges, the places where "extreme" people live differently, think differently, and consume differently. As Monique Sternin, now director of the Positive Deviance Initiative, explains: "Both positive deviance and design thinking are human-centered approaches. Their solutions are relevant to a unique cultural context and will not necessarily work outside that specific situation."

One program that might have benefited from design thinking is mosquito net distribution in Africa. The nets are well designed and when used are effective at reducing the incidence of malaria. ⁵ The World Health Organization praised the nets, crediting them with significant drops in malaria deaths in children under age 5: a 51 percent decline in Ethiopia, 34 percent decline in Ghana, and 66 percent decline in Rwanda. ⁶ The way that the mosquito nets have been distributed, however, has had unintended consequences. In northern Ghana, for instance, nets are provided free to pregnant women and mothers with children under age 5. These women can readily pick up free nets from local public hospitals. For everyone else, however, the nets are difficult to obtain. When we asked a well-educated Ghanaian named Albert, who had recently contracted malaria, whether he slept under a mosquito net, he told us no-there was no place in the city of Tamale to purchase one. Because so many people can obtain free nets, it is not profitable for shop owners to sell them. But hospitals are not equipped to sell additional nets, either.

As Albert's experience shows, it's critical that the people designing a program consider not only form and function, but distribution channels as well. One could say that the free nets were never intended for people like Albert-that he was simply out of the scope of the project. But that would be missing a huge opportunity. Without considering the whole system, the nets cannot be widely distributed, which makes the eradication of malaria impossible.
The Origin of Design Thinking
IDEO was formed in 1991 as a merger between David Kelley Design, which created Apple Computer's first mouse in 1982, and ID Two, which designed the first laptop computer, also in 1982. Initially, IDEO focused on traditional design work for business, designing products like the Palm V personal digital assistant, Oral-B toothbrushes, and Steelcase chairs. These are the types of objects that are displayed in lifestyle magazines or on pedestals in modern art museums.

By 2001, IDEO was increasingly being asked to tackle problems that seemed far afield from traditional design. A healthcare foundation asked us to help restructure its organization, a century-old manufacturing company wanted to better understand its clients, and a university hoped to create alternative learning environments to traditional classrooms. This type of work took IDEO from designing consumer products to designing consumer experiences.

To distinguish this new type of design work, we began referring to it as "design with a small d." But this phrase never seemed fully satisfactory. David Kelley, also the founder of Stanford University's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (aka the "d.school"), remarked that every time someone asked him about design, he found himself inserting the word "thinking" to explain what it was that designers do. Eventually, the term design thinking stuck. ⁷

As an approach, design thinking taps into capacities we all have but that are overlooked by more conventional problem-solving practices. Not only does it focus on creating products and services that are human centered, but the process itself is also deeply human. Design thinking relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, to construct ideas that have emotional meaning as well as being functional, and to express ourselves in media other than words or symbols. Nobody wants to run an organization on feeling, intuition, and inspiration, but an over-reliance on the rational and the analytical can be just as risky. Design thinking, the integrated approach at the core of the design process, provides a third way.

The design thinking process is best thought of as a system of overlapping spaces rather than a sequence of orderly steps. There are three spaces to keep in mind: inspiration, ideation, and implementation. Think of inspiration as the problem or opportunity that motivates the search for solutions; ideation as the process of generating, developing, and testing ideas; and implementation as the path that leads from the project stage into people's lives.

The reason to call these spaces, rather than steps, is that they are not always undertaken sequentially. Projects may loop back through inspiration, ideation, and implementation more than once as the team refines its ideas and explores new directions. Not surprisingly, design thinking can feel chaotic to those doing it for the first time. But over the life of a project, participants come to see that the process makes sense and achieves results, even though its form differs from the linear, milestone-based processes that organizations typically undertake.
Inspiration
Although it is true that designers do not always proceed through each of the three spaces in linear fashion, it is generally the case that the design process begins with the inspiration space-the problem or opportunity that motivates people to search for solutions. And the classic starting point for the inspiration phase is the brief. The brief is a set of mental constraints that gives the project team a framework from which to begin, benchmarks by which they can measure progress, and a set of objectives to be realized-such as price point, available technology, and market segment.

But just as a hypothesis is not the same as an algorithm, the brief is not a set of instructions or an attempt to answer the question before it has been posed. Rather, a well-constructed brief allows for serendipity, unpredictability, and the capricious whims of fate-the creative realm from which breakthrough ideas emerge. Too abstract and the brief risks leaving the project team wandering; too narrow a set of constraints almost guarantees that the outcome will be incremental and, likely, mediocre.

Once the brief has been constructed, it is time for the design team to discover what people's needs are. Traditional ways of doing this, such as focus groups and surveys, rarely yield important insights. In most cases, these techniques simply ask people what they want. Conventional research can be useful in pointing toward incremental improvements, but those don't usually lead to the type of breakthroughs that leave us scratching our heads and wondering why nobody ever thought of that before.

Henry Ford understood this when he said, "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said 'a faster horse.'" ⁸ Although people often can't tell us what their needs are, their actual behaviors can provide us with invaluable clues about their range of unmet needs.

A better starting point is for designers to go out into the world and observe the actual experiences of smallholder farmers, schoolchildren, and community health workers as they improvise their way through their daily lives. Working with local partners who serve as interpreters and cultural guides is also important, as well as having partners make introductions to communities, helping build credibility quickly and ensuring understanding. Through "homestays" and shadowing locals at their jobs and in their homes, design thinkers become embedded in the lives of the people they are designing for.

Earlier this year, Kara Pecknold, a student at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, British Columbia, took an internship with a women's cooperative in Rwanda. Her task was to develop a Web site to connect rural Rwandan weavers with the world. Pecknold soon discovered that the weavers had little or no access to computers and the Internet. Rather than ask them to maintain a Web site, she reframed the brief, broadening it to ask what services could be provided to the community to help them improve their livelihoods. Pecknold used various design thinking techniques, drawing partly from her training and partly from ideo's Human Centered Design toolkit, to understand the women's aspirations.

Because Pecknold didn't speak the women's language, she asked them to document their lives and aspirations with a camera and draw pictures that expressed what success looked like in their community. Through these activities, the women were able to see for themselves what was important and valuable, rather than having an outsider make those assumptions for them. During the project, Pecknold also provided each participant with the equivalent of a day's wages (500 francs, or roughly $1) to see what each person did with the money. Doing this gave her further insight into the people's lives and aspirations. Meanwhile, the women found that a mere 500 francs a day could be a significant, life-changing sum. This visualization process helped both Pecknold and the women prioritize their planning for the community. ⁹
Ideation
The second space of the design thinking process is ideation. After spending time in the field observing and doing design research, a team goes through a process of synthesis in which they distill what they saw and heard into insights that can lead to solutions or opportunities for change. This approach helps multiply options to create choices and different insights about human behavior. These might be alternative visions of new product offerings, or choices among various ways of creating interactive experiences. By testing competing ideas against one another, the likelihood that the outcome will be bolder and more compelling increases.

As Linus Pauling, scientist and two-time Nobel Prize winner, put it, "To have a good idea you must first have lots of ideas." ¹⁰ Truly innovative ideas challenge the status quo and stand out from the crowd-they're creatively disruptive. They provide a wholly new solution to a problem many people didn't know they had.

Of course, more choices mean more complexity, which can make life difficult, especially for those whose job it is to control budgets and monitor timelines. The natural tendency of most organizations is to restrict choices in favor of the obvious and the incremental. Although this tendency may be more efficient in the short run, it tends to make an organization conservative and inflexible in the long run. Divergent thinking is the route, not the obstacle, to innovation.

To achieve divergent thinking, it is important to have a diverse group of people involved in the process. Multidisciplinary people-architects who have studied psychology, artists with MBAs, or engineers with marketing experience-often demonstrate this quality. They're people with the capacity and the disposition for collaboration across disciplines.

To operate within an interdisciplinary environment, an individual needs to have strengths in two dimensions-the "T-shaped" person. On the vertical axis, every member of the team needs to possess a depth of skill that allows him or her to make tangible contributions to the outcome. The top of the "T" is where the design thinker is made. It's about empathy for people and for disciplines beyond one's own. It tends to be expressed as openness, curiosity, optimism, a tendency toward learning through doing, and experimentation. (These are the same traits that we seek in our new hires at IDEO.)

Interdisciplinary teams typically move into a structured brainstorming process. Taking one provocative question at a time, the group may generate hundreds of ideas ranging from the absurd to the obvious. Each idea can be written on a Post-it note and shared with the team. Visual representations of concepts are encouraged, as this generally helps others understand complex ideas.

One rule during the brainstorming process is to defer judgment. It is important to discourage anyone taking on the often obstructive, non-generative role of devil's advocate, as Tom Kelley explains in his book The Ten Faces of Innovation. ¹¹ Instead, participants are encouraged to come up with as many ideas as possible. This lets the group move into a process of grouping and sorting ideas. Good ideas naturally rise to the top, whereas the bad ones drop off early on. InnoCentive provides a good example of how design thinking can result in hundreds of ideas. InnoCentive has created a Web site that allows people to post solutions to challenges that are defined by InnoCentive members, a mix of nonprofits and companies. More than 175,000 people-including scientists, engineers, and designers from around the world-have posted solutions.

The Rockefeller Foundation has supported 10 social innovation challenges through InnoCentive and reports an 80 percent success rate in delivering effective solutions to the nonprofits posting challenges. ¹² The open innovation approach is effective in producing lots of new ideas. The responsibility for filtering through the ideas, field-testing them, iterating, and taking them to market ultimately falls to the implementer.

An InnoCentive partnership with the Global Alliance for TB Drug Development sought a theoretical solution to simplify the current TB treatment regimen. "The process is a prime example of design thinking contributing to social innovation," explained Dwayne Spradlin, InnoCentive's CEO. "With the TB drug development, the winning solver was a scientist by profession, but submitted to the challenge because his mother-the sole income provider for the family-developed TB when he was 14. She had to stop working, and he took on the responsibility of working and going to school to provide for the family." Spradlin finds that projects within the InnoCentive community often benefit from such deep and motivating connections. ¹³
Implementation
The third space of the design thinking process is implementation, when the best ideas generated during ideation are turned into a concrete, fully conceived action plan. At the core of the implementation process is prototyping, turning ideas into actual products and services that are then tested, iterated, and refined.

Through prototyping, the design thinking process seeks to uncover unforeseen implementation challenges and unintended consequences in order to have more reliable long-term success. Prototyping is particularly important for products and services destined for the developing world, where the lack of infrastructure, retail chains, communication networks, literacy, and other essential pieces of the system often make it difficult to design new products and services.

Prototyping can validate a component of a device, the graphics on a screen, or a detail in the interaction between a blood donor and a Red Cross volunteer. The prototypes at this point may be expensive, complex, and even indistinguishable from the real thing. As the project nears completion and heads toward real-world implementation, prototypes will likely become more complete.

After the prototyping process is finished and the ultimate product or service has been created, the design team helps create a communication strategy. Storytelling, particularly through multimedia, helps communicate the solution to a diverse set of stakeholders inside and outside of the organization, particularly across language and cultural barriers.

VisionSpring, a low-cost eye care provider in India, provides a good example of how prototyping can be a critical step in implementation. VisionSpring, which had been selling reading glasses to adults, wanted to begin providing comprehensive eye care to children. VisionSpring's design effort included everything other than the design of the glasses, from marketing "eye camps" through self-help groups to training teachers about the importance of eye care and transporting kids to the local eye care center.

Working with VisionSpring, IDEO designers prototyped the eyescreening process with a group of 15 children between the ages of 8 and 12. The designers first tried to screen a young girl's vision through traditional tests. Immediately, though, she burst into tears-the pressure of the experience was too great and the risk of failure too high. In hopes of diffusing this stressful situation, the designers asked the children's teacher to screen the next student. Again, the child started to cry. The designers then asked the girl to screen her teacher. She took the task very seriously, while her classmates looked on enviously. Finally, the designers had the children screen each other and talk about the process. They loved playing doctor and both respected and complied with the process.

By prototyping and creating an implementation plan to pilot and scale the project, IDEO was able to design a system for the eye screenings that worked for VisionSpring's practitioners, teachers, and children. As of September 2009, VisionSpring had conducted in India 10 eye camps for children, screened 3,000 children, transported 202 children to the local eye hospital, and provided glasses for the 69 children who needed them.

"Screening and providing glasses to kids presents many unique problems, so we turned to design thinking to provide us with an appropriate structure to develop the most appropriate marketing and distribution strategy," explained Peter Eliassen, vice president of sales and operations at VisionSpring. Eliassen added that prototyping let VisionSpring focus on the approaches that put children at ease during the screening process. "Now that we have become a design thinking organization, we continue to use prototypes to assess the feedback and viability of new market approaches from our most important customers: our vision entrepreneurs [or salespeople] and end consumers." ¹⁴
Systemic Problems Need Systemic Solutions
Many social enterprises already intuitively use some aspects of design thinking, but most stop short of embracing the approach as a way to move beyond today's conventional problem solving. Certainly, there are impediments to adopting design thinking in an organization. Perhaps the approach isn't embraced by the entire organization. Or maybe the organization resists taking a human-centered approach and fails to balance the perspectives of users, technology, and organizations.

One of the biggest impediments to adopting design thinking is simply fear of failure. The notion that there is nothing wrong with experimentation or failure, as long as they happen early and act as a source of learning, can be difficult to accept. But a vibrant design thinking culture will encourage prototyping-quick, cheap, and dirty-as part of the creative process and not just as a way of validating finished ideas.

As Yasmina Zaidman, director of knowledge and communications at Acumen Fund, put it, "The businesses we invest in require constant creativity and problem solving, so design thinking is a real success factor for serving the base of the economic pyramid." Design thinking can lead to hundreds of ideas and, ultimately, real-world solutions that create better outcomes for organizations and the people they serve.

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Design Thinking for Social Innovation (SSIR)

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In an area outside Hyderabad, India, between the suburbs and the countryside, a young woman-we'll call her Shanti-fetches water daily from the always-open local borehole that is about 300 feet from her home. She uses a 3-gallon plastic container that she can easily carry on her head.

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Google for Entrepreneurs teamed up with Virgin Unite to host a not-to-miss conversation featuring 3 extraordinary leaders in business and product design. Moderated by Kaili Emmrich of Google for Entrepreneurs, the Hangout featured Eric Ries (The Lean Startup), Tim Brown, (CEO of IDEO), and Google Ventures Design Partner Jake Knapp.

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Design Thinking and Innovation is part of the Entrepreneurship & Innovation Learning Track. If you're interested in developing deeper insights and expertise, you can choose to complete three entrepreneurship and innovation courses within 18 months to earn a Certificate of Specialization.

Syllabus

Design Thinking and Innovation equips current and aspiring innovation managers with the design thinking principles and innovative problem-solving tools to solve business challenges and guide their organization's strategy. The course features five weeks of course content and two weeks of project work, enabling you to put your learning into practice. Leaders interviewed include Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel, Royal Philips CEO Frans van Houten, and T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert, among others. Participants will walk away with an innovation toolkit of frameworks and exercises for identifying business opportunities and generating possible solutions for their organization's initiatives.

Learning requirements: In order to earn a Certificate of Completion, participants must thoughtfully complete all 7 modules (5 content weeks and 2 project weeks) by stated deadlines
Leaders interviewed:

Stéphane Bancel, CEO, Moderna

Sean Carney, CDO and Business Leader for Healthcare Transformation Services, Royal Philips

Phil Gilbert, General Manager, Design, IBM

Frans van Houten, CEO, Royal Philips

D. R. Mehta, Founder and Chief Patron, BMVSS

Shani Sandy, Design Executive, IBM

Mike Sievert, CEO, T-Mobile

Yoni Stern, Partner and SVP of Business Development, Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT)

Christi Zuber, Managing Director and Founder, Aspen Labs

Download Syllabus

The HBS Online Advantage

World-class faculty

Edge-of-your-seat online learning

Global peer collaboration and networking

Real-world projects, case-based learning

Harvard Business School Online offers a unique and highly engaging way to learn vital business concepts. Immerse yourself in real challenges faced by leading businesses, including BMVSS, IBM, Insigne Health, Frog Design, and Philips. You'll wrestle with the issues they faced, all while engaging with fellow learners from around the world.

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Design Thinking and Innovation is part of the Entrepreneurship & Innovation Learning Track. If you're interested in developing deeper insights and expertise, you can choose to complete three entrepreneurship and innovation courses within 18 months to earn a Certificate of Specialization.

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Design Thinking for Social Impact - Design Sprint Conference 2017