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How do the best design performers increase their revenues and shareholder returns at nearly twice the rate of their industry counterparts?

We all know examples of bad product and service design. The USB plug (always lucky on the third try). The experience of rushing to make your connecting flight at many airports. The exhaust port on the Death Star in Star Wars.

The business value of design

We also all know iconic designs, such as the Swiss Army Knife, the humble Google home page, or the Disneyland visitor experience. All of these are constant reminders of the way strong design can be at the heart of both disruptive and sustained commercial success in physical, service, and digital settings.

Despite the obvious commercial benefits of designing great products and services, consistently realizing this goal is notoriously hard-and getting harder. Only the very best designs now stand out from the crowd, given the rapid rise in consumer expectations driven by the likes of Amazon; instant access to global information and reviews; and the blurring of lines between hardware, software, and services. Companies need stronger design capabilities than ever before.

So how do companies deliver exceptional designs, launch after launch? What is design worth? To answer these questions, we have conducted what we believe to be (at the time of writing) the most extensive and rigorous research undertaken anywhere to study the design actions that leaders can make to unlock business value. Our intent was to build upon, and strengthen, previous studies and indices, such as those from the Design Management Institute.

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We tracked the design practices of 300 publicly listed companies over a five-year period in multiple countries and industries. Their senior business and design leaders were interviewed or surveyed. Our team collected more than two million pieces of financial data and recorded more than 100,000 design actions. Advanced regression analysis uncovered the 12 actions showing the greatest correlation with improved financial performance and clustered these actions into four broad themes.

The four themes of good design described below form the basis of the McKinsey Design Index (MDI), which rates companies by how strong they are at design and-for the first time-how that links up with the financial performance of each company (Exhibit 1).

Our research yielded several striking findings:

1. We found a strong correlation between high MDI scores and superior business performance. Top-quartile MDI scorers increased their revenues and total returns to shareholders (TRS) substantially faster than their industry counterparts did over a five-year period-32 percentage points higher revenue growth and 56 percentage points higher TRS growth for the period as a whole.

2. The results held true in all three of the industries we looked at: medical technology, consumer goods, and retail banking. This suggests that good design matters whether your company focuses on physical goods, digital products, services, or some combination of these.

3. TRS and revenue differences between the fourth, third, and second quartiles were marginal. In other words, the market disproportionately rewarded companies that truly stood out from the crowd (Exhibit 2).

An elusive prize

In short, the potential for design-driven growth is enormous in both product- and service-based sectors (Exhibit 3). The good news is that there are more opportunities than ever to pursue user-centric, analytically informed design today. Customers can feed opinions back to companies (and to each other) in real time, allowing design to be measured by customers themselves-whether or not companies want to listen.

Lean start-ups have demonstrated how to make better decisions through prototyping and iterative learning. Vast repositories of user data and the advance of artificial intelligence (AI) have created powerful new sources of insights and unlocked the door for new techniques, such as computational design and analytics to value. Fast access to real customers is readily available through multiple channels, notably social media and smart devices. All of these developments should place the user at the heart of business decisions in a way that design leaders have long craved.

What our research demonstrates, however, is that many companies have been slow to catch up. Over 40 percent of the companies surveyed still aren't talking to their end users during development. Just over 50 percent admitted that they have no objective way to assess or set targets for the output of their design teams. With no clear way to link design to business health, senior leaders are often reluctant to divert scarce resources to design functions. That is problematic because many of the key drivers of the strong and consistent design environment identified in our research call for company-level decisions and investments. While many designers are acutely aware of some or all of the four MDI themes (Exhibit 4a), these typically can't be tackled by designers alone and often take years of leadership commitment to establish.

Top-quartile companies in design-and leading financial performers-excelled in all four areas. What's more, leaders appear to have an implicit understanding of the MDI themes. When senior executives were asked to name their organizations' single greatest design weakness, 98 percent of the responses mapped to the four themes of the MDI (Exhibit 4b).

Unpacking the MDI

In the remainder of this article, we'll describe the four clusters of design actions that showed the most correlation with improved financial performance: measuring and driving design performance with the same rigor as revenues and costs; breaking down internal walls between physical, digital, and service design; making user-centric design everyone's responsibility; and de-risking development by continually listening, testing, and iterating with end users.

More than a feeling: It's analytical leadership

The companies in our index that performed best financially understood that design is a top-management issue, and assessed their design performance with the same rigor they used to track revenues and costs. In many other businesses, though, design leaders say they are treated as second-class citizens.

Design issues remain stuck in middle management, rarely rising to the C-suite. When they do, senior executives make decisions on gut feel rather than concrete evidence.

Designers themselves have been partly to blame in the past: they have not always embraced design metrics or actively shown management how their designs tie to meeting business goals. What our survey unambiguously shows, however, is that the companies with the best financial returns have combined design and business leadership through a bold, design-centric vision clearly embedded in the deliberations of their top teams.

A strong vision that explicitly commits organizations to design for the sake of the customer acts as a constant reminder to the top team. The CEO of T-Mobile, for example, has a personal motto: "shut up and listen." IKEA works "to create a better everyday life for the many people." And as Pixar cofounder Ed Catmull told readers in a interview, to "wow" movie-goers continually, his company encourages its teams to take risks in their new projects: Pixar considers repeating the formulas of its past commercial successes a much greater threat to its long-term survival than the occasional commercial disappointment.

It's not enough, of course, to have fine words stapled to the C-suite walls. Companies that performed best in this area of our survey maintain a baseline level of customer understanding among all executives. These companies also have a leadership-level curiosity about what users need, as opposed to what they say they want. One top team we know invites customers to its regular monthly meeting solely to discuss the merits of its products and services. The CEO of one of the world's largest banks spends a day a month with the bank's clients and encourages all members of the C-suite to do the same. Through personal exposure or constant engagement with researchers, executives can act as role models for their businesses and learn firsthand what most frustrates and excites customers.

Many companies, though, acknowledge a worrying gap in understanding at the top of their organizations.

Less than 5 percent of those we surveyed reported that their leaders could make objective design decisions (for example, to develop new products or enter new sectors). In an age of ubiquitous online tools and data-driven customer feedback, it seems surprising that design still isn't measured with the same rigor as time or costs. Companies can now build design metrics (such as satisfaction ratings and usability assessments) into product specifications, just as they include requirements for grades of materials or target times to market.

The value of such accurate insights is significant-one online gaming company discovered that a small increase in the usability of its home page was followed by a dramatic 25 percent increase in sales. Moreover, the company also discovered that improvements beyond these small tweaks had almost no additional impact on the users' value perceptions, so it avoided further effort that would have brought little additional reward.

More than a product: It's user experience

Top-quartile companies embrace the full user experience; they break down internal barriers among physical, digital, and service design. The importance of user-centricity, demands a broad-based view of where design can make a difference. We live in a world where your smartphone can warn you to leave early for your next appointment because of traffic, and your house knows when you'll be home and therefore when to turn on the heat. The boundaries between products and services are merging into integrated experiences.

In practice, this often means mapping a customer journey (pain points and potential sources of delight) rather than starting with "copy and paste" technical specs from the last product. This design approach requires solid customer insights gathered firsthand by observing and-more importantly-understanding the underlying needs of potential users in their own environments. These insights must be championed at every meeting. Yet only around 50 percent of the companies we surveyed conducted user research before generating their first design ideas or specifications.

Combining physical products, digital tools, and "pure" services provides new opportunities for companies to capture this range of experience. A hotel, for example, might do more than just focus on the time between check-in and check-out (the service element) by promoting early engagement through social media or its own apps (the digital dimension) and providing physical mementos aimed at encouraging customers to rebook. The reception team of one big hotel chain we know gives departing guests a rubber duck adorned with an image of their host city (such as clogs and tulips for Amsterdam). The team includes a note suggesting that guests might like to keep the duck at home as a reminder of their stay and could build a collection by visiting the group's other properties. This small touch led to a 3 percent improvement in retention over time.

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Design-driven companies shouldn't limit themselves to their own ecosystems. The best businesses we interviewed think more broadly. Ready-made meals are popular with the hard-working singles who grab them on their way home. A retailer of these meals has considered teaming up with Netflix to devise a one-click meal-ordering system, which would come into play two hours into an evening's binge viewing when the customer would receive a screen prompt. Mobile-payment services such as Google Pay and Apple Pay were the result of a willingness to think across boundaries to devise easier ways to access cash. A piece of plastic in your wallet is one solution, but how much easier is it to use a device you already carry in your pocket?

More than a department: It's cross-functional talent

Top-quartile companies make user-centric design everyone's responsibility, not a siloed function. In the tired caricature of traditional design departments, a group of tattooed and aloof people operate under the radar, cut off from the rest of the organization. Considered renegades or mavericks by their colleagues, these employees (in the caricature) guard access to their ideas, complaining that they have too often been burned by narrow-minded engineering or marketing heads unwilling to (or incapable of) realizing the designers' grand visions.

We are not suggesting that this stereotype is still common-or that other functions are necessarily to blame-but it can be surprisingly resilient. One company we know, for example, unveiled a new flagship design studio to much jubilation from the design community. Before long, all the designers had moved their desks inside the studio, and had deactivated door access for the marketing, engineering, and quality teams. These moves drastically reduced the level of cooperative work and undermined the performance of the business as a whole.

Our research suggests that overcoming isolationist tendencies is extremely valuable. One of the strongest correlations we uncovered linked top financial performers and companies that said they could break down functional silos and integrate designers with other functions. This was particularly notable in consumer-packaged-goods (CPG) businesses, where respondents from companies that were top-quartile integrators reported compound annual growth rates some seven percentage points above those that were weakest in this respect.

Nurturing top design talent-the 2 percent of employees who make outsized contributions in every business -is another important dimension of team dynamics. Getting the basic incentives right is a part of this: in our survey, companies in the top quartile for design overall were almost three times more likely to have specific incentive programs for designers. These programs are tied to design outcomes, such as user-satisfaction metrics or major awards.

Crucially, though, retaining great design talent requires more than promising a big bonus or a career path as a top-flight manager. Carrots such as these are not enough to retain top design talent if not accompanied by the freedom to work on projects that stir their passion, time to speak at conferences attended by their peers, and opportunities to stay connected to the broader design community. Talented designers at a CPG company well-respected for its design credentials started leaving because of the amount of time they had to spend styling slideshow packs for the marketing team. Conversely, Spotify's appeal to top designers is often attributed to its autonomy-with-connectivity culture and to a working environment characterized by diversity, fun, and speed to market.

Design already touches many parts of a business: human-machine interactions, AI, behavioral economics, and engineering psychology, not to mention innovation and the development of new business models. While not a new concept, "T-shaped" hybrid designers, who work across functions while retaining their depth of design savvy, will be the employees most able to have a tangible impact through their work.

They will only be able to do so, though, if they have the right tools, capabilities, and infrastructure. That calls for the sort of design software, communication apps, deep data analytics, and prototyping technologies that drive productivity and accelerate design iterations. All of this requires time and investment. We found a strong correlation between successful companies and companies that resisted the temptation to cut spending on research, prototyping, or concept generation at the first sign of trouble. Formal design allocations should be agreed to in partnership with design leaders instead of appearing (as they often do) as line items in the marketing or engineering budgets.

More than a phase: It's continuous iteration

Design flourishes best in environments that encourage learning, testing, and iterating with users-practices that boost the odds of creating breakthrough products and services while simultaneously reducing the risk of big, costly misses. That approach stands in contrast to the prevailing norms in many companies, which still emphasize discrete and irreversible design phases in product development. Compartmentalization of this sort increases the risk of losing the voice of the consumer or of relying too heavily on one iteration of that voice.

The best results come from constantly blending user research-quantitative (such as conjoint analysis) and qualitative (such as ethnographic interviews). This information should be combined with reports from the market-analytics group on the actions of competitors, patent scans to monitor emerging technologies, business concerns flagged by the finance team, and the like. Without these tensions and interactions, development functions may end up in a vacuum, producing otherwise excellent work that never sees the light of day or delights customers.

In a successful effort to improve the user experience, one cruise company we know talked directly to passengers, analyzed payment data to show which food and activities were most popular at different times, and used AI algorithms on security-camera feeds to identify inefficiencies in a ship's layout. At a medical-technology company, blending sources of inspiration meant talking to a toy designer about physical ergonomics and to a dating-app designer about the design of digital interfaces. These moves helped the company to refine a device so that it appealed to customers with limited dexterity. The resulting product was not only safer and easier to use but also beat the market by more than four percentage points when launched.

Despite the value of iteration, almost 60 percent of companies in our survey said they used prototypes only for internal-production testing, late in the development process. In contrast, the most successful companies consciously foster a culture of sharing early prototypes with outsiders and celebrating embryonic ideas. They also discourage management from driving designers to spend hours perfecting their early mock-ups or internal presentations.

Design-centric companies realize that a product launch isn't the end of iteration. Almost every commercial software publisher issues constant updates to improve its products postlaunch. And the Apple Watch is one among many products that have been tweaked to reflect how customers use them "in the wild."

A first step toward great design

We realize that many companies apply some of these design practices-a strong voice in the C-suite, for example, or shared design spaces. Our results, however, show that excellence across all four dimensions, which is required to reach the top quartile, is relatively rare. We believe this helps account for the dramatic range of design performance reflected in the observed companies' MDI scores, which were as low as 43 and as high as 92 (Exhibit 5).

The diversity among companies achieving top-quartile MDI performance shows that design excellence is within the grasp of every business, whether product, service, or digitally oriented. Through interviews and our experience working with companies to transform their strength in design, we've also discovered that one of the most powerful first steps is to select an important upcoming product or service and make a commitment to using it as a pilot for getting the four elements right. This approach showed far better financial results than trying to improve design as a theme across the whole company-for example, conducting trials of cross-functional work in isolation from real products or services.

One medical-equipment group we know rallied around the design of a new surgical machine as it sought to head off a growing threat from competitors. The commitment of the CEO and senior executives was intense; executive bonuses were tied to the product's usability metrics and surgeon-satisfaction scores. Cross-functional and co-located teams carried out more than 200 user tests over two years, from the earliest concepts to the detailed design of features. In all, more than 110 concepts and prototypes were created and iterated. The final design's usability score-a measure of customer satisfaction-exceeded 90 percent, compared with less than 76 percent for the machines of its two main competitors. The ultimate solution combined a physical device, a digital data pad that could seamlessly connect with more than 40 third-party operating-theater devices, and a service contract.

In the past six months, the company's market share has jumped 40 percent, in part as investors understand the upcoming user-centric products and services that set the company apart from its competition and-even more important-that will improve patients' lives.

The McKinsey Design Index highlights four key areas of action companies must take to join the top quartile of design performers. First, at the top of the organization, adopt an analytical approach to design by measuring and leading your company's performance in this area with the same rigor the company devotes to revenues and costs. Second, put the user experience front and center in the company's culture by softening internal boundaries (between physical products, services, and digital interactions, for example) that don't exist for customers. Third, nurture your top design people and empower them in cross-functional teams that take collective accountability for improving the user experience while retaining the functional connections of their members. Finally, iterate, test, and learn rapidly, incorporating user insights from the first idea until long after the final launch.

Companies that tackle these four priorities boost their odds of becoming more creative organizations that consistently design great products and services. For companies that make it into the top quartile of MDI scorers, the prizes are as rich as doubling their revenue growth and shareholder returns over those of their industry counterparts.

Want to know how your organization compares?

Take the 30-minute McKinsey Design Index self-assessment to understand where your design strengths and opportunities lie, and the value at stake from further improvement.

About the author(s)

Benedict Sheppard is a partner in McKinsey's London office, where Garen Kouyoumjian is a consultant; Hugo Sarrazin is a senior partner in the Silicon Valley office; and Fabricio Dore is an associate partner in the São Paulo office.

The authors wish to thank Becca Coggins, Volker Grüntges, and Michael Silber for their tireless support of the research behind this article. They also wish to thank Maxim Berdutin, Markus Berger-de León, John Edson, Sarah Greenberg, Rupert Lee, Randy Lim, Drew Mancini, Rob Mathis, Rashid Puthiyapurayil, Stefan Roggenhofer, David Saunders, and Hyo Yeon for their substantive input.

Interactive - McKinsey Quarterly

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How do the best design performers increase their revenues and shareholder returns at nearly twice the rate of their industry counterparts? We all know examples of bad product and service design. The USB plug (always lucky on the third try). The experience of rushing to make your connecting flight at many airports.

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Ever since it became clear that smart design led to the success of many products, companies have been employing it in other areas, from customer experiences, to strategy, to business ecosystems. But as design is used in increasingly complex contexts, a new hurdle has emerged: gaining acceptance of the "designed artifact" into the status quo. In fact, the more innovative a new design is, the more resistance it's likely to meet. The solution, say the CEO of IDEO and the Rotman School's former dean, is to also apply design thinking to the introduction of the innovation itself.

This process, intervention design, grew organically out of the iterative prototyping that designers did to help understand customers' reactions to new products. Not only did iterative prototyping create better offerings, but it was a great way to get organizational funding and commitment, because it improved the chances of success and reduced fear of the unknown. Intervention design uses iterative prototyping to get buy-in too, but extends it to interactions with all the principal stakeholders-not just customers.

When Intercorp Group devised a revolutionary concept for Peru's schools, it needed to win acceptance for corporate-run education and for a very different role for teachers. Thanks to intervention design, it now has 29 schools in operation and is rapidly growing.

HBR Reprint R1509C

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Ever since it became clear that smart design led to the success of many products, companies have been employing it in other areas, from customer experiences, to strategy, to business ecosystems. But as design is used in increasingly complex contexts, a new hurdle has emerged: gaining acceptance of the "designed artifact" into the status quo.

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How the inventor of Mario designs a game

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How the inventor of Mario designs a game

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If you are interested in being less biased-and particularly less prejudiced-I have good news and bad news.

Let's start with the bad. Human beings are naturally biased. The only way we can make sense of the world is to simplify it by putting things and people into mental category "buckets" that are either good or bad, interesting or boring, etc. There are many of these; just check out this visualization to see the variety.

An unbiased human would simply be unable to function, wasting vast amounts of time trying to experience the world as it is, without making any inferences or assumptions. Imagine not taking a flight because you cannot trust the pilot, or not assuming that the person pointing a gun at you may have unfriendly plans for you.

On a related note, scientific research concludes that there are no convincing methods for eradicating prejudice entirely, and that the substantial amounts of cash spent on combatting biases are probably wasted, because there's no proven way to make people unbiased.

The good news is that while eliminating bias and prejudice is impossible, there are of bias and prejudice, partly as the product of experience. So it's safe to assume that if you're reading this, you are likely better at keeping a lid on your biases than most people. This is because you are both aware of your biases, and probably more curious and open to experiences.

So what, then, can we learn from the available research to apply to ourselves, if our goal is to become a less biased version of ourselves? Here are four key recommendations:

Embrace cognitive diversity

This means learning to tolerate and perhaps even like people who think, act, and feel very differently than you do. It may be as simple as watching a TV program that you hate, or listening to a podcast that you vehemently disagree with. The better path would be to actually make an effort to interact with people who question or dislike your values, at least to understand how they think.

Related: How unconscious bias affects everything you do

One of the most consistent findings in social psychology is that simply being exposed to people who are different-this includes sociodemographic and ethnic diversity-tends to make us a bit more open-minded and tolerant, particularly if we can find some common ground or overlap between their views and ours. That is generally the case, you just have to try.

Cultivate your empathy

Empathy is an old topic in psychology, defined as the ability and willingness to take other people's perspectives to understand what they are thinking and feel what they are feeling. Although there are reliable training programs to boost empathy even in psychopaths, you can practice and develop your empathy alone.

Start by analyzing what other people may be thinking, their motives and attitudes. Then try to justify why they may think and feel as they do. In particular, pay attention to those who are less privileged and disadvantaged, and consider-at least temporarily-that they may not be as lucky or successful as you, despite being as interesting, talented, or hard-working (if not more). Think of how you would feel if you were in their shoes. These and other simple exercises on perspective can help you create a habit for empathic thinking and feeling, which will make you more tolerant, and perhaps even less biased.

Make your biases explicit

In other words, get real. Awareness of bias is a necessary step for dealing with it, even if it's not the entire antidote. One interesting tool to get there is the implicit association test, which while clearly not perfect, has been used for decades to explore the gap between people's explicit and implicit biases. For a range of widely used and well-designed free tests including on race and gender, try Harvard University's tests, which will give you instant feedback and tell you how you compare to most people. For example, I took the gender one and it confirmed that I'm moderately sexist toward men, rating women's career potential more highly.

Related: This strategy works better than diversity training

This doesn't solve the problem of people who are aware they are racist and sexist and proud of it. But they tend to be a smaller proportion of the overall population than the people who, inadvertently, project more minor biases in their interpersonal exchanges with others. These are the people who engage in benevolent sexism or racism, giving backhanded compliments to women and minorities, or acting in a patronizing and condescending way that perpetuates negative stereotypes about them. They might say something like, "Blacks are great athletes" (meaning they are not intellectually smart), or, "Female leaders are very caring" (meaning they are not tough or unsentimental enough to lead properly).

Control your behaviors

Ultimately, what matters is not how you feel or what you think about people deep down, but how you behave. This is so obvious that we almost forget it. Consider two individuals: one who is prejudiced but consistently behaves in prosocial and inclusive ways, to the point that their reputation is one of fairness, and another who, despite being quite open-minded and agnostic about stereotypes, behaves in a derogatory and prejudiced manner.

If you think this is unlikely, think again. For almost 100 years, psychological research has shown that the relationship between attitudes and behavior is often weak and inconsistent. For instance, the number of people who are in favor of organ donation far exceeds the number of people who donate organs, and the number of people who care about the planet and the environment surpasses the number of people who recycle and make their lives more eco-friendly. By the same token, the number of people who believe in the inferiority of certain nationalities, genders, ethnicities, or religious groups is probably significantly larger than the number of people who behave in nasty or derogatory ways toward those very groups. That is a good thing: We call it civilization.

So while you'll never be bias-free, if you try to see things from other people's perspectives who are not like you (which will generally be easier if you spend time with them), and you critically evaluate what your main biases are, you will probably be able to keep them in check, and even hide them. That is the best you and those who are interested in living in a more peaceful and civilized world can hope for.

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How to become a less biased version of yourself

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If you are interested in being less biased-and particularly less prejudiced-I have good news and bad news. Let's start with the bad. Human beings are naturally biased. The only way we can make sense of the world is to simplify it by putting things and people into mental category "buckets" that are either good or bad, interesting or boring, etc.

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Can bees save elephants from train accidents? As incredible as it may seem, they seem to be doing their job fairly well! In November 2017, the Indian Railways launched the initiative, 'Plan Bee' to prevent trains from hitting elephants crossing tracks. On Friday, the Indian Railways declared that its "Plan Bee" has been a great success as the number of casualties has gone down drastically.

Under the Northeast Frontier Railway (NFR)'s Plan Bee, a device, which costs around Rs 2,000 was installed first at the level crossings near Guwahati railway station. The plan involves setting up of devices near tracks, which emit the 'buzzing' sound of swarming bees, considered as a natural nemesis of elephants, " Railway Minister Piyush Goyal tweeted. The sound is audible to elephants 600 meters away and thus helps them in keeping away from the tracks," Goyal said.

According to wildlife experts, India has the highest number of train accidents involving elephants in the world. Deaths have increased sharply - between 1987 and 2010, a period of 23 years, 150 elephants died while crossing railway tracks, but the figure touched 120 between 2009 and 2017, just 8 years. 35 elephants were killed on railway tracks during 2014 to 2016 and five elephants were killed till July 2017, the Lok Sabha was informed last year. India has a deep connection with elephants. But, for years, the railways turned a blind eye to their suffering.

In April this year, four elephants were hit by the Howrah-Mumbai Express at the double-crossing railway tracks near Telidihi village of Jharsugida district in Odisha, killing all four on the spot.

Reasons: Increasing human population, habitat destruction, increased frequency of fast trains, and neglect on part of authorities.

India's deep connection with Elephants Asian elephant ranges across Southeast Asia, with India accounting for about 55 per cent of the total. The country's wild elephant numbers jumped from 15,627 in 1980, with the official Elephant Census 2017 pegging the population at 27,312. India has deep connection with the elephant. In 2010, it was declared as the national heritage animal of India. A calf named Bholu is the mascot of Indian Railways. Elephants are also worshiped and used in religious rituals. Yet, for years, the Railways turned a blind eye to their suffering.

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Plan Bee: How Indian Railways is saving elephants from train accidents

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Can bees save elephants from train accidents? As incredible as it may seem, they seem to be doing their job fairly well! In November 2017, the Indian Railways launched the initiative, 'Plan Bee' to prevent trains from hitting elephants crossing tracks.

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A look at what's ahead for the future of business, technology and design.

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Why Design Thinking Works

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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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- by Naina Dhingra, Jonathan Emmett and Mahin Samadani

A growing number of organizations suddenly are into employee experience. They're discarding the stiff, outdated term human resources and many have even replaced chief human resources officer with chief employee experience officer.

So, what is employee experience? Is it a fad? The new buzzword? A fresh approach to competing in today's war for talent? Or a fancy way to make engagement sound better to millennials?

Millennials are certainly a factor. They comprise 30 percent of the population and by 2025 will represent 75 percent of the global workforce. What they seek most from their jobs is meaningful work, flexibility and autonomy, and connection and mentoring.

This shift to EX, as we refer to employee experience, parallels the changing nature of work. With today's technology, 45 percent of activities people are paid to do could be automated, and 60 percent of jobs could have 30 percent or more of their activities automated.

How people show up and interact with companies will differ fundamentally because employers are recognizing they must reimagine every aspect of work - from recruitment and job evaluations to collaboration, perks, and the workplace itself. For them, the war for talent will be won or lost based on EX.

McKinsey believes EX is essential for companies to compete effectively. It ranks among our top people initiatives and we're dedicating significant resources to it. We're not alone. EX even influences where companies locate their business, including a giant online retailer's criteria for deciding where to situate its second headquarters. Its selection criteria included community, quality of life, cultural community fit and access to mass transit - all factors that help enhance EX.

We define EX as companies and their people working together to create personalized, authentic experiences that ignite passion and tap into purpose to strengthen individual, team, and company performance.

It requires a human-centric approach to grasp an employee's needs and desires to create those moments that truly matter in their day, year, and career. We borrow from great customer experience to consider how these moments provide unexpected delight to inspire employee loyalty and retention.

Consider a story that a healthcare client recently related about a family member in a medical crisis being connected by colleagues and co-workers to a network of healthcare professionals, support systems, and exceptional products. That experience transformed that employee's attitudes toward the company. Another company tackled barriers getting in the way of accomplishing work. It made a difference with employees spending more time on things that matter. Gone are the three-hour meetings late on a Friday afternoon that lead nowhere. Now that's a good experience.

Imagine what companies can achieve if they create extraordinary moments - both big and small - for and with their employees each day.

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Employee experience: essential to compete | Organization

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by Naina Dhingra, Jonathan Emmett and Mahin Samadani A growing number of organizations suddenly are into employee experience. They're discarding the stiff, outdated term human resources and many have even replaced chief human resources officer with chief employee experience officer. So, what is employee experience? Is it a fad?

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Design thinking has become crucial for many activities in the business world as well as in other contexts. However, design thinking is still a rather nebulous phenomenon in literature as well as in practice. As Carlgren et al. (2016, 49) state:

There is a need for a description of DT that is less normative and static and that is specific enough to be able to frame it as a concept, yet flexible enough to allow for variety in its local use. There is also a need for a description that takes account of the various facets of use, so that DT can be seen as a process, or as methods, a toolbox, a mental approach, a culture or a mix thereof. This could mean that researchers studying DT would not have to rely on, for example, the d.school process, which is one of the more common descriptions but which does not capture what goes on in the name of DT in many organizations.

In this article, I propose a comprehensive three-part descriptive model for design thinking that is based on previous research (Hassi & Laakso, 2011 and Carlgren et al., 2016). Therewith I aim to provide a description of design thinking that is both tangible and lives up to the richness of design thinking.

So, what is design thinking? Design thinking can be described as a mindset and work attitude for creative problem solving based on the following five principles: user focus, problem framing, collaboration, experimentation and visualization. In addition, a structured process and physical space serve to support and implement these principles (figure 1). In the following, I would like to describe the three different parts in more detail.

The design thinking principles

The first descriptive unit is divided into three levels, each related to the other (table 1). At level 1, there are the five core principles of design thinking: user focus, problem framing, collaboration, experimentation and visualization. Derived from these principles, there are different mindsets and work attitudes that are essential throughout all activities. The "mindsets" describe the mental attitudes with which one approaches the work at hand, as well as the general way of thinking in an organizational culture. The "work attitudes" category, in turn, refers to concrete practices and tangible ways of working that are consistent with the mindsets. Thus, the mindsets and work attitudes influence each other. At the same time, they support the application of concrete methods. Having the right mindset and work attitude is the basis for successful implementation of certain methods - the mere application of methods alone is not enough, as they must be applied with the appropriate attitude and specific goals. On the other hand, methods can in turn support the establishment of mindsets and work attitudes.

The design thinking process

The second part of the descriptive model is the design thinking process. The process serves as a guide for the design team and provides a structure for the expedient implementation of the principles, mindsets and work attitudes as well as the methods. The process represents a framework in which promising ideas can be generated and user-oriented solutions can flourish. It´s similar to the Creative Problem Solving Process (CPS Process, a structured creativity process for systematically generating ideas), with certain specific characteristics such as a strong user focus and working with prototypes. There are different variations of the design thinking process; I am guided by the process that is taught at the HPI School of Design Thinking in Potsdam. The process can thus be divided into six phases: understand, observe, define point of view, ideate, prototype and test (figure 2).

The first three process phases are all about learning about the problem, identifying the relevant questions, understanding the users and then defining a concrete point of view towards the problem based on this information. To sum up, the first three phases are about ensuring that a significant problem or user need is identified and addressed. Only then, in the next three phases, is the focus on creating solutions for the problems that have been identified: different ideas are generated, the ideas are made tangible in the form of prototypes and the design team gets feedback from the users right away.

The loops between the process phases indicate that DT is rarely a straightforward approach; instead it is an iterative process in which the different phases are repeated continuously. Thus, different modes of thinking are used at different times. Divergent thinking describes a creative, open, unsystematic, experimental and playful approach, while convergent thinking is a logical, rational, systematic, linear decision-oriented approach.

The physical space in design thinking

The third part of the descriptive model is the physical space. While the physical space itself cannot produce ideas, it can inspire the people within it and support them, e.g. to get more creative or work together in a better way. Depending on the working mode, there are different requirements for the physical space (figure 3).

Teamwork plays an important role in design thinking; therefore an open, teamwork-promoting spatial structure is important. Furthermore, the space should stimulate the team so that it is prompted to use easily accessible materials for building rapid prototypes. Next, the versatility of the premises is relevant in the form of various working areas and surfaces, so that the principle of visualization can be followed. Lastly, a flexible room design makes it possible to easily adapt the space to the respective needs (e.g., standing vs. sitting, focus vs. activity).

So, this three-part descriptive model depicts my understanding of design thinking. I would like to express my thanks to Lisa Carlgren, Ingo Rauth, Maria Elmquist, Lotta Hassi, Miko Laakso and the HPI School of Design Thinking for their great work.

I hope you find this useful and I'm looking forward to your questions, thoughts or feedback.

References:
Carlgren, L., Rauth, I. & Elmquist, M., 2016. Framing Design Thinking: The Concept in Idea and Enactment. Creativity and Innovation Management, 25(1), pp. 38-57.

Hassi, L. & Laakso, M., 2011. Conceptions of design thinking in the management discourse. Porto, European Academy of Design Conference.

Tschepe, S., 2017. Was sind die wichtigsten Eigenschaften und Fähigkeiten von Design Thinking-Coaches? Available at: http://www.designthinkingundcoaching.de [Accessed 2 April 2017].

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Mindset? Process? Method? A Comprehensive Descriptive Model for Design Thinking

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Design thinking has become crucial for many activities in the business world as well as in other contexts. However, design thinking is still a rather nebulous phenomenon in literature as well as in practice. As Carlgren et al.

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Is your school or workplace divided between the “creatives” versus the practical people? Yet surely, David Kelley suggests, creativity is not the domain of only a chosen few. Telling stories from his legendary design career and his own life, he offers ways to build the confidence to create. (From The Design Studio session at TED2012, guest-curated by Chee Pearlman and David Rockwell.)

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Design Thinking Bootleg — Stanford d.school

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The Design Thinking Bootleg is a set of tools and methods that we keep in our back pockets, and now you can do the same.

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What tools can I use to understand people?

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How do I choose a solution to take forward?

How do I prototype my ideas?

How do I prepare for launch?

How do I prepare for scale?
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"Be a Design Thinking facilitator!"

Join a community of learners, do-ers and teachers. Journey through a Design Thinking experience, apply it in the real world, and go forth and teach others the methodology.

Facilitator Roles

Coordinate a group of participants and meeting space. There must be a minimum of 2 people, but no maximum for the number or participants.

Present Opening Remarks on WHAT Design Thinking is to you, and why this is an important exercise for the group. There are NO wrong answers here.

Facilitate and document the Crash Course debrief.

Help your team move from learning design thinking to doing design thinking by visiting "Chart your own course" - It may help you to review the various mixtapes ahead of time so that you have a hunch as to what direction your team might want to take.

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Join a community of learners, do-ers and teachers. Journey through a Design Thinking experience, apply it in the real world, and go forth and teach others the methodology. Coordinate a group of participants and meeting space. There must be a minimum of 2 people, but no maximum for the number or participants.

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Share and engage with the Design Sprint Community

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Organizations are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on employee engagement programs, yet their scores on engagement surveys remain abysmally low. How is that possible? Because most initiatives amount to an adrenaline shot. A perk is introduced to boost scores, but over time the effect wears off and scores go back down. Another perk is introduced, and scores go back up - and then they fall again. The more this cycle repeats itself, the more it feels like manipulation. People begin to recognize the short-term fixes for what they are.

When organizations make real gains, it's because they're thinking longer-term. They're going beyond what engagement scores are telling them to do in the moment and redesigning employee experience, creating a place where people want, not just need, to work each day. But what does that mean, and what does it look like?

To understand this, I interviewed 150 psychologists, economists, and business leaders around the world. The executives included heads of HR, innovation, IT, and diversity, and they represented a range of industries and sectors (tech, manufacturing, retail, professional services, education, startups, and others). Based on those conversations, I identified three environments that matter most to employees: cultural, technological, physical. Next, I worked with Serge P. da Motta Veiga of American University and Steven King of Emergent Research to develop survey questions to determine how organizations are faring in each area. Support for the research was provided by Cisco and Lever.

After analyzing more than 250 diverse organizations, drawing on the Fortune 100 and various "best workplaces" lists, I found that over half the companies were rated poorly by their employees in at least one of the three areas, and 20% got very low scores across the board. Although 23% were making strides in all three areas, just 6% were investing heavily in all three - and those "experiential organizations" (Adobe, Accenture, Facebook, Microsoft, and others) saw performance gains.

When I interviewed business leaders at the top-scoring organizations, they told me their investments in the three employee experience environments had led not only to happier employees but also to larger talent pipelines and greater profitability and productivity. But that was just anecdotal evidence. So I looked at appearances in "best of" lists. For instance, compared with the other companies I studied, those that invested most heavily in employee experience were included 28 times as often among Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies, 11.5 times as often in Glassdoor's Best Places to Work, 2.1 times as often in Forbes's list of the World's Most Innovative Companies, 4.4 times as often in LinkedIn's list of North America's Most In-Demand Employers, and twice as often in the American Customer Satisfaction Index.

Some of the most compelling evidence lay in the financial data. I wasn't able to find every single metric for every single company, but the results were still striking. Compared with other companies, the experiential organizations had more than four times the average profit and more than two times the average revenue. They were also almost 25% smaller, which suggests higher levels of productivity and innovation.

And they outperformed the S&P 500, the NASDAQ, Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For, and Glassdoor's Best Places to Work, in addition to the other organizations I studied, by considerable margins.

Looking at the data, it's clear that there is a significant return to organizations that focus on employee experience over the long term, not just engagement in the here and now. Adobe, for instance, has an EVP of customer and employee experience and is making considerable investments in real-time employee feedback programs, beefing up diversity and inclusion efforts, giving employees access to consumer-grade technologies, and building workspaces according to multiple floor plans to accommodate different styles and preferences. LinkedIn and Accenture both host HR hackathons, where employees help break down and rebuild the people and HR functions to reflect the work that they really do (and need to do). Airbnb treats its physical space like software: The company is constantly experimenting with different layouts and floor plans, and employees get to volunteer to design and build their conference rooms, with a modest budget. KPMG and the San Diego Zoo do an amazing job of telling their organizational story and helping employees understand the impact their contributions have on the organization, which fosters a feeling of belonging and purpose.

Your organization might want to take a different approach altogether. The important thing is to shift your attention away from those fickle engagement numbers and focus on how people experience your organization day by day. This means moving away from putting people into outdated workplaces, and redesigning workplaces and practices around your employees.

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Why the Millions We Spend on Employee Engagement Buy Us So Little

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Organizations are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on employee engagement programs, yet their scores on engagement surveys remain abysmally low. How is that possible? Because most initiatives amount to an adrenaline shot. A perk is introduced to boost scores, but over time the effect wears off and scores go back down.

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Last week, I read the latest of a dozen or so blog posts I've come across trashing personas or user interviews or customer journeys or jobs to be done or [ insert your design tool or method here]. My immediate reaction to this is frustration and concern.

If you hire a carpenter to build you a table and the finished product doesn't fit your space, you don't blame the hammer, you blame the craftsman.

Most of these articles and posts follow a similar pattern. They lead with a very provocative title that implies you should forget everything you know, or that you are doing it all wrong. (And yes, I recognize the irony here.) The author then provides a fairly well-written thesis as to why a certain design tool or method is fundamentally broken or "complete trash". They provide real-world examples and talk about specific times the tool or method has failed them. Occasionally, they will also provide details on how the tool was crafted and the nature of the content or framework they used. And everytime I read these descriptions I have the same reaction... "Of course personas failed them here, that is not how they are supposed to work!"

I've had this same debate with my peers many times. I will hear someone say, "I hate personas," and my immediate response is, "Explain to me why you feel that way." Afterall, I am a researcher and I have a responsibility to ask, listen and build empathy for their point of view. The conversation will go back and forth for a while but it inevitably always leads to the same conclusion - they have seen more badly-written personas than good ones. The tool has been so over-used and abused, that it has gotten a bad reputation and they want to distance themselves from it.

This attitude is dangerous. The tools themselves aren't the problem, it's how they are being misused. I believe there are four tenets we should keep in mind to prevent us from cutting off our nose to spite our face.

Choose the Right Tool

Just like a master carpenter with saws and hammers and wrenches in his woodshop, designers have a plethora of methods and frameworks at our disposal. Ethnographic research methods, workshops, personas, customer journeys, mind maps, storyboards, sketches, prototypes, etc are the tools of our trade. Just like a good carpenter, we need to know how and when to use the right tools to get a specific job done.

Not every project requires us to write personas. Interviews (or interviews alone) are not always the best way to collect the insights we need to understand our users. Customer journeys are not the be-all-and-end-all in visualizing a user's experience. The tools and methods we use should differ from project to project because the specific goals and scope of each project is different.

"If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

- Abraham Maslow

Each tool in our toolbox has a specific purpose and context in which it should be used. Just as the carpenter needs to know when to use a table saw vs a band saw, we need to educate ourselves on when personas are, and are not appropriate to use and what may be best to use in their place. In order to plan and select the proper tools, we need to ask ourselves the following:

What do I need to know to be successful? How can I learn that?

What is the best way to synthesize, visualize and share what I learn so that the key insights and opportunities can be actioned and addressed in design?

What secondary research methods can complement and further validate these findings?

Use The Tool The Right Way

Selecting the right tool for the job is only half the battle. You also need to know how to use it. If you've taken a wood-working class, you will remember that on the first day you likely had safety training. The instructor takes you around to each piece of equipment and shows you the proper way to use it. If your instructor was anything like mine, you also heard stories of people who were maimed because they used the tools incorrectly. While it is unlikely that you will lose a finger if you write a bad persona, the consequences can still be costly.

If I were struggling to use a hammer, because I was holding it backwards, and then loudly declared "all hammers are useless," my carpenter friends would laugh in my face.

Interviews, observations, diary studies and workshops should be carefully planned and properly executed. We need to ask the right questions in the right way and document consistently to ensure we collect the right data and answer our pre-defined objectives. Our analysis and synthesis should be rigorous. Whether we are conducting a formal study or quick-n-dirty guerilla research we should never be sloppy or we can't trust the outcomes.

Personas, customer journeys, jobs to be done, user stories, and service blueprints MUST be based on real user data and insights. I once walked into a workshop and observed a group of people writing a persona. I was a little confused at first, but once I realized they were making the entire thing based on what they "thought", a little piece of me died on the inside. You can't claim all personas are garbage if you are only using trash to create yours.

The outcomes of your research should be actionable and set a clear direction for design. Personas should contain attitudes, behaviors, motivations, needs and pain points that we can tap into and address. I don't care that "Henry the Hipster" is a vegan who hangs out at his local cafe and bikes everywhere. I want to know why he chose to be vegan and how that motivation or attitude influences other aspects of his life. Why did he choose that particular cafe? What rational and emotional thoughts affected his reasoning and loyalty? Why is biking his prefered mode of transportation? Maybe he can't afford a car, maybe he enjoys the physical activity, maybe it's a matter of sustainability. The answers to these questions can give me the insights I need to design the right thing for Henry.

Balance Consistency With Adaptability

I previously taught a contextual research course for graduate-level designers. When my students were synthesizing their research and creating their design deliverables, I would often be asked to share "templates" for artifacts such as personas or customer journeys. While I understand why they asked the question, I always cringe a bit when it's suggested we could or should be templatizing a tool like this.

Some of the agencies that I have worked for have strived for consistency in deliverables. An artifact from Shop X, should look like an artifact from Shop X in both branding and format. I have tried to balance this with my own philosophy and approach to the types of tools that I use and the things I make. But just as the tools we use need to differ from project to project, some of their components or format may also need to change.

The personas I write always contain a name, image, quote, short descriptor and narrative or list of beliefs, attitudes and motivations. Depending on the specific goals and needs of the project there are other components to the personas I may swap in or out - pains and gains, 2x2s, semantic differentials, connections to a journey, brand resonance, and device usage to name a few. My advice is to start with a solid definition of your tool, it's purpose and core components but don't be afraid to adapt and adjust the format to fit specific needs or goals. Play with the format until it's something that works for your team and objective.

Share, Debate, Learn, and Refine

I've been working in the design field for over 15 years and I never stop looking for inspiration and ways I can grow, adapt and refine my toolbox. Almost every time I pull out a tool to use, I am making a slight tweak because I learned something the last time I used it or read/saw a technique I'd like to try. I'm fortunate that I have found a community and built a network of peers I can turn to for support, critique and discourse.

Find your tribe, engage with and leverage them. When you have a new problem to solve, ask for advice on new methods or approaches to try. I guarantee, someone in our industry has tackled something similar and has tips on what has or hasn't worked for them. We know our tool set needs to be adjusted based on context. Test and learn what will work, when, where and how. Find opportunities where you can explore methods and give yourself freedom to fail. Learn from your failures and refine your approach. It's important that we have outlets for informed, healthy debate on topics such as this in order to continue to grow and evolve as designers.

Every tool has a purpose but learning how and when to apply those tools is just as important. Remember that methodology matters.

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed my perspective please give it a "clap" and share this post. If you have a counterpoint, let's continue the discourse.

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Personas aren't the problem... your methodology is - UX Collective

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Last week, I read the latest of a dozen or so blog posts I've come across trashing personas or user interviews or customer journeys or jobs to be done or [ insert your design tool or method here]. My immediate reaction to this is frustration and concern.

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Why Workplace Culture Matters (And How to Build a Good One)

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5 ways to create an environment that inspires innovative work

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What's missing in design as a practice and as a group of professionals? The one thing I feel is missing is a kind of sense of skepticism from designers.

Digital platforms provide an incredible opportunity for us to make our voice heard. But yet at the same time, we don't really choose the platforms or even the format through which we react with. So you see a condition is that we tend to resort to the things that are provided to us without us really questioning it.

This incredibly reduced form of looking at design is very common nowadays-we can just basically click on a button. One out of the three things is awesome or is it really bad and then that is the design criticism that we have right now.

And I haven't actually seen much skepticism from designers about these platforms and mediums and blogs and channels that are provided to us. I haven't seen much of that yet, but then I think that if we look around into other adjacent fields, we see that in art-not that all artists are critics-as a field they tend to just be a lot more reflective.

In their writing, they reflect on their own work, and they're skeptical about what they're doing often times. They're also very skeptical and question the world around them. And that's something that I think that we can do a lot more as designers, and I know it is not an easy thing to do, because a lot of our practice is to serve commercial goals and purposes. Under that kind of condition it's not that easy to say, "Okay. Are we doing the right thing? Or are we doing good design right now?"

I think we should strive to do a lot more reflection as a group. So I would like to propose the idea that the designer is a skeptic. I know that skepticism is not necessarily encouraging and positive work, but I think that really opens up the ability for us to question things around us, and that also asks us to think about a cultural and attitude shift that needs to happen.

There are certain shifts that I would like to see happen. The first one is to shift our obsession on "prescription" to "exploration."

The Limits Of Design Thinking

Design thinking embodies our obsession with prescription. I gave a talk on design thinking and my issues with design thinking last year and got a lot of responses. We crave prescriptions and mythology in general- as a profession and as a society. That probably explains the proliferation of design thinking.

Prescriptions create a kind of prison, in terms of how we can think about things and how we work. But a very linear methodology-based way of working completely removes other possibilities.

With 3M Post-it Notes-a hallmark of design thinking-you can do a lot of quick brainstorming and collaborations, right? But if you actually look at what's on the stickers, they are all just thoughts from our heads, right? That is questionable because it removes a lot of the other possibilities and materials that you can bring in to actually really enrich the discussion.

So from prescription, I would like to go back to some of the old ways of working. That is not just going back to old mediums, but rather it's the idea of going back to the very notion of explorations.

I look at an image of [legendary designers] Charles and Ray Eames working in their studio, and the first thing that I notice is all the stuff that they have in their studio. Of course, that was before the internet and computer came about. But what was special about their way of working is that they were just really curious about everything around them, and they collected everything possible. It was through genuine interest in the world around them and through exploration they were able to develop this incredible body of work.

If you looked at that body of work from today's lens, you would find much of it really crazy, like how is that even possible? And why would they do that? There is no focus whatsoever, right? But if you put the business focus aside, you see that they translated their exploration directly into their work and created this incredible body of work that is still inspiring us today.

Democratized Design Versus Cross-Pollination

We have entered an age of the democratization of design. The assumption is that by democratizing design, we're actually able to create better design. I don't think that. I'll propose a different idea that's what I call cross-pollination between domains.

The word "empathy" is prevalent in design discourse; people have become experts on design empathy. Back in the day we called it research. It's just part of your research. You listen to your audience. You understand what their needs are. It's not that I'm against empathy. We, as designers, need to empathize with our audience, and now we call them "users."

But there's also this assumption right now with the word "empathy" that we should just give people the pencil, and let them actually design because we have to create this kind of user-centric solution. It's too simplistic to draw that equation-that being empathetic to your audience or users equates to giving them the ability to tell you how to design or drive how you design.

I want to bring out a historic example. This is really an interesting case. And I got to know this project when I was at SVA in 2001, through my art class. The artists Komar and Melamid work as a pair. And each of them has his own body of work. So in early '90s, they had this idea. They wanted to know what true "people's art" would look like. This, I think, is the only and perhaps largest of user research in art ever.

So they created this project that is called the "Most Wanted and Least Wanted Paintings." How did they do that? This was before the internet came about. So they couldn't actually put out an online survey and send it out to millions of people. They didn't have Facebook at that time. So what they did was they literally traveled to these countries. They're 14 countries that they traveled to. And you see from the list they're culturally quite different with the majority being in Europe but America is also on the list.

They wanted to find out, out of each country: What would their most wanted painting look like, as well as least wanted? So they asked very simple questions-similar to what we ask our users today.

What colors do you like? Do you like warm colors or cool colors? Do you like to see colors blended into each other or do you like to see them separate? In America, the answer was predominantly blended color.

Out of the answers, they started to realize the paintings. America's favorite painting was a very classic landscape with people in it and two deer on the right with a tree in the foreground, a little hill on the left, and a lake and mountains in the background.

In France, they had some pretty similar results with the exception that there were some haystacks in the foreground. There was also that tree and there's a lake and there's a mountain in the back, and there are two deers Iceland is almost the same compositionally as well as thematically.

So it is astounding that, first of all, they so similar in terms of themes, objects, and compositions. Even more astounding to me is how generic they are. This is very kind of enlightening study in that, not all user feedback is good. And oftentimes user feedback is the bottom line and we should strive to do better than that.

So what I would like to propose is this idea of cross-pollination between different domains. It simply means that designers should get into other domains-ones that are typically outside of our own comfort zone.

One interesting example for me is this architecture group in the '60s called Archigram. Archigram was a group of architects, and they never got anything realized. That was not their agenda to get their thinking built but what they were trying to do is to agitate modernism, which again, was on the rise at that time. They created a medium that is very unconventional in the architecture realm-a zine-and they focused on issues such as technology and architecture, mobility, modularity.

So they would propose things like the whole city can move. Things like that. These are some examples from their really large body of work, and as you can see here, none of this is traditional architecture drawing. These are so exuberant and stylistically diverse that they're inspiring to look at, and you don't even have to be an architect to enjoy these images.

In issue four, they completely borrowed the language of Marvel Comics. They just use it as is, but the content was their original content. I find that clash and that cross-pollination really interesting. That kind of thinking is missing in our field of design right now. Everything feels sterile and safe. So I would like us to get out of our comfort zones and get into our domains.

The Jargon Of Design Thinking

We have too much jargon. And I think that we're also responsible for creating a lot of jargons. Both in design thinking and also in branding, there's ton of jargon. We have to shift our focus from jargon to vocabulary. Again, old-school vocabulary. You can't have any meaningful or deeper conversation unless you have a rich set of vocabulary.

Design thinking is full of jargon, and most of it is confusing and doesn't mean much at all. Take words like, "unleash" or "unlock." You hear these two words quite often in design thinking. I find that problematic because design itself is not just like you're letting go of this beast and it's going to go save the world. Design is a lot more nuanced, but because of a lack of vocabulary, we begin to see simplistic words used over and over and over again.

That lack of vocabulary has real consequences in the world, not just on paper. Think about an MRI room for children. This is a pretty terrifying experience for kids to go through these machines, for adults even. So let's say you're trying to figure out, "How can kids enjoy such an environment?" And the solution is to create a lot of cartoons and plaster them around the wall, around a whole machine.

That intent is great. But the solution and execution is terrible. There are so many other things that can be questioned, like the dimensions of the room, the ceiling height, the lighting, the textures. It's about all the other things that you not actually see in graphics. And that requires a great interior designer or architect to answer these questions.

Once you bring in these experts, you begin to have a deeper vocabulary to critique such a design. So that a lack of design vocabulary is an issue that we really have to address as an industry.

Innovation

We are in an era of innovation. I gathered a quick, small collection of the word "innovation" in relationship to design thinking. And I found a false promise that design thinking guarantees innovation. But innovation is different from invention. You can invent something but if you fail to bring it to market, that is not innovation. Innovation is that process from inventing something and making something to bringing it to a market and mass adoption.

All the tools that we're in love with and that we rely on are examples of innovations. They're great. But in looking at the "right now," you begin to fail to look back or look forward. So these great products result in incredible problem in e-waste and no, it's not just e-waste, it's basically pollution of all kinds. Plastic as well.

Plastic was an innovation back in the day. So was the atomic bomb. That changed the game of warfare. If you just focus on innovation then you actually fail to look at history and also what we can learn from history.

Now, in the last few weeks, we're so angry at Facebook, through this exposé of Cambridge Analytica. And there's a movement, #DeleteFacebook. But #DeleteFacebook is not the solution here. It's a symptom of looking at right now. Social media is not going away. Invasion on our privacy or our personal data is not going away. Deleting Facebook is not going to change anything.

It's not a question of taking away social media. We might as well just take down the internet. It's about how we can use it, how we can regulate it so that it can serve us better.

From Functionalism To Craft

I propose that we go from a society obsessed with how things work-that's functionalism-to craft. Right now, we want things to work. The professor Brett Waters teaches at Stanford about design thinking, and he wrote a piece titled, "Design Thinking Is Not About Design." That caught my attention.

Design is an engineering methodology, according to Waters, for developing successful products. Design thinking has nothing to do with making something pretty and everything to do with making something useful. For example, an engineer could use it to develop an ugly machine that does its job beautifully. This statement fails to recognize the importance of beauty and how beauty is actually intelligence, is rigor, is culture. It embodies so much more of us people than sheer functionalism.

Take the work of Dutch designer Iris Van Herpen. If you look at her dresses, you see that there's nothing about them that look like normal clothes. And there's something so spectacular about them that you question their usefulness. They may not be useful, but you can see incredible craft and use of material and technology to create these things that almost look like some ancient artwork from ancient culture.

And the other example is the Aspen Art Museum designed by the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban. The façade is a basic looking façade, but the technology and material required to go into it is actually really, really difficult. The material is a combination of paper and a little wood with resin. It is fireproof and incredibly strong. It's structurally sound but it's also incredibly beautiful.

So this dichotomy between functionalism and beauty, between something that actually works versus something that's just pretty-that should be completely dissolved. It's not serving us any good.

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What's missing in design as a practice and as a group of professionals? The one thing I feel is missing is a kind of sense of skepticism from designers. Digital platforms provide an incredible opportunity for us to make our voice heard.