Unstructure

Is design thinking really that hard? There is obviously a growing acceptance of the notion behind design thinking as the previous essays and comments pointed out. But it remains that there is no formula for design thinking, and because of that, design thinking may alienate business leaders, managers, or even UX practitioners.

Consider the following quotes:

• “Design thinking is not about solving design problems, it’s about solving problems with design.” –Paula Thornton
• “It’s not just thinking. It’s a structured approach to organizing design.” –Gayle Curtis
• “Good design is at the intersection of business and human goals. It’s not just about users, and it’s not just about business—it’s about balancing both.” –Jess McMullin

A natural reaction to this is: Great! Sign me up! P.S. I have no idea where to begin.

Even as the essays on this panel have hit the nail on the head in how design thinking can be used for innovation in businesses, it still feels like an elusive process that faces many barriers in actual organizations. I’ve been noticing this with one of my clients. After introducing some new user-centered, user-driven design, marketing and sales invariably rework it to echo their time-tested sales pitch, causing it to bloat with extraneous options, text, and check boxes. In the end, we’ve made only an incremental improvement in our design.

Yet, I’ve also noticed a theme emerge across the many articles on design thinking recently. Bruce MacGregor talks about the importance of gaining insights early. Venessa Miemis mentions Tim Brown’s book which outlines an “inspiration phase” (disclosure: I have not read the book myself). And Peter Merholz continually reminds us that users are the central to the design process.

At the same time, I saw this surprising graphic last week: that “science” only makes up a sliver of the design thinking process. Really, I thought? What about the aforementioned importance of understanding users—isn’t that like a “science”? Maybe this is partly explains the uncertainty and confusion around design thinking.

[via http://www.kaplusa.com/blog/2009/12/the-role-of-intuition-in-design/ ]

I prefer the way that David Gillis describes the tradeoff between science and art as more of a continuum. Even still, where does design thinking fit in? A notch closer to the art, or to the science?

[via http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/2010/01/20/the-art-science-of-evidence-based-design/ ]

Taken together, I wanted to write a piece on the “science” in the design thinking process, to reiterate the importance of user-centered design and try to illustrate how this is not just a black box. Hopefully there’s some stuff in here that will help companies grasp exactly what we mean when we talk about “innovation” and “design thinking.”

One way to think of the innovation process is as a funneling of ideas across various stages—stages that span needs-finding, synthesis, ideation, prototyping, and iterating. Of course, this is a cyclical and dynamic process so it’s somewhat misleading to represent it as a sequential progression.

[via http://www.slideshare.net/mikeyk/intro-to-design-thinking ]

Gillis represents this process slightly differently, but still captures the same basic design phases:

[via http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/2010/01/20/the-art-science-of-evidence-based-design/ ]

Now, I prefer to think in terms of craft and creativity rather than science and art. By craft, I’m referring to the well-defined and established process of user-centered design. Creativity is the art, shiny design-y, intuitive part—the window dressing if you will. And to an extent, all these phases can be said to involve both craft and creativity.

It’s the craft part of design thinking that I want to elaborate on in the rest of this post, since the craft can be taught to a greater extent than the intuitive, experiential, creative part. Afterall, there are books and workshops out there teaching contextual and user-centered design. One great resource is IDEO’s Human Centered Design Toolkit.

Investigate / Observe:

Remember that the point of user-centered design is to gain clues about unmet user needs—needs that users themselves may be unable to articulate. The only way to gain this insight is to embed yourself in the community and practice of the people you’re designing for.

To do this, you must first scope your project and define various goals and hypotheses (what IDEO calls a brief).

Next, you talk to end users directly to learn about how they think, act, and engage, either with your product or in the space where you want to design a new product. This involves conducting contextual interviews, field studies, or otherwise observing users in their natural environments (not in the lab). If you’re designing an e-commerce checkout application, watch a user’s entire purchasing process from start to finish. If you’re redesigning your own site’s checkout flow, watch your users’ purchasing process. This is not a usability study. You’re not looking for feedback on specific features of your checkout process; you’re looking holistically at what your users’ goals are, what they’re doing to address those goals, where breakdowns occur, where confusion arises because expectations were violated, and importantly, how they feel (emotions! emotions! emotions!)

Synthesize:

There are number of established ways for documenting and synthesizing your insights. For example, interpretation sessions should be run as soon as possible after gathering user data, and they should always be done with other people—both people who were at your observation sessions as well as people who weren’t. Although it sounds counterintuitive, people who weren’t “in the field” with you often see the problem space from a different perspective, which causes important questions to be raised that might otherwise have been overlooked.

Some of the methods to use in interpretation sessions include building affinity diagrams, modeling workflow and cultural influences, and generating personas. Not all of these activities will be performed in the first interpretation session, but they are all part of the craft of synthesis in the design thinking process.

What you should be left with after this is a set of design principles in which you can begin to think about how to innovate on your product.

Ideate / Brainstorm:

Ideation and brainstorming is as critical to design thinking as is the collection of user data. After you’ve gathered your design principles, the goal is to generate ideas about how to create a product, service, or experience based on those principles. Gayle Curtis has an excellent talk on how to run such brainstorming sessions. Again, it’s a craft to structure the session— although what it generates is intended to be very creative, exploratory, and experiential. The more ideas the better.

Another excellent way to ideate is through what Dennis Schleicher calls a Issue Board. Issue Boards are, in fact, quite structured while still being visually evocative. They are generally built by one or two individuals, but subsequently used in larger brainstorming sessions to generate ideas.

Prototype / Evaluate / Validate:

I’m specifically lumping the prototyping and evaluative phases of design thinking together, to emphasize the point that prototypes are intended to solicit feedback. Yes, prototyping is an activity that can involve lots of creativity and visual aesthetics. But prototypes are not simply a beautifully-packaged, first generation version of your product—prototypes come in all shapes and sizes (from conceptual mockups to paper prototypes to high-fidelity interactive products).

In order to use prototypes to generate feedback, you must be open to testing your ideas early and often. Explore some conceptual mockups, and get feedback from a few users; then move onto paper prototypes and get quick feedback again; etc. This can also involve something like participatory design, whereby users are directly involved in the development of your prototype. There’s a good example of this in the Design Thinking for Social Innovation article: IDEO worked with children directly to develop a comprehensive vision care system for VisionSpring (the local provider).

…

As most will agree, design thinking is no panacea, even when combined with business thinking. Perhaps organizations become fearful of its outcome; or the numerous stakeholders and deep-seated traditions make it difficult to use design thinking in practice. One way to deal with this problem is to create an emotional connection with business leaders and UX professionals, in much the way we want to create an emotional connection with our users.

To do this, we must continue sharing examples of design thinking across a range of problem areas (which I have not succeeded in doing, but which unstructure has placed a call for). Sooner or later there will be a compelling example that resonates with every industry! We must also providing the necessary resources for others to embark on the design thinking process themselves. The goal for this essay was to do just that: illustrate how to put the craft in design thinking.

If you’re a businessperson or someone interested in understanding how to facilitate innovation, you’ve probably heard of “design thinking” by now. Coined by IDEO’s David Kelley, the term refers to a set of principles, from mindset to process, that can be applied to solve complex problems. I’ve seen articles lately ranging from those that highlight its potential, [Design Thinking for Social Innovation, How does design thinking give companies a competitive advantage?] to those that warn of it’s impending failure as a practice [Why Design Thinking Won't Save You , The Coming Boom and Bust of Design Thinking]. I’ve been eager to enter into the conversation, especially because some of the arguments around the topic don’t make sense to me and I wanted to know why. Change by Design, written by IDEO’s CEO Tim Brown, was on my winter reading list anyway, so I decided to finish it before bringing in my own perspectives.

I just got through the book a few days ago, and feel like I “get it.” So I’ve spent a few days reflecting on it and rereading some innovation articles, and think there is a bigger picture at the essence of design thinking that is being lost on some. I’m going to provide a brief summary of the book (from my interpretation), and tie in some other areas that brought me insights into these ideas.

Design Thinking as a Path to Innovation

Though the subtitle of the book is “How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation,” what Brown is actually proposing in this book goes far beyond offering advice for keeping your business on the leading edge of innovation. He’s talking about a new ethos in how we operate as a society. That concept feels pretty big, so it’s packaged as a business innovation book instead in order to overcome the challenge of getting you to open it. Not that you’re being tricked – it IS about innovation, but it’s extended beyond the scope of designing products and services to encompass the way we design the systems in which we live. After seven chapters of explaining design thinking as it relates to your organization, he gets to the meat and potatoes with chapters titled ‘The New Social Contract,’ ‘Design Activism,’ and ‘Designing Tomorrow – Today.’

He begins to frame this within the opening pages of the book:

What we need are new choices – new products that balance the needs of individuals and of society as a whole; new ideas that tackle the global challenges of health, poverty, and education; new strategies that results in differences that matter and a sense of purpose that engages everyone affected by them.

He goes on to identify 3 key spaces of innovation, which function as overlapping stages of a process: inspiration, ideation, and implementation. You can read a more thorough explanation of these stages in this article, but here’s the short version:

inspiration: the problem or opportunity that motivates the search for solutions
[this stage involves sketches, mock-ups, and scenario-building]
ideation: the process of generating, developing, and testing ideas
[this stage involves building prototypes & exploring the balance between practical functionality and emotional appeal]
implementation: the path that leads from the project room to the market
[this stage involves clearly communicating the idea and proving/showing that it will work]

It’s a simple enough of a framework, one that shares many components with any well-devised design or research process. As he explains the approach, he highlights that innovation must occur within a set of constraints, such as economic viability, and that a traditional business-minded rational/analytic approach must be maintained as well. I mention this because some of the articles I’ve read that bash design thinking seem to complain that the approach is an abandonment of good ‘business thinking.’ For instance, here’s a quote from an article in Harvard Business Review titled ‘Why Design Thinking Won’t Save You‘:

Design thinking is trotted out as a salve for businesses who need help with innovation. The idea is that the left-brained, MBA-trained, spreadsheet-driven crowd has squeezed all the value they can out of their methods. To fix things, all you need to do is apply some right-brained turtleneck-wearing “creatives,” “ideating” tons of concepts and creating new opportunities for value out of whole cloth.

I’m kind of surprised by the statement, because Brown never makes a statement that sounds like “all you need to do is…” He actually repeats many times throughout the book that there needs to be a combination of the intuitive/emotional with the rational/analytic, a “balance of management’s legitmate requirement for stability, efficiency, and predictability with the design thinker’s need for spontaneity, serendipity, and experimentation.” If anything, he’s calling for a holistic interdisciplinary approach to business that breaks down the rigid silos of standard organizational structure that, in its very design, impedes creativity, collaboration, knowledge sharing, and in turn, innovation.

Tools for Design Thinking

The design thinker uses a set tools and skills that inform and facilitate the innovation process, from visual tools like sketches, mind maps and prototypes to mental processes like brainstorming, building on the ideas of others, and creating scenarios. They operate on principles that encourage collective ownership, like “all of us are smarter than any of us,” and adhere to ‘rules’ that promote organizational creativity, like having permission to fail, experiment, take risks, and explore the full range of their faculties. They rely on their “ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, and to construct ideas that have emotional meaning as well as functionality.” But these practices and techniques are not unique to the design thinker.

As I commented on Bruce MacGregor’s article ‘How does design thinking give companies a competitive advantage?,’ the principles of design thinkers are also those used by futurists. (A good introductory article to Futures Thinking was written up by Jamais Cascio in Fast Company, found here.) Though the terminology is different, the process is very similar. Again, I mention this because there is some argument around design thinking which seems to be coming down to semantics – “it’s really just social science,” or “it’s just futures thinking repackaged.”

So, what is design thinking then?

The strategies and tactics reviewed so far are probably familiar to you if you’ve read literature on creativity and innovation. You can pull up the innovation sections of the major business management publications, and find that the articles will give you a similar flavor as what’s mentioned above. So how does design thinking make this any different?

Whether it’s called design thinking, lateral thinking, right-brain thinking, systems thinking, integrative thinking, futures thinking, or my own term of ‘metathinking,’ from my perspective, the concept itself is rooted in a capacity to understand the world and our relationship to it, and within it, in a different way.

Design thinking is a “human-centered approach,” and for me that means truly getting down to the core of what we think it means to be human, of what it ’should’ look like, and how we want to experience life. When we see the word “design,” we may immediately think of just products made by a snooty designer; items we see displayed at a museum that bear no resemblance to something we’d find in our home, artwork that makes us somehow feel stupid because we don’t understand why it’s so special, or architecture that is said to make “a statement” but feels completely alien in the way it impacts us. That is not the same design that is being proposed by design thinking.

When I started my blog, I knew I wanted to write about emerging trends at the intersection of technology, communication, and culture. Many of the posts lately have been focused around social media technologies and how they’re allowing for a many-to-many communication structure that’s never been possible before in human history, and what the implications of such a thing could be. But really, those explorations are laying a foundation for a bigger question; namely, where do we go from here? My research brought me to systems theory and complexity theory, and I’ve been particularly interested in complex adaptive systems theory. It proposes that the world is full of systems; from the ecosystem in which we live, to the social systems we’ve constructed via civilization, to the online social systems we’re creating as we develop a network culture. It broadened my perspective on the way culture works to think of it as a complex series of interactions, full of meaningful patterns that shape our society whether we’re aware of them or not. It made me think about the many systems around us that are currently collapsing, from global economic systems, to governments, to educational institutional models, to healthcare. The talk about massive change is pervasive today, and many suggest we need to undergo a complete paradigm shift in the way we operate if we’re to survive in a fashion that’s desirable and sustainable. The good news is, that shift can be made with intentionality and choice. We’re citizens in an increasingly participatory culture, and I realized that that was the essence of what I wanted to write about – our ability to influence how we shape society. So I titled the blog Emergent by Design.

My posts have evolved to become a kind of storytelling and connecting the dots, and the comments sections have become conversation areas. We are engaging in a process of collectively inventing what we want, how we’d like to interact with it, and what we can do to make it happen. In my mind, this is at the heart of design thinking.

In a previous post, What is Social Media [the 2010 edition], I briefly covered the definition of “media” and illustrated how our entire manmade environment is a collection of media that act as representations of some other thing or idea. From convenient functionality,

to casual ambiance,

to childlike fantasy,

to shared wisdom and personal histories,

to a better ability to meet basic needs.

None of these examples happened by accident – they were done by design. They create a context that affects the reaction of the person experiencing them. So design is not just about the end product or service itself, but also the process of the interaction and the emotional response and intrinsic value that it provides. In that vein, design thinking is about the interaction between feasibility (what is functionally possible within the foreseeable future); viability (what is likely to become part of a sustainable business model); and desirability (what makes sense to people and for people), with an emphasis on the people for which the product or service is being designed.

Synthesis

So whether you hope to employ design thinking to restructure the culture of an organization or to innovate a new product or service, it’s important to remember that it’s more than a set of simple tactics that can be implemented overnight. It’s more like a new ecology of mind, that takes time to grow, adapt, and evolve. It still requires an adherence to sound business decision-making, but also a commitment to challenge one’s own beliefs about “the way things work,” and to keep coming back to a human-centered approach by focusing on addressing people’s unspoken and unmet needs.

When I was in school, I was taught that Science was Science, Art was Art, that English was English, and that none of them were related to each other. It wasn’t until I had left the education system for some time before I realised that the Western education system reflects the foundation thinking of most Western cultures, that the world is modular and must be split into categories with clear and fixed boundaries.

While this modular approach to life provides an initial understanding of how things work, it is very limiting. As Bruce MacGregor demonstrates with IDEO’s holistic Design Thinking framework, which combines human, business and technical strategies to achieve maximum efficiencies, great innovations have come from combining multiple disciplines. He mentions Bob Geldof, who used the emotive world of music to draw attention to world hunger. While this was an unprecedented concept at the time, raising awareness of world issues through the medium of music, particularly with the success of bands such as U2, it seems quite normal today.

Which brings us to an interesting, if not counter-intuitive idea. Putting concepts into rigid, immovable boxes, rather than preserving them as immutable truths, often results in them becoming irrelevant over time. We have all seen companies which have clung on too long to products and processes well after they should have moved on, resulting in their inevitable failure. Since change is the only constant, those innovations which have lasted are generally those which have touched the dynamic, holistic essence of humanity, by combining multiple disciplines. Today, world aid is still associated with music. Driven by a love of both science and humanity, Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings are still admired by artists and medical students alike. Alexander Graham Bell, whose father, grandfather and brother were associated with work on elocution and speech, as well as his wife’s and mother’s deafness, influenced his invention of the telephone.

Individuals and organisations can achieve incredible feats of innovation, but since we are taught from a young age that the world is a static, two-dimensional place, businesses need to work hard to unlearn such a modular approach to innovation in order to create real and lasting value.

In 1985, Ethiopia was suffering a major drought. 1 million people had starved to death, and a huge sum of money had to be raised to avoid further disaster.  Organizations began by approachingthe challenge with analytical solutions that met expected norms about how to garner help for such a large challenge.  Some built distribution system, some setup donation channels, others created efficient food bundling.  These were incredibly sophisticated responses, but it still wasn’t enough. The donations just weren’t coming.

Bob Geldof looked at the problem differently.  By focusing on people first, he found most were not connecting to the realities of world hunger because it was presented as a statistic or theory. It wasn’t being talked about in a positive emotional way that engaged the individual in meaningful ways, and thus, they were not compelled to contribute.

How might we make famine in Ethiopia meaningful?  That’s the question Mr. Geldoftook on.  And when he did, he didn’t turn to experts or statistical data.  He turned to music because he knew – as a musician himself – people experience music emotionally.  It can be fun, sad, angry, and it can to inspire action.  What Mr. Geldof was thinking was different.

How many of you watched Live Aid when it aired or was rebroadcast?  200,000 people attended on two continents.  400 million others watched through what was then the most technically ambitious satellite broadcast to date.  The one-day event raised a quarter of a billion dollars. The immediate impact alone is impressive.

Think for a moment what you felt about world hunger the day before Live Aid, and the day after.  I was 22 when I watched it.  Like millions of others, it affected me then and it continues to inspire me today, to connect to people’s passions, to think differently, and to try answering the big questions. It engaged me, and millions of others, to act. To participate.To answer the meaningful call for help.

To put it simply I believe combining design thinking with traditional analytical thinking broadens and enriches the way we solve business questions. We are all familiar with the analytical processes that dominate business thinking today.  Design thinking, by contrast, is best suited for problems where the goals are not yet well defined, the system is complex, and when there’s no obvious starting point.  This makes it an important complement for moving beyond the data to generate new ways of connecting with people’s passions.

I didn’t know it at the time, but Mr. Geldof was an early design thinker.  He took insights from people, business and technology, built them up into this new and ambitious way of addressing world hunger, made it experiential, brought his own intuition to the problem, and was uncompromisingly optimistic that something more could be done.  And he did it.

The analytical thinking was important too.  It’s great that design thinking helped connect people to world hunger and raise money, but the money still had to get to where it was needed most.  Creating financial structures to distribute donations and similarly well-defined challenges are well suited for analytical thinking.  Creating new value – and new meaning – that engages people to understand or interact with their world in new ways are challenges that are well suited for design thinking.

What do I mean by design thinking?  Design thinking is a way of approaching questions.   It is not about the craft of design, but it is based on the principles of thinking that are used by designers.  Let’s take a second to look at some of the key principles.

Insight driven. Your insights can and should come from many sources, often not obviously related to the current business question. Traditionally innovation has been driven by the development of new technology, which is one good source of insights.  But so are different business models or methods of operation.  At IDEO our first source of insight is often from people.  This is where we learn about human needs and learn how to connect with people.

Synthesis. Integrating the many initial insights and concepts to create a new and holistic solution is a key step to developing new offers.  When synthesis is done well you be able to see all the interdependencies, supporting elements, and human interactions within the systemic solution.

Experiential. Our learning about an experience accelerates exponentially once we make it real.  Humans react to real things they can touch, see, smell, taste, hear and interact with, ideally in their natural environment.   Making it real means you can watch people and see what they really do and understand how they are feeling.  This learning is best done with a series of iterative prototypes, initially very rough and becoming more refined over time.  Start prototyping quickly so you can start learning earlier.

Optimism. To create anything new requires a passionate belief that there is a better way.  Lots of people will tell you why your idea will not work.  It is worth listening to learn, but it is important to always be looking ahead to what is possible. Traditional methods for predicting success rarely work with new to the world ideas.  This is when it is important to use your experience and intuition to make the best choices to move forward.

Design thinking is a process of bringing together the human, business and technicalperspectives.  This simple framework helps as a reminder of how these three elements are used through out the process. Each of these elements is first a source of inspiration,usually starting with the human.  Secondly understanding how tointegrate them.And finally,serving as the guideposts for implementinga new idea.

In business today design thinking can be used to address questions in many aspects of your company.  It can help build meaningful connections between consumers and your products, services or spaces. Your real brand is the compilation of these experiences and when done right they build deep loyalty. A great example is howNetflix revolutionized the movie rental business using what I see as design thinking.  They understood the human desire to avoid late fees and inconvenient travel to the video store.  They used an online order system and delivered the DVDs through the US mail, bypassing the traditional retail model.  And they used new technology that allowed them to simple sort through every disk in stock once a day, so no complicated inventory or access system was needed.  There are many other details that make their business successful, but these simple principles form the foundation of a successful new service that has changed the movie rental business.

Design thinking can help move beyond the basic transactions of the B2B world to one based on human relationships.  It is easy for a company to switch suppliers based on functional metrics, but the people involved will never have the same relationship with someone else as the one your build with them. A few years back IDEO was working Marriott Hotels to design a new experience for one of their brands.  The new experience was very compelling and successful with their guests.  But just as impactful was the way Marriott was able to engage the franchise owners in the new design.   Normally it could take 3-4 years to form consensus among senior management, build a demonstration unit and engage the franchise owners.  For this project we built a full-scale model with pure white walls and furniture in a warehouse.  The senior management and the franchise owners were able to come to the warehouse in groups and truly experience the new design concept.  Being able to walk through the space and talk through it with the group was very compelling.  This time it only took 3 months for everyone to agree to the new direction.

Design thinking can even play a big part in nurturing a culture that attracts the best employees by reinforcing intrinsic rewards.  Kaiser Permanente, a large group of hospitals in the US, has built a strong culture of empowering their employees to participate in innovating for the company.  They started with a small group experiment that revolutionized the way the nurses exchange information with each other during the shift change.  They measured the results, reducing the time until the nurse met with their patients from 43 minutes to 11 minutes, and then rolled the new format out across the entire network.  From this beginning they built an innovation center to support ongoing innovations.  Today this is a central part of their culture and individuals continue to create new ideas that are being adopted throughout Kaiser and even by other healthcare providers.

Design thinking is an alternative way to create a competitive advantage for any business.  The most successful businesses take advantage of the benefits from both design thinking and analytical thinking. Maintaining the tension between the creative and operational needsis not about compromising either aspect but a dynamic dance between the two styles.  The leadership challengeis to manage this tension, taking advantage of both approaches to create meaningful value that drives sustainable growth and the success of your business.