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[mjm286]

On Design Thinking

Maddie Malone

      IDEO is a design company that takes a human-centered, design-based approach to help organizations innovate and grow. Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, says that, “design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer's toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.” All of these tools are used in combination to contribute to one thing: innovation. Thinking like a designer can transform the way organizations develop products, services, processes, and strategy. It allows people and professionals outside of the design world to use these tools to tackle challenges.

     IDEO lists six steps to a design thinking approach: frame a question, gather inspiration, generate ideas, make ideas tangible, test to learn, and then share the story in order to inspire others to take action.

     Design thinking is a new approach made partly in response to the increasing complexity of modern technology and business. People need help making sense of these complexities and their interactions with technologies and other complex systems to be simple, intuitive, and pleasurable. The principles of design thinking are: empathy with users, a discipline of prototyping, and tolerance for failure. These principles are the tools we can use to create these simple, intuitive, and pleasurable interactions and help to develop a responsive, flexible organizational culture.

     Jon Kolko from the Harvard Business Review explains that although “historically [design] has been equated with aesthetics and craft...a design-centric culture transcends design as a role, imparting a set of principles to all who help bring ideas to life.” A design-centric organization encourages employees to observe behavior and draw conclusions about what people want and need in order to build empathy. These organizations use emotional language concerning desires, aspirations, engagement, and experience in order to describe their inferences of products and users.

     The design thinking process been applied to a whole range of problems in the past decade including creating a business model for selling solar panels in Africa to the operation of Airbnb. The first steps of design thinking are simple skills and once familiar, these skills can help people apply creativity to effectively solve real-world problems better than they would without the building blocks of these processes and principles.

     I think that the brainstorming part of the design process sounds the most fun and explorative. Nothing but criticism is to be held back during brainstorming sessions. Bad ideas can eventually circle around to useful parts of a solution but if you shoot it down before you put it out there as an option, then you're contributing one less piece to the puzzle of the solution. Later in the process is when you sift through the ideas and make connections; is this phase is it better to have one-hundred ideas than ten ideas to think through.

     After defining the problem, talking with customers, and boiling ideas down to possible solutions, a design-thinker would explore the potential solutions through modeling and prototyping. They design, build, test, and repeat like engineers and scientists. The solution checks out if it works for customers, if you can build it, and you can support it.

     Although it is called design thinking, it is build for everyone to use and that is the greatest point of its function. It’s not only innovative, but inclusive; it can be used by businesses, individuals, community service groups, in classrooms, and in any field with complex operations and problems. 

Resources:

Design Thinking, Tim Brown, IDEO, https://www.ideou.com/pages/design-thinking

Design Thinking Comes of Age, Jon Kolko, Harvard Business Review, https://hbr.org/2015/09/design-thinking-comes-of-age

Design thinking, explained, Rebecca Linke, MIT Management Sloan School https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/design-thinking-explained

[sac242-blog]

Design Thinking

Spencer Critendon

11 October 2018

Artc 1302

Palak Modi

Design Thinking

As designers, it is our job to create things that others might not think of spontaneously. This is standard for designers, being the concept of design is using creativity to design something no one else has thought of before. Using design thinking, we can incorporate our creativity with basic knowledge of design to create something both we are proud of and things consumers will use/recognize. For example, using design thinking can take a simple idea from someone’s head, to the sketch book leading to the development process.

Through tumblr, blogs have further defined design thinking and what steps we can take to create concepts that run through our minds. The user Rebelandbird helped define this process for us designers using the words of Tim Brown, a member of the IDEO. “Good design thinkers observe. Great design thinkers observe the ordinary and in that ordinariness find great insight.” (Tim Brown, IDEO). To further define, Tim Brown is defining the thought process necessary to think outside the box. We need to take what everyone sees as normal and make it unique and creative. If a designer looks at a normal egg carton box, a designer can see use for it in a different way from others. While this object is simply used for holding eggs, a designer can use this egg carton for holding paints, condiments, and a lot of other things an ordinary observer might not recognize.  

Along with design thinking comes the concept of inclusive thinking. As specified in the name, inclusive thinking is the concept of including the consumer with the designer to create something that can be both practical and creative. Calumpringle-blog helped express this concept by quoting Safak Pavey, MP of the people’s republican party. “On inclusive design: It’s a way of thinking that embraces principles of human rights. Ideas start with the inclusion of the voiceless, forgotten and marginalized and leads to smarter solutions for the majority.” Being inclusive makes sure people of all areas are satisfied with the products at hand, raising consumer sales and satisfaction overall.  

To create our design, we need to be particular with our approach to the design. Although design is based off concepts coming from someone’s head, there are systematic approaches that help change the appearance of the design. Peter Zumthor describes this process as his favorite part of design thinking in his quote from inthenoosphere’s post. “…Associative, wild, free, ordered and systematic thinking in images, in architectural, spatial, colorful and sensuous pictures – this is my favorite definition of design.” While we can be spontaneous and random with our concepts, we can also place things systematically to include an order which is calming and comforting for the eyes.  

Overall, design thinking is the concept of using creative design but thinking about the consumers/viewers while producing the work. Design thinking takes a concept and makes it a reality. Because of this, concepts get better each and every day. Without designers to create concepts/designs, the work field would be full of a lot of cut-copy resources and there wouldn’t be much diversity.

[mjm286]

“Good design thinkers observe. Great design thinkers observe the ordinary and in that ordinariness find great insight.” --I love this quote. I think this ability is a motivating factor for many artists go into the field of design to learn more so that they can innovate for not just themselves, but others too. It is important to see problems/solutions from individual perspectives as well and individual communities and then see what they could be when we incorporate them all into the innovation process. Plus, incorporating diverse perspective from the community around us makes innovation more accessible and positive for all to utilize and enjoy.

[mjm286]

On Creative Thinking

Oct 12, 2018

ARTC #1302

Palak Modi

Many universities have or are starting to develop courses in creative studies, those like the “Creative, Innovation and Change” course taught by environmental engineer, Jack V. Matson at Penn State. He calls it “Failure 101,” because “the frequency and intensity of failures is an implicit principle of the course. Getting into a creative mind-set involves a lot of trial and error.” This generation of teachers understands that critical thinking is important but creative thinking is necessary in taking risks, planning, implementing ideas and creating working innovations.

It seems like since the development of fast computers and smart phones, innovation and creation is increasing on a rapid curve. There is so much available information and inspiration in developed countries and younger generations are going to be responsible for the handling of all this new innovation. So I do support the development of these new studies in creative thinking. We need to know what questions to ask, how to categorize and find the root of real problems, how to manage and work with ideas that seem to be failing, and how to take action when we do figure out solutions.

I was never good at formulas and functions in algebra and chemistry. I am more of a visual and hands on learner. I need room to do and redo, try and fail, and try again until I understand what works and how I made it work. I think that creative thinking allows space for learners to develop their own processes. You’re given a malleable set of steps to set you up for creating and once you understand those basics, all you need to do is start playing and using your imagination. In my experience, broken ideas provide great pieces for a later, better idea. Where would the element of exploration be if we were always able to make things perfectly the first time around with certainty? Where would is fun be? We would be robots in a sense.

The beauty of the human mind is that part of its development is making mistakes. Experiencing failure feels really shitty at first but when you keep doing it and eventually come up with a solution that is really beautiful and really works; the initial failure makes so much sense as part of the process. Brad Keywell, a Groupon Founder and former student of Dr. Jack V. Matson’s at the University of Michigan, says that, “Matson taught him to not just be willing to fail but that failure is a critical avenue to a successful end.” He says that, “‘universities are way too often shapers of formulaic minds,’ and encourage students to repeat and internalize fail-safe ideas.”

I agree that in school, there is not enough room for failure. We worry about getting good grades and keeping the pace so that we can be prepared for jobs after college. While yes, I agree that this is very important and as a young adult, I do want to be prepared for the real world, I also want to be able to utilize my creative thinking skills in the face of every problem. I invite creative thinking strategies into every major because it will bring innovation to student life, professional work, and throughout communities.

  Resources:

Laura Pappano, Learning to Think Outside the Box, The NY Times, Feb. 5, 2014