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.
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
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