Design Thinking Is More Than Style

An extract from Tim Brown’s Change by Design.

There is no one best way to move through the design thinking process. The continuum of innovation is best thought of as a system of overlapping spaces rather than a sequence of orderly steps. We can think of them as:

• Inspiration — The problem or opportunity that motivates the search for solutions
• Ideation — The process of generating, developing, and testing ideas
• Implementation — The path that leads from the project room to the market

Projects may loop back through these spaces more than once as the team refines and explores new directions.

Design thinking is fundamentally an exploratory process. A more iterative, non-linear approach. Done right, it will inevitably make unexpected discoveries. Some discoveries may even motivate the team to rediscover some of its most basic assumptions. Or discover a potentially more profitable market opening up.

Will design thinking extend the time it takes to take an idea to market? To the contrary. A nimble team of design thinkers will have been prototyping from day one and self-correcting along the way. Fail early to succeed sooner.

In any case, predictability leads to boredom and boredom leads to loss of talented people. It also leads to results that rivals find easy to copy.

THREE SPACES OF INNOVATION (or) CONSTRAINTS

Without constraints, design cannot happen. The willingness and even enthusiastically accepting constraints is the foundation of design thinking.

The first stage of design process is often about discovering which constraints are important and establishing a framework for evaluating them. Constraints can best be visualized in terms of three overlapping criteria for successful ideas.

Feasibility
What is functionally possible within the foreseeable future

Viability
What is likely to become part of a sustainable business model

Desirability
What makes sense to people and for people

A competent designer will resolve each of these three constraints, but a design thinker will bring them into a harmonious balance. The pursuit of peaceful coexistence does not imply that all constraints are created equal; a given project may be driven disproportionately by budget, technology, or a volatile mix of human factors.

Different types of organizations may push one or another to the fore. Nor is it a simple linear process. Design teams will cycle back through all three considerations throughout the life of a project, but the emphasis on fundamental human needs — as distinct from fleeting or artificially manipulated desires — is what drives design thinking to depart from the status quo.

An approach commonly taken by Engineering driven companies is looking for a technological break-through. In this scenario teams of researchers will discover a new way of doing something and only afterward will they think about how the technology might fit into a existing business system and create value. Such reliance on technology is hugely risky. By focusing their attention on near-term viability, they may be trading innovation for increment.

An organisation driven by its estimation of basic human needs and desires may be dreaming up alluring but essentially meaningless products destined for the local landfill.

THE PROJECT

That design thinking is expressed within the context of a project forces us to articulate a clear goal at the outset. It creates natural deadlines that impose discipline and give us an opportunity to review progress, make midcourse corrections, and redirect future activity. The clarity, direction, and limits of a well-defined project are vital to sustaining a high level of creative energy.

THE BRIEF

The classic starting point of any project is the brief. Almost like a scientific hypothesis, the brief is a set of mental constraints that gives the project team a framework from which to begin, benchmarks in which they can measure progress, and a set of objectives to be realized: price point, available technology, market segment, and so on.

Just as a hypothesis is not the same as an algorithm, the project brief is not a set of instructions or an attempt to answer a question before it has been posed. Rather, a well-constructed brief will allow for serendipity, unpredictability, and the capricious whims of fate, for that is the creative realm from which break-through ideas emerge. If you already know what you are after, there is usually not much point in looking.

A brief gone wrong? Just look at the products arrayed in shelfs in electronic stores. Designers just end up giving shells to components supplied by other companies. Gratuitous efforts at styling and assertive graphics and packaging may catch our eye but do little to enhance the experience of ownership and use.

A design brief that is too abstract risks leaving the project team wandering about in a fog. One that starts from too narrow a set of constraints, however, almost guarantees that the outcome will be incremental and, most likely, mediocre.

The art of the brief can raise the bar and set great organizations apart from moderately successful ones. Do not make the brief too concrete, but help the team establish a realistic set of goals. Without making it too broad, give space to the team to interpret the concept for themselves, to explore and to discover.

As the project progresses and new insights accumulated, it is advisable to adjust the initial plan by introducing additional constraints: a revised price point, a restriction. Such midcourse adjustments are common and are a natural feature of a process that is healthy, flexible and dynamic.

Simultaneously, these continual refinements of the initial plan help guide the project team toward the right balance of feasibility, viability, and desirability.

The message here is that design thinking needs to be practiced on both sides of the table: by the design team, obviously, but by the client as well. The difference between a design brief with just the right level of constraint and one that is overly vague or overly restrictive can be the difference between a team on fire with breakthrough ideas and one that delivers a tired reworking of existing ones.

SMART TEAMS

The next ingredient is clearly the project team.

It is common now to see designers working with psychologists and ethnographers, engineers and scientists, marketing and business experts, writers and filmmakers.

We ask people to be active in each of the spaces of innovation: inspiration, ideation, and implementation. Staffing a project with people from diverse backgrounds and a multiplicity of disciplines takes some patience, however. It requires us to identify individuals who are confident enough of their expertise that they are willing to go beyond it.

To operate within an interdisciplinary environment, an individual needs to have strengths in two dimensions — the “T-shaped” person. On the vertical axis, every member of the team needs to possess a depth of skill that allows him or her to make tangible contributions to the outcome. This competence — is difficult to acquire but easy to spot. It may be necessary to literally sift through thousands of resumes to find those unique individuals, but it is worth the effort.

Design thinkers, by contrast, cross the “T.” They may be architects who have studied psychology, artists with MBAs, or engineers with marketing experience. A creative organization is constantly on the lookout for people with the capacity and — just as important — the disposition for collaboration across disciplines. In the end, this ability is what distinguishes the merely multidisciplinary team from a truly interdisciplinary one. 

In a multidisciplinary team each individual becomes an advocate for his or her own technical speciality and the project becomes a protracted negotiation among them, likely resulting in a grey compromise. In an interdisciplinary team, there is collective ownership of ideas and everybody takes responsibility for them.

TEAMS OF TEAMS

Design thinking is the opposite of group thinking, but paradoxically, it takes place in groups. The usual effect of “groupthink” is to suppress people’s creativity. Design thinking, by contrast, seeks to liberate it. When a team of talented, optimistic, and collaborative design thinkers come together, a chemical change occurs that can lead to unpredictable actions and reactions. One way to achieve this is to do away with one large team in favor of many small ones.

Inspiration phase requires a small, focused group whose job is to establish the overall framework. Implementation phase may have larger teams. Only later do the “armies” arrive.

The promise of electronic collaboration should not be to create dispersed but even-bigger teams; this tendency merely compounds the political and bureaucratic problems we are trying to solve. Rather, our goal should be to create interdependent networks of small teams.

What about remote collaboration? The internet helps move information around but has done little to bring people together. Creative teams need to be able to share their thoughts not only verbally but visually and physically as well. I am not at my best writing memos. Instead, put me in a room where somebody is sketching on a whiteboard, a couple of others are writing post-its or sticking Polaroid photos on the wall, and somebody is sitting on the floor putting together a quick prototype. I haven’t yet heard of a remote collaboration tool that can substitute for the give-and-take of sharing ideas in real-time.

The emergence of social networking sites has shown that people are driven to connect, share and “publish,” even if there is no immediate reward to be gained. No economic model could have predicted the success of Facebook. Always-on video links (worm holes), instant messaging, blogs and wikis — all allow teams to publish and share insights and ideas in new ways. Anyone who is serious about design thinking across an organisation will encourage them.

CULTURES OF INNOVATION

To be creative, a place does not have to be crazy, kooky, and located in Northern California. What is a prerequisite is an environment — social but also spatial — in which people know they can experiment, take risks, and explore the full range of their faculties. The physical and psychological spaces of an organization work in tandem to define the effectiveness of the people within it.

A culture that believes that is is better to ask forgiveness afterward rather than permission before, that rewards people for success but gives them permission to fail, has removed one of the main obstacles to the formation of new ideas.

The concept of “serious play” has a long, rich history within American social science. Mattel organizes a 12-week camp in which participants from across the organization were invited to relocate to an alternative space with the objective of creating new and out-of-the-box product ideas. The first two weeks of the session were spent in a “creativity boot camp.” There they hear a spectrum of experts about everything from child development to group psychology and were exposed to a range of new skills including improvised acting, brainstorming, and prototyping. After the remaining 10 weeks, they are ready to pitch their ideas to management. Many went back to their respective departments determined to use the practices and ideas they had learned. They found, however, that the culture of efficiency to which they returned invariably made that difficult. More than a few became frustrated. Some ultimately left the company.

There must also be a plan for reentry into the organisation.

HOW USING REAL SPACE HELPS THE PROCESS

Design thinking is embodied thinking — embodied in teams and projects, to be sure, but embodied in the physical spaces of innovation as well. In a culture of meetings and milestones, it can be difficult to support the exploratory and iterative processes that are at the heart of the creative process. Happily, there are tangible things we can do to ensure that facilities do what they are supposed to do: facilitate!

We allocate special “project rooms” that are reserved to a team for the duration of its work. The project spaces are large enough that the accumulated research materials, photos, storyboards, concepts, and prototypes can be out and available all of the time. The simultaneous visibility of these project materials helps us identify patterns and encourages creative synthesis to occur much more readily than when these resources are hidden away in file folders, notebooks, or PowerPoint decks. A well-curated project space, augmented by a Project Web Site or Wiki to help keep team members in touch when they are out in the field, can significantly improve the productivity of a team by supporting better collaboration among its members and better communication with outside partners and clients.