In 2009, Tim Brown, CEO of innovation and design company, IDEO, gave a TED Talk about his views on design. He reflected on the start of his career as a designer working on a woodworking and fax machine that were now obsolete compared to the designers before him from the 19th century. With the focus on consumerism, we had moved from a world focused previously on “systems thinkers who were reinventing the world to a priesthood of folks in black turtlenecks and designer glasses working on small things”.
I work with many architects and engineers and so that statement hits close to home. It certainly does make you think and wonder whether what we are doing is truly impactful and has a purpose.
The term, “design thinking” has been around since 1969 when Nobel Prize laureate Herbert A. Simon first mentioned it in his book, The Sciences of the Artificial. Since then, design thinking has steadily grown in popularity. In 2008, with Tim Brown’s leadership, IDEO has made great strides to expand the notion of design thinking. Tim Brown states:
“Design thinking can be described as a discipline that uses the designer’s sensitivity and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.”
Design thinking is an innovative iterative problem-solving process. It can be applied not just to product design, but also to services, systems, strategies, and physical spaces. Industries using the design thinking approach include technology, banking, healthcare, business operations, social organizations, governments, education, and airports.
IDEO has applied design thinking to 1) help people harness their genetic information by launching the first store for products powered by DNA, 2) scale an entire network of schools for the growing Peruvian middle class, and 3) redesign for Lufthansa Airlines the long-haul travel experience through the relationship between attendance and passenger.
Lufthansa and IDEO redesigned the inflight service to establish their flight crew as trusted, knowing hosts, thereby providing the emotional value customers needed as identified during user research.
Unique to the design thinking approach is 1) an emphasis on the user, or a human-centered perspective and 2) the generation of an innovative, creative solution. The general phases as identified by IDEO are as follows:
Inspiration
The first phase is to find inspiration. This includes understanding and sometimes redefining the problem, conducting research through empathy, and forming insights (revealing “aha moments”) from the perspective of the user(s). The user may focus just on the primary user or customer, but may also focus in on other users that are involved in the customer’s journey such as the employees and suppliers.
Key to the inspiration phase is empathy. Oftentimes, the goal is to literally try to put oneself in another’s shoes to understand how they feel – their behaviors, attributes, attitudes, actions, mindsets, emotions, desires, needs, goals, what they value, and their concerns and pain points.
Finding inspiration involves engaging all your senses in the experience. Having empathy is foundation to the achieving innovation in human-centered design thinking. The specific knowledge gained in the inspiration phase will inform the design.
Ideation
The second phase is to ideate or explore a wide range of potential opportunities or solutions. Oftentimes, even the craziest of solutions can lead to true innovations, so the goal is to think outside the box. Quickly sketching up solutions is a great way of coming up with ideas. Doing this in a team is also essential to feed off the energy of others. In doing so, you co-create.
Once multiple ideas are generated, key moments that matter will rise to the top that may be high-value touchpoints, or unique branding experience. These moments or potential innovative solutions to the problem statement will be quickly and inexpensively prototyped and tested.
Prototypes are your solution mock-ups and may consist of a series of storyboard sketches on paper, physical models, or role-playing exercise. The goal is to test the prototype, learn from the failures, and get user feedback on potential innovative design solutions. This may take several iterations. Initial tests will be with the design team, but it is often a good idea at some point to test with actual customers as well.
Implementation
The implementation phase is where the majority of the time, money, and energy should be placed. This is to emphasize that the inspiration and ideation phase should not be an exhaustive, time intensive, and costly endeavor. The implementation phase is part of the traditional process in a problem-solving process. It typically involves detailed design, training, phasing, and other processes before implementation. However, the results of the inspiration and ideation phases are important to convey through storytelling to facilitate smooth implementation.
The additional inspiration and ideation steps could be thought of as additional planning steps to allow for the implementation to be 1) targeted to the right problem, 2) address the user moments or values that matter (effective), 3) allow for a truly innovative solution that is memorable (unique and evokes a brand), and 4) allows for the development of future key performance indicators and its application for effectiveness evaluations.
The End Result – True Innovation
Empathy and the application of a divergent and convergent design process is what leads to true innovative design solutions. The experience is like when you get tested for and assigned an eyeglass prescription. The optometrist uses a phoropter device, which has two plates and multiple lenses to determine what lenses work for you, flipping through various lenses until you see clearly. As a designer, you learn to continuously broaden (diverge) and then fine tune (converge) the lens at which you frame and resolve a problem. Sometimes, this means putting things out of focus, and then putting it back into focus, just to be able to comparatively tell which thoughts are more insightful or which ideas will matter more to connect back to the user. Also, putting yourself constantly in the shoes of another user is like adding a second later to the phoropter device, and you continue to fine tune the settings, through prototyping and iterations, until your vision, or solution becomes clear.