Design Thinking

When I was at art school the critique was central to the ethos. Every couple of weeks I would have to pin my work up on the wall and defend it from the criticism of fellow students and professors. It was always stressful but as long as I hadn’t made the mistake of staying up all the previous night trying to get the work finished I normally performed OK. The critique is a great way to give someone feedback that they can use to improve the work. People who were good at giving criticism did not let personal feelings get in the way of being honest and inevitably the sessions could become quite tough. It was not unknown for students to fall out with each other over a crit.

Today we are more interested in collaborative teams than we are in the individual. Design challenges are too complex for an individual to tackle alone. We have found out that for teams to work well together there needs to be an essentially optimistic environment. Back in May I talked at the Art Center College conference Serious Play about how designers use aspects of play in their work and one idea that I focused on was permission to take risks. I suggested that the reason many creative companies have playful environments is to encourage risk taking and to help create a culture of optimism.

The dilemma we face today is that in a culture of optimism good honest criticism seems to be dying out. Is it because we are nervous about upsetting each other?

Whatever the reason, I believe we need to find effective methods for criticism within todays optimistic, collaborative design culture. Does anyone have any examples of how this is already being done?

One of the principles of design thinking is that it requires empathy for users to inspire ideas. Normally we think about getting that from ethnographic style research. Diving deep into the lives of a relatively small number of people, understanding the environment they live in, their social networks, seeing things first hand. We have lots of evidence that this works but I sometimes wonder if we aren’t also missing something. The problem with looking deeply at a few people is that you miss the opportunity for insights that might come connecting more broadly across cultures.

Yann Arthus Bertrand is the creator of Earth From Above and he has a great new project called 6 billion others. He sent six directors out into the world to interview dozens of people about all kinds of topics. The results are powerful. He has brought comments from many different folks together around issues like love, what did your parents tell you, the meaning of life, poverty and many more. I have found myself hypnotized by the comments of people from every culture. The video is cleverly shot and the translation makes it really easy to experience.

Google disrupted search partly through the use of design. Of course it was the search algorithm PageRank that was the big technical breakthrough followed by AdWords and AdSense but the simplicity of the interaction was also key to getting users to weave search into every aspect of their internet behavior. If you want to know more about how the Google interaction developed then check out Bill Moggridge’s book Designing Interactions. Google took the world by storm but is that the end of the design of search?

A new search engine by the name of Cuil indicates not. I love Cuil because it uses design thinking to create a better search experience. Yes, it also has some technical innovations that allows it to search more of the internet than Google or other competitors but the big breakthrough for me is that Cuil presents information in a way that is more useful and interesting. Instead of creating a long list of results it lays them out a bit like the page of a newspaper. It creates pages of links that are related and displays them as tabs and it also creates categories that are displayed in a box. The final piece is that Cuil integrates images with the search results so that you can scan visually as well as by text.

I haven’t spent enough time with Cuil yet to know whether it does a better job of getting to that one specific thing but I do know it is far better for searches where you are not sure what you are looking for. It is great for browsing and takes you to links you might never have thought to look for or couldn’t describe with specific search terms.

Check it out. It may just be the next evolution of the design of search.

I am a big fan of a culture of experimentation as a driver of innovation. I believe it creates the divergence necessary to create the best, and least incremental, options. I also think that if an organization relies on top down direction to achieve that experimentation then it risks missing many of the most interesting opportunities. Steve Jobs aside, large companies have not exhibited a good track record when it comes to picking the right bets and I think that is because they started with too meager a set of choices.

I was wondering what the rule set might be for encouraging bottom-up or emergent experimentation such that you end up with better innovation options without the chaos or diffusion of “letting a thousand flowers bloom”. Here is my take:

1. Assume the best ideas emerge from the organizational ecosystem, including all stake-holders not just employees.
2. Set conditions so that those in the ecosystem who are most likely to be stimulated by changing external factors (technology, business factors, consumer needs, strategic threats or opportunities) are the ones who are best situated and motivated to have new ideas.
3. Do not favor ideas based on the author. Favor the relevance of the content.
4. Do favor ideas that create organizational resonance. Indeed demand new ideas gain a following, even if small and vocal, before giving organizational support.
5. Use the resources of senior leadership (the top-down bit) to cultivate, to tend, prune and harvest ideas.
6. Articulate an over-arching purpose so that the ecosystem has a context in which to innovate without top down control. (John Mackie has done a great job of this at Whole Foods)

None of these rules is necessarily easy to apply, especially for a top-down oriented organization, but I think they might achieve some pretty spectacular results. What do you think?

It is great to see more application of design thinking in the social sector. Organizations such as Tim Prestero’s Design That Matters and Cameron Sinclair’s Architecture for Humanity are encouraging designers to engage with social issues. At the same time we are seeing foundations such as Rockefeller funding projects that include design thinking. My concern though is, just like the social sector in general; we may be diffusing a small amount of capacity across a very broad range of problems. I worry that we only see incremental progress rather than major breakthroughs because we are spreading efforts too thinly. There are some exceptions to this. Designers Accord, the non-profit sustainability coalition, has created significant momentum and now has more than 100,000 members. Even so, it is bewildering to see the number of NGO’s working across the social sector. In his recent book Blessed Unrest Paul Hawken makes a brave attempt to list them all. While the sum total of this effort is no doubt admirable the diffusion of resources and ideas is quite extreme.

I got a great present from my wife the other day. It was a set of Bodum coffee cups. They are the double walled ones with a vacuum in between. Like a vacuum flask, they keep hot liquids hotter for longer and cold liquids colder. The revelation for me was how much better my morning latté now is. The old experience was a great first taste, where the coffee was at the right temperature, and then a steadily degraded experience with each subsequent sip. If I was particularly engaged in what I was reading the coffee would be cold by the time I got to the last few mouthfuls. With the new cup every sip is as good as the last and I catch myself savoring a mouthful of great coffee many more times a day. So the question I asked myself is whether the new cup is a great product or a great experience.

In my Harvard Business Review article I introduce the idea of design thinking with the example of Thomas Edison and the customer centered, systems thinking, approach that he took to the creation of the light bulb. The great engineer of Victorian England, Isambard Kingdom Brunel (pictured here), was also not a typical engineer. He cared about the experience his customers had when they traveled on his railways and steamships. He may have been a design thinker.

Something tells me that design thinking was widely spread long before design was seen as a profession and long before we started to write about it. The difference was that it was intuitive and its practitioners often seen as slightly odd. They were not typical inventors, engineers, artists or businessmen. They integrated aspects of all of these and they focused on creating solutions that met the needs of the customer. I believe that design thinking is part of a longer tradition of integrated, human centered, creative problem solving. The early examples were mavericks who used their intuition to determine how they approached and solved problems and created breakthrough ideas. Now we exist in a time where we need more than a few intuitive mavericks to tackle the challenges in front of us. We also exist in a time where we have compartmentalized ourselves into ever more specialist disciplines, using engineered processes to create incremental solutions. We need to be inspired to cut across boundaries to make new connections and insights. Some of the great mavericks of the past can provide such an inspiration. My list includes Brunel, Edison, Charles and Ray Eames, Akio Morita, Steve Jobs (of course), Ferdinand Porsche. Who else should be on the list?