Design Thinking

This is the second of a series of pieces originally posted at Fast Company. It follows from an earlier post called A post consumption economy.

When I consider bidding for something on e-Bay, the first thing I do is check the reliability rating of the seller. When I want to meet a hard-to-reach executive, I try to establish a link through my network. When I consider which conference I will pay to attend, I choose TED because I know it will give me the most new ideas to feed off for the year.

Each of these qualities–reputation, access, and ideas–has real and tangible value to me and to the individual or institution that holds them. I am more likely to shop with an e-Bay vendor with a stellar rating. I am more likely to meet that executive if I have a large and well-maintained network. I am more likely to pay (a very large sum of money) to go to the conference with the most useful ideas. So why don’t we measure some of these things and have them constitute the picture we have of our personal, corporate or national wealth?

Some would argue that these are intangible and therefore hard to exchange, unlike cash or physical assets. I would argue that this is much less true in an information society where essentially everything is intangible. How can anything be less tangible than credit default swaps, and yet somehow we managed to exchange those, with admittedly disastrous consequences? With the information systems at our disposal, we can create measures of many of the things that facilitate modern society. Here is my list of things that I think might make up a networked, participation based economy.

Network value would describe the access that an individual or organization has to new ideas and opportunities. Brand value would describe reputation. Social value would measure influence. Knowledge would be measured through the number and quality of ideas and, finally, meaning measured through engagement. I suspect that we may have a hard time letting go of the measuring of cash, so I assume monetary value remains one of the dimensions of a participation economy. Personally, I think it would be an interesting thought experiment to imagine the first five replacing money rather than augmenting it.

Each type of value has to have some kind of measurable currency and the units of that currency presumably have to be exchangeable in some form. So in this framework monetary value has a measurable currency in the form of cash and has units such as dollars, euros or yuan. The measurable units of currency for networks might be connections, such the number of Linked-in connections I might have. For brand, reputation would be measured through ratings, just like e-Bay ratings, or the ranking of corporations that Interbrand publishes each year. The influence generated through social value might be measured by tracking conversations, much as the number of hits in a Google search is an indication of influence or importance. Identifying a universal measure for meaning might well be the most difficult, but corporations manage to measure employee engagement and media companies measure audience engagement. Somehow the stickiness of our experiences ought to be measurable and be an indication of how important to us any given experience might be. The more meaningful those experiences, the wealthier we should feel, and be.

Measuring and tracking all six of these may make for a complex economy, but unlike much of what we measure today, these are all relevant at an individual, organizational, or national scale. It seems to me we are more likely to want to participate in their nurturing and growth rather than leaving it to a few smart mathematicians on Wall Street.

Are these the right things to measure in an economy based on participation–and could their measurement result in some kind of sustainable system of growth and wealth creation?

A team at IDEO is running an experiment in collaborative design. They are working with the Acumen Fund on a project to bring access to clean water to people living in Africa and India. They are blogging about the experience and you can see the posts here.

NPR has posted a great visualization of the US power grid. It shows the transmission grid, the mix of power sources in each state, locations of power stations and the densities of solar and wind power across the country. It makes the complexity of the power system and the challenge of replacing carbon based sources all too clear.

I’ll be spending this week guest blogging for Fast Company. I am using it as an opportunity to dig into the participation economy ideas that I first posted about a few weeks ago. Indeed the first post is a redux of that original to introduce the topic to Fast Company readers. The next four posts will be new. I plan to explore metrics for a participation economy, transactions that support participation, health care reform and designing for participation. A few days after they appear over at FC I will also post them here.

You can find an intro by Linda Tischler here and the first post here.

It is finally time to announce the title and publication date for my book about design thinking.

It is called “Change By Design – how design thinking transforms organizations and inspires innovation“. It will be published by Harper Collins under their Harper Business impression and is due for release late September 2009.

There is more detail at the book website and I will be adding more material as we get closer to the publication date.

Many of the responses and conversations on this blog have informed the book and I would like to offer an early thank you to all of those who have been so engaged in the debate over the last few months.

This doesn’t mean the end of this blog – far from it. I hope we can keep this conversation going and develop interesting new perspectives on the role of design and design thinking.

Nathan Shedroff has just written what is likely to become the sustainability manual for designers. Design Is The Problem is a thorough and informative survey of just about every aspect of sustainable design. It covers important frameworks, schools of thought and specific tools. It’s interspersed with good examples and case studies that reveal the complexity of the issue and that force the reader to engage with the topic rather than assume simple answers, which of course don’t exist. Design Is The Problem does not go into significant depth on each topic but it will give you a place to start on pretty much anything related to sustainability. Definitely an important book to have in your library.

Following the G20 summit this week, it seems as though we are in one of the most significant periods of new rule making we have seen for a long time. Our government leaders were promoting all kinds of new regulation to control hedge funds and banks. Similarly this year we expect to see new regulations emerging from the Copenhagen summit on carbon emissions. Here in the US, new rules are being proposed for health care, particularly around access, affordability and medical records.

Two of my colleagues at IDEO, Tatyana Mamut and Lionel Mori, have proposed that innovation, and particularly systemic innovation, is determined by a balance of three things – behavioral norms, tools and rules. As designers we tend to take rules and regulations as part of the existing constraints but in a time of rapid regulatory change I wonder whether there is a more active role for design thinking.

Take Formula 1 motor racing as an esoteric but illustrative example. This is a sport where the rules are often changed with little notice and the race teams invest millions of dollars in their response, attempting to gain tenths of a second in performance over their fellow competitors. Formula 1 is a kind of experimental hotbed where new rules are constantly tested. The intent of the rule makers is often to create a predictable reduction in performance so as to create safer or more competitive racing. What often happens however is that the ingenuity of engineers and designers combined with poorly written rules result in faster rather than slower cars. Design is testing the rules and innovation is the result.

What if design was used to test some of the rules our government leaders are proposing? Could we go through some experimental cycles using design and prototyping as a tool before final decisions are made about what rules to adopt? Might this help us avoid our tendency to create new rules and then walk away, under the assumption that our finance, health and global energy systems will now behave in the way we want them to?

There is quite a debate going on around IDEO at the moment about the merits of the Tata Nano. On the one hand some are concerned about the increased emissions and congestion a conversion to cars will cause in India and other poorer economies. Others worry that it sets off yet another round of unsustainable consumption. On the flip-side there is a case to made that modern cars create fewer emissions than old motorbikes and auto-rickshaws. There is also speculation that Tata intends the Nano to be assembled locally by dealers and rural entrepreneurs. This would be an interesting new business model.

Either way the Nano appears to be quite an achievement from a cost perspective coming in at around $2000 when it goes on sale in Mumbai on Monday. The question is whether the Nano will ultimately help or harm the economies and livehoods of those that purchase it?

I have been a bit slow to mention the publication of a wonderful new book by Jacqueline Novogratz, founder of the Acumen Fund. The Blue Sweater is the story of the work that Jacqueline has been doing for the last twenty years in Africa, India and Pakistan.

There are many messages that the book has to offer – the power of optimism, the precariousness of many development initiatives, the extreme challenge of truly understanding the needs of the poor. For me the most powerful lesson was one of leadership, in particular the leadership of women trying to change their own lives and the lives of those around them.

This is an inspirational book that shows it is possible to create real change in the world.

Consulting firm McKinsey has just launched a new website, called What Matters, that is an extensive collection of essays and interviews with opinion formers around the world. The content is categorized into ten big topics: Biotechnology, Climate Change, Credit Crisis, Energy, Geopolitics, Globalization, Health care, Innovation, Internet, Organization.

Authors include some of my favorite thinkers such as Juan Henriquez, Jeffrey Pfeffer, Gary Hamel, Jacqueline Novogratz and  John Thackara.

Check it out as a great resource for some of the latest longterm thinking. It would be interesting to consider what is missing from the list of topics.