The idea for this website has been floating around in my head for a long time. But the actual green light was inspired by a recent experience, one that proved that the ideas and solutions generated by Design Thinking are applicable even in an industry in which “design” is a foreign concept.
After spending the better part of my career as a designer/art director, I have come to understand the limitations of our design vocabulary. Design is a concept that many people do not fully understand. “Just make it look pretty” is a phrase that stabs designers in the heart, and people say it more than they will admit. Design Thinking operates in the same vaguely conceptual space.
Design Thinking uses overly complicated phrases like: “next generation adaptive capacity”, “cross-disciplinary innovation facilitation skills”, “reuseable future-made visible tools”, “human-centered, prototype-driven process for innovation” and “transformative design”. With jargon like this, it’s no wonder that people don’t have any idea how to implement Design Thinking into their organization.
Design Thinking is a creative problem-solving discipline that connects creativity, human resources and technology/tools to business needs in order to form strategic business systems. Designers are trained to visualize ideas that connect to user experience and business needs. Designers tell stories that use tools such as color, typography, materials, etc. to achieve their goals. These solutions are created to fit within the market and cultural trends.
Within Design Thinking, the methodology and story-telling is the same, except the tools and models are business related. Additionally, talent, skills, technological and business resources come together to satisfy an integrated end goal. The outcome is a strategic system that sits at the intersection of creativity, culture/society, technology, operations and user and business needs. In short, we design business solutions that intersect: Business needs, Creative, Customer Experience and Operations.
Our world revolves around a financial system that is lead by revenue and profit goals. Opportunity lies in the ability for Design Managers to understand, operate, and succeed within this environment. Many organizations are beginning to incorporate design into their business models. A recent Wall Street Journal post shared the following information. “Since 2010, 14 design agencies and 27 companies co-founded by designers have been acquired by giants such as Google, Facebook and Adobe. Five U.S.-based startups co-founded by designers have raised more than $2.75 billion. Six venture-capital firms have invited designers onto their teams — for the first time — in the last year.” This month, McKinsey & Company announced that they have purchased Lunar, a large design consulting firm, in order to incorporate design into their business.
Apple is the most obvious and successful organization that has embraced Design Thinking. Other large organizations such as GE, IBM, and Capital One have also brought in design or UX specific firms to work with them. In a May 14, 2015 Wired article, Lunar President John Edson states that the acquisition “is indicative of just how thoroughly design and business are melding. There’s more and more overlap between management consulting and design consulting. Design is business and business is design.”
Another sign of the times is a new offering at Stanford University entitled “Design Thinking Boot Camp: From Insights to Innovation.” This program is a three-day intensive for executives to learn and understated how “to ideate and prototype, test and re-test to develop fresh, innovative solutions. Implementing the design thinking principles and practices you’ve learned…”
In a 2014 Harvard Business Review article called “Capitalism Needs Design Thinking”, Tim Brown, CEO and president of the global design firm IDEO, discusses the value of Design Thinking. “We need to use the techniques and methodologies of design to bring hypotheses and proposals out into the world much more rapidly and try them out and evolve them in real life, rather than spending months, years, or even decades writing hypothetical reports in policy think tanks where it doesn’t actually have much of an impact in the end,” he says. “We also need the skills of storytelling that come along with design to help describe new possibilities in ways that can create some action.
“The big challenge,” he concludes, “is to figure out how to empower people who are used to thinking in this way to raise their sights and design a better future.”
The purpose of itsdesignthinking.com is to give Design Thinking a voice, to create a community and partnerships, and to ultimately create a better understanding of what its value is. This is just the beginning and a hopefully a step towards a better understanding of Design Thinking.