Tim Brown Design Thinking Video

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Notes and key takeaways:
1) Design thinking starts with divergence (expand range of options).
2) Take a human-centered approach (vs existing business constraints or tech-based approach): observe real user behavio
Notes and key takeaways:
1) Design thinking starts with divergence (expand range of options).
2) Take a human-centered approach (vs existing business constraints or tech-based approach): observe real user behavior, and emotional meaning vs functional performance.
3) Fail early, fail often: rapid prototyping
4) Get input & study extreme users, leverage range of outside experts, crowdsourcing
5) Share the inspiration internally: collaboration with tangible output vs more meetings - focus on productivity, creativity and fun
6) Blend big & small projects: use variety of approaches, diversified portfolio of innovation
7) Budget to the pace of innovation: strategic venturing model?
8) Find talent any way you can! Use multiple perspectives from your internal team, weird backgrounds for fresh views/ideas
9) Design for the cycle- have people experience the whole cycle of a project
10) Don't ask what, ask why? Keep double-clicking "why" until new insight found
11) Open your eyes and observe the "super-normal" vs assume. Don't think, look.
12). Make it visual - sketch
13) Build on ideas of others
14) Demand options: don't settle for 1st good idea - let 100 flowers bloom, then x-pollinate for full divergent thinking.
15) Balance your portfolio, keep your prototypes, document the process
16) Design a life! How to treat Life as a prototype?
-"Design got small" - design became tool of consumerism: amusing, desirable, but not important. Ex: better woodworking machine or prettier fax machine...with products or whole indsutries becoming obsolete fast! From systems thinkers -> "priesthood of hipster industrial designers" (aesthetics, fashion)
-"design thinking": design used to be big. Ex: design of railway system by Brunell (UK) - led to new innovations such as best gradients, etc. Then did trans-atlantic transport system.
-starts with integrated thinking: balancing desirability + viability + feasability.
-starts with humans: more than ergonomics - have to understand culture & context. Ex: low-cost hearing aids for India on PDA, fitted by non-technicians (start with culture & people vs tech). Cross subsidizing those who can pay for those who can't.
- building to think vs "thinking to build": rapid prototypes speed up the process, iterative learning. Ex: $200 to $4 lenses using low cost CAD/CAM gear vs big western machines
* from Consumption to Participation: (like Media-as-a-Service? Or as-an-Experience?). Ex: Welfare participants vs Welfare Consumers?? Need to design participatory systems!
-"Design too important to be left to designers": ex: nurses exchanging ideas on how to change shifts -- led to new method for updates @ shifts in front of patients, meaning less time away from patients
-Change: times of change drives need for new solutions (ex: shift to industrial age for Brunell). Today: rapid tech changes are obsoleting prior systems. Design thinking encourages Divergence to create more choices (vs converge onto 1 option from multiple choices)
-key: what question are we answering? Shaping the right question is critical! Ex: Indian drinking water problem -- hosted competition for seed funding via Acumen Fund, pairing multiple disciplines and not just designers to think about design of business model, social marketing, in addition to product/tech. This is participation from local community too!
Design thinking is fundamentally exploratory process - should lead to surprises & unexpected discoveries! This means revisiting most basic assumptions
1) Inspiration: problem or opportunity that motivates search for solutions
2) Ideation: generating, developing and testing ideas
3) Implementation
-nimble team of design thinkers prototype from day 1 and self-correct along the way: "fail early to succeed sooner"
Mark of designer is willing embrace of constraints! Design thinker brings these into harmonious balance:
A) feasibility: what is functionally possible within foreseeable future
B) viability: what is likely to become part of sustainable business model
C) desirability: what makes sense to people and for people
Sad reality: companies start with
1) constraint of existing business model: but business systems designed for efficient, so new ideas are incremental, predictable, easy to copy
2) Tech-breakthrough: tech looking for problem and fit - very risky & unlikely to have near term payback of time, R&D $ (Xerox PARC, etc)
3) Estimation of basic human needs & desires
Design Project: has start/middle/end to create constraints, clear goal, and anchor to real world. Starts with design brief: framework with benchmarks, objectives (price point, available tech, market segment). BUT shouldn't be a pre-determined solution (hypothesis is not an algorithm) - should be open enough to allow for surprises, etc.
Art of the Brief: not too broad nor concrete. Often add additional constraints and refinements midcourse
Project teams: "all of us are smarter than any of us" - need diverse, complementary backgrounds, with people willing to go beyond own expertise.
T-shaped person: depth of skill for tangible contribution (difficult to acquire, easy to spot) + cross-discipline capacity. Multidisciplinary team (each member advocates own speciality, leading to protracted negotiation) is NOT same as Interdisciplinary one (collective ownership of ideas)
Team of teams: goal is to create interdependent networks of small teams.
Risk-taking culture: better to ask forgiveness after than permission before is key for formation of new ideas. Let people be "whole people" vs fragmented individuals. "Serious play" - skunk works not enough, as those folks still stifled when injected back to "normal org".
Project spaces: realworld dedicated spaces for projects + online collab spaces is ideal.
Design is too important to be left to specialized designers: management needs to think like designers, designers need to think strategically. How to look at every problem as a design problem?
Converting need into demand: putting people 1st: behaviors are never wrong but always meaningful (vs engineer response of RTFM).
- focus groups & surveys never lead to insights if asked "what do you want?", just "gimme a faster horse" -- conventional market research only good for incremental improvement
1) Insight: observe actual experiences of real people improvising their way through daily life - hunt for "thoughtless acts" (actual behaviors and emergent behaviors)
2) Observation: watch what people don't do, listen to what they don't say (quality, not quantity). Mass marketing is dead!
- but concentrating on center of bell curve only confirms what we already know vs new learnings or surprises. Need to head to the edges and find "extreme" users
- impact of social science/ethnographics (immersive experience, "go native"?): study emerging markets and fringes vs coolhunting/trendspotting
- analogous situations: Indy500 pit vs ER, firestation, or recess playground?
3) Empathy: standing in shoes of others
- ??? Could lifestream/lifecam be used to teach/share empathy (ex: 1st person cam showed insights on how to redesign ER check in process) - PUA? Foreign affairs?
- essential to identify latent needs (acute needs that people can't always articulate) - can create state of empathy, emphasize the new or reference the ordinary/familiar
- hard to watch cognitive vs behaviorial process...one approach is to ask consumers to draw images/metaphors as cognitive experiments
- emotional understanding can turn customers from adversaries into advocates!
- study not just individual but also group/social behavior: network analysis. How to understand a culture, and shift to "us with them" vs "us vs them"?
Louis Pasteur: "fortune favors the prepared mind"
Create with people vs create for them -- collaboration between creators and consumers vs pure UGC (IDEO uses "unfocus group" of extremists). Make consumers part of the design experience
??? How to apply for social games?
Convergent vs Divergent Thinking:
-Western: take inputs, analyze, converge upon single answer. Group think converges toward single outcome. Practical way to decide between existing alternatives. NOT good at probing future and creating new possibilities - more like a funnel. Eliminate options & make choices. William Faulkner: "process of good writing is killing off your little darlings"
-Divergent thinking: multiply options to create choices, widen the funnel first. Linus Pauling: "to have a good idea, you must first have lots of ideas"
-design thinking is rhythmic exchange between divergent and convergent phases, with each iteration phase less broad & more detailed
-Analysis vs Synthesis: analysis breaks apart complex problems into pieces to understand them better. Synthesis is collective act of putting pieces together to create whole ideas, sifting through to identify meaningful patterns (creative process).
- data and facts never speak for themselves: designer is master storyteller whose skill is measured by ability to craft compelling, consistent, believable narrative.
- 1st raw material synthesized into coherent, inspiring narrative, leading to higher level synthesis: another rhythmic back & forth between analysis and synthesis
* those most exposed to changing externalities are best placed to respond & most motivated to do so: new tech, shifting consumer base, strategic threats
- ideas should not be favoured based on who creates them. Ideas that create a buzz should be favored
* senior leadership should have "gardening skill": tend, prune, harvest ideas. Top-down vs bottom-up (ex: WholeFoods using each store's small teams to experiment with new ways to serve employees better) -- NOT employee suggestion box!!
- signs of optimistic culture: colorful messy disorder vs tidy beige cubicles. Bursts of laughter vs subdued conversation. Literal smell of excitement in the air.
Rules for brainstorming:
- defer judgment
- encourage wild ideas
- stay focused on topic
- build on ideas of others (so each member invested in process and moving things along)
- ex: little girls brainstorming vs boys -- focused listening, serial conversation = true collab vs fighting for own idea airtime!
- Post-it notes: design teams naturally diverge endlessly - Post-it note storyboards + Butterfly Test: post-it note ballots for each person to vote on best ideas and reach consensus
Integrative Thinking-- The Opposable Mind: thinkers who exploit opposing ideas to construct a new solution > thinkers who consider only one model at a time
- top leaders "embrace the mess" and allow complexity to exist during search for solutions, because complexity is most reliable source of creative of opportunities
Prototyping:
-early prototypes should be fast, rough, cheap - explore many ideas in parallel. Fail quickly and cheaply!
-Overinvestment in refined proto locks you into potentially mediocre realization, and inhibits discovery of new, better ideas at minimal cost
-only invest as much time, effort needed to get useful feedback & drive idea forward. Avoid "finished" proto - goal is not to create working model but to give form to an idea to learn its strengths & weaknesses, & identify new directions for more refined protos.
- limit scope of early proto- focus on seeing if an idea has functional value: "just enough prototyping"
-prototyping non-physical experiences: scenario storytelling, storyboarding - keep people at center of the idea: "transaction between people and things"
-study the "customer journey" (as opposed to assuming how people will behave or change behavior) from beginning of service experience to end. Ex: most of train travel experience does not involve train at all! Each step before/during/after is a chance to create positive interaction!
-acting out potential ideas: experiential prototyping (ex: fullscale model of hotel lobby & check in process, with designers going through each step of experience & noting what could be better)
-how to prototype an evolving organization? Not just "re-org" - constant change, and story has to be repeated many times before people understand how it applies to them & behavior change needed
- prototypes are paradoxical: they slow us down early on to speed us up later (try to discover failure points early!). Proto should inspire new ideas: start early in a project, be numerous, quick and ugly. Team members should make their own proto initially & not outsource (don't always need model shop for design thinkers to "build" proto)
-set goal for earlyt proto: time limit. One measure of innovative organization is average time to 1st proto.
-during ideation we build many protos. As project advances, # of proto decreases but resolution of each hoes up. Next stage is implementation (pilot)
Experience Design:
-Daniel Pink: Psychodynamics of Affluence ("A Whole New Mind") -- once our basic needs are met, people look for meaningful & emotionally satisfying experiences (in the experience economy)
-shift from consumption to participation (music used to be sold as sheet music for consumers to play before recorded music came along)
-Experience Engineering: Disneyland, WholeFoods are great at this- all the tiny nuances. Experience brands engage the customer at every possible opportunity (ex: Virgin America)
-SPARC: see, plan, act, refine, communcate
-Behavior change: get people to try something new by building on familiar behaviors (ex: "keep the change" program @ BofA)
-experience comes to life when personalized & customized - via smart technology, or providing something special or relevant at just the right time. Ex: Four Seasons, leveraging employees to identify opportunities and giving them tools to act upon them -- real experience culture is one of spontaneity
***Experience Blueprint: framework for working out details of a human interaction. Also captures how people travel through experience in time, and describes emotive elements. Goal: identify most meaningful points & turn them into opportunities! Connects the customer experience with the business opportunity
- base premises on observations, not assumptions! The a-ha moment may not be where you think it is (ex: "the exhale moment" of finally getting into your hotel room)
-successful experience requires 1) active consumer participation, 2) authentic, genuine, compelling feel delivered by employees within an experience culture, 3) experiences that are well executed - designed and engineered with precision
Storytelling:
-4th dimension of designer's toolkit: time (sequence of events). Different than designing with space: design thinker has to be comfortable in both space and time
-ex: designing interaction is designing verbs, not nouns -- allow a story to unfold over time. Use narrative techniques like storyboard and scenarios with user at the center
-Barry Schwartz, "Paradox of Choice": most people don't want more options, just want what they want, and paralyzed by fear if overwhelmed by choice (optimizers), or just put up with whatever works (satisficers)
-X-prize model: Revolution through Competition. Design challenges are a great story around an idea and way to unleash power of competition. People love the idea of following bands of adventurers competing on a quest for the impossible.
-effective storytelling has beginning (storytelling needs to begin early in a project, woven into every innovation effort) and end (story gains traction when picked up by intended audience and moved forward after design project is over). Ex: Red Cross blood donation experience was more about inviting people to share their stories and emotional reasons for giving blood, vs better signage and seating
- conventional advertising no longer works with less time, more choices; storytelling will resonate much better.
** Allow customers to write own last chapter of the story!
Corporate Design Thinking:
- Ways to Grow: 1) extend (evolutionary: new offerings to existing users), 2) create (revolutionary: new offerings to new users), 3) manage (incremental: existing offerings to existing users), 4) adapt (evolutionary: existing offerings to new users)
- most challenging innovation is "create": new mrkts and new products -- too risky. Revolutionary can work well: Sony Walkman, Apple iPod created new markets
- smash hits can be tempting, but too rare. Incremental projects are easy to forecast, but too shortsighted. Best approach is to invest across all four categories (diversift the portfolio)
Shift to Social Contracts:
- companies have to yield authority over market and engage in 2 way conversation with users: shifting to 1) product-as-service, 2) discrete products and services to complex systems, 3) industrial age and mindless consumption is no longer sustainable
- every product is now a service, yet service businesses are slower to innovate vs product companies!

His very brief chapter on sustainable design was pathetic and not worth his effort. What is the point in telling a story about finding a discarded toothbrush you desig
This was easy to read and on occasion insightful, but it felt like a really long advertisement/infomercial for IDEO. It would have been much better if he concentrated on just a few clients/ideas rather than trying to say everything in one book. Felt like I was at a party stuck in a corner with someone doing a lot of name dropping!His very brief chapter on sustainable design was pathetic and not worth his effort. What is the point in telling a story about finding a discarded toothbrush you designed on a pristine beach in Mexico if all you say is "We can't control what people do with stuff after we design it"? A seriously irresponsible response and why even bring it up if that's your response?
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Dish: TBD. ...more

My expectations may have been set too high due to recommendation I've got but the honest truth is that if you're aware of modern practices in software development, you won't find anything new here. Even if this book is filled with plenty of real-life cases, I just couldn't help myself missing the 'substance'.
All of them seemed so ... obvious: Experiments? Yes! Prototyping? Yes! Get out of the ivory tower and touch the real life? Yes! Cooperate with users? Yes! Service instead
A bit disappointing.My expectations may have been set too high due to recommendation I've got but the honest truth is that if you're aware of modern practices in software development, you won't find anything new here. Even if this book is filled with plenty of real-life cases, I just couldn't help myself missing the 'substance'.
All of them seemed so ... obvious: Experiments? Yes! Prototyping? Yes! Get out of the ivory tower and touch the real life? Yes! Cooperate with users? Yes! Service instead of product? Yes!
This may be innovative, refreshing & new in non-IT industries, I admit.
Btw., book is a bit outdated & ... actually it's a bit funny :) Netflix is mentioned, but ... author is referring to times when Netflix was sending DVDs & has just started experimenting with on-line videos :) Or - Nokia is mentioned as a successful & innovative company ;D

There's a lot right with the book. As a practitioner, you are able to relate to the very real challenges of applying design thinking to transformation and the real life case stories are rewarding. The different chapters are thought through and explains the critical tenets of design thinking of human-centered approach, prototyping, d
Tim Brown's seminal paper on Design Thinking is almost a holy text to me. So when the author talks of transformation change by design, it is a must read on my shelf!There's a lot right with the book. As a practitioner, you are able to relate to the very real challenges of applying design thinking to transformation and the real life case stories are rewarding. The different chapters are thought through and explains the critical tenets of design thinking of human-centered approach, prototyping, divergence and design for 'Spaceship Earth'. Some of the examples relating to culture are bang-on especially the ability to let go and the culture for failures.
It's almost an easy to read course book for all change management professionals. Where it misses out is the blueprint - the sequence of activities. The storytelling is to the exact point but it does not give the full picture. For example Nokia did a breakthrough in early 2000s to diversify into mobile phones, but the book doesn't talk of the same traits leading to the downturn. It talks about wikipedia's business model but does not talk about how or why other similar companies fail. The initial parts were a tough read compared to the latter half.
It's a good book, but not an eye opener. If you are a beginner, it is a good book to start with for Design thinking.
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Although there were a few valuable insights regarding the design process here, it wasn't anything that couldn't have fit in a one hour lecture and written on a standard square yellow sticky note.
Many busine
Tim Brown preaches the virtue of the designer and asks people and businesses responsible for hiring them to give them more time, money, and resources to do their job while at the same time claiming that operating within tight, unforgiving constraints is the realm in which the designer thrives.Although there were a few valuable insights regarding the design process here, it wasn't anything that couldn't have fit in a one hour lecture and written on a standard square yellow sticky note.
Many businesses care about innovation and design, but must figure out how to do it with limited budget and resources. If these businesses didn't have those constraints, they wouldn't need Tim Brown's book.
I can only imagine Tim wrote this as a self-pat-on-the-back for himself, his company, and designers alike.
Kudos on your book deal. I was one of the suckers who bought it.
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Still, it's useful to hear about design thinking from one of its originators.
This is a good book if what you're looking for is an introduction to design thinking. If you're a bit familiar with the concept, though, or have been using it to some extent, it's mostly a series of quick examples by Tim Brown of IDEO, none of which are highly illustrative. Also, given that this book came out in 2009, some of the examples are no longer current. (E.g., Nokia a leader in mobile devices?)Still, it's useful to hear about design thinking from one of its originators.
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Flash forw
A few years ago, I attended a "design thinking" workshop at an administrator's conference. The presenter began by stating that a person who goes into a hardware store looking for a quarter-inch drill bit doesn't really want a quarter-inch drill bit. They want a quarter-inch hole. A design thinker is someone who starts with the question "how do we produce a quarter-inch hole" instead of "where do we find a quarter-inch drill bit." At the time, this struck me as an important observation.Flash forward to the early days of 2019, when I have been tasked with leading a design-thinking workshop for university administrators who need, in effect, a whole lot of quarter-inch holes and are finding that their quarter-inch drill bits no longer work. A colleague recommended that I start with Tim Brown's Change by Design. I'm glad I did, and there are some good insights in the book. But I still don't have a better way to explain the whole concept of design thinking that is better than the quarter-inch hole analogy.
First, the problems with the book. Through no fault of its own, it is now ten years old, and it shows its age. Brown is an executive at the fabled IDEO firm in Palo Alto, which designed, among other things, the original Apple mouse and the Palm Pilot. This is good stuff, but this particular book sacrifices timelessness for a sense of cutting-edgeness that does not particularly wear very well. Ten years later, it is hard to think of the Blackberry as the apex of handheld technology or Best Buy as the cutting edge of retail experience.
So much has happened since the book was written, that all of the advantages of being at the cutting edge in 2009 disappear and a lot of the examples are stale. A better strategy, I think (and Brown does this a little bit) would have been to stay away from the tech industry as much as possible and talk about breakfast cereal and Carnation milk, and instant coffee and all sorts of other things that illustrate the same points in a less time-bound fashion.
The book also suffers, in my view, by a sort of hyperactive, throw-stuff-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach to its subject matter. The chapters are not very well focused, and the author moves from example to example without really settling in on anything. In his defense, he tells us that this is what he is doing, and he says that it is consistent with what design thinking is all about, but he does not make many concessions to the linear thinkers among us, which I, as a very linear thinker, find alienating.
Of course, the right answer is that I need to stop being such a stuffed shirt, but it is probably too late for me. The best I can do is try to design a curriculum that will stop my children's generation from being such stuffed shirts, and there are some good ideas here for what that might look like. Among the takeaways:
--Innovate fearlessly. Structure safe environments for brainstorming and experimentation, and cultivate a high tolerance for failure. Innovation comes when people do not see their jobs as contingent on not screwing up.
--Prototype everything. Create models, illustrations, storyboards, trial runs, and other opportunities for people to visualize the end result.
--Focus on what human beings will be doing, not on what, ideally, they should be doing. This was probably the most important point for me. A whole lot of really wonderful ideas have failed because their designers did not do a good job of imagining what human beings would really be doing with the product or the service.
--Create options. At every stage of the process, but especially the early stages, design thinkers should be brainstorming, asking probing questions, and creating multiple possible ways of solving the problem.
--Communicate with everybody all the time. This is another extremely important element of organizational culture. Silos discourage innovation. Turf wars keep organizations locked into old patterns. The only way to break free is to create a culture where people are always talking to each other and sharing ideas. And where people aren't afraid of stepping out of bounds. Nearly all of the good stuff is out of bounds.
These are all good suggestions, but I am not sure that they go very far beyond common sense. Are they "design thinking"? Is this actually a thing and not just a trendy word for being open to innovation and intentional about change? There is probably some there there, but this book doesn't entirely define it. But I am still pretty sure it has to do with quarter-inch holes.
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- First, seems that Brown provided enough detail describing several projects, but then he'd stop short before one could glean the details of what they accomplished and how the I think IDEO may be one of the coolest companies around today and was hoping that reading Tim Brown's "Change by Design" would provide a technicolor version of not only numerous specific projects IDEO has undertaken, but how they do what they do. Unfortunately this book was disappointing which may be due to several things.
- First, seems that Brown provided enough detail describing several projects, but then he'd stop short before one could glean the details of what they accomplished and how they did it...I found myself yearning/grasping to get more color. For example, in Chapter 6, "Spreading the Message", he raises the issue of "adherence" in the pharma sector...there may be great medicines out there but patients don't take them. OK...interesting...how did IDEO's design thinking processes help to address that problem??? Two paragraphs later he moves on. I'd rather have learned about fewer interesting projects, but go into more depth on each.
- Second, and related to the above, felt like too much "intellectualizing" about the value of design thinking. Got it in the introduction and first chapter or two...no need to keep lecturing. Show us more specific examples.
- Third, the original book was published in 2009, and this edition is revised and updated. But seems that very little was updated, and while I have no doubt that IDEO has consistently done great work, there was a shopworn feeling reading about developments that happened 10, 15 or 20 years ago. (Every now and then he'd insert some updates. For example, in Chapter 7, "Design Thinking Meets the Corporation". when discussing Nokia, they added some commentary about Nokia's pivot from hardware manufacturer to service provider and MSFT's 2014 acquisition.)
The one new chapter is the very last one: "Redesigning Design", written by both Tim Brown and Barry Katz. Now this has some real promise and I wish Brown would have taken the opportunity to generate a complete new book going into much more detail on their initiatives over the last 5 years or so. The six "redesigning" topics he focuses on in this chapter deserve much more than they got here: 1) Institutions, 2) Democracy, 3) Cities, 4) AI, 5) Life (and death), and 6) the Future. For example, in (2), IDEO has worked with Los Angeles county to come up with a new design for voting machines addressing the numerous issues we've witnessed over the last 18 years, and 31,000 machines will be delivered in time for the 2020 elections. HOW DID THEY DO THAT??? TELL ME MORE!
I continue to be mesmerized by IDEO the company, and am wondering how their methods could be used to completely redesign the industry I've spent my career: media audience and advertising measurement which is sorely in need of a reboot. This book didn't do much to unleash any creativity on this topic, but regardless I have a sense that IDEO's approaches could play a powerful role in addressing that industry's forward-looking requirements.
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I can't.
While this book contains many underline-worthy statements, questions and case studies it falls short of showing you "the how".
What's irritating about it is the seemingly infinite amount of organisation names you have to read which creates a kind of stop-start-y reading experience.
I got this book as a gift from OpenIDEO at their Gather seminar in California and it's got handwritten messages from my global Chapter friends in it so I'm tempted to give it a four out of sentimentality but...I can't.
While this book contains many underline-worthy statements, questions and case studies it falls short of showing you "the how".
What's irritating about it is the seemingly infinite amount of organisation names you have to read which creates a kind of stop-start-y reading experience.
There was also no big plot, manifesto or philosophy, just case study after case study.
It's also about IDEO, make no mistake.
That being said, this book may be useful to someone who's never heard of design thinking or to someone who'd like to convince others of the benefits of following this practice.
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Had no idea about ideo or this kind of design but this book was a kind introduction. The first half had much more meat on the bone - for me - than the second. If you find yourself reading it and notice you're bored, you're probably done with this book.
Good introduction to design thinkingHad no idea about ideo or this kind of design but this book was a kind introduction. The first half had much more meat on the bone - for me - than the second. If you find yourself reading it and notice you're bored, you're probably done with this book.
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Essentially each chapter of the book is about a discipline in design, for example one chapter is dedicated to UX Research, another chapter to Prototyping, another one to Interaction Design/Experience Design, another to Service Design, finally a chapter dedicated to Visual Story Telling, without actually taking their names. Each of these chapters serve only as an
If you are a designer, you would have heard most of the content of the book already and you would have experienced it in your work too!Essentially each chapter of the book is about a discipline in design, for example one chapter is dedicated to UX Research, another chapter to Prototyping, another one to Interaction Design/Experience Design, another to Service Design, finally a chapter dedicated to Visual Story Telling, without actually taking their names. Each of these chapters serve only as an introductory course to these disciplines, without actually going into the intricate details of these methodologies and techniques. As such the book is anecdotal i.e. most of these are taken from the person experiences of the author. Most of the examples cited in the book are related to IDEO and the authors involvement in various projects which are cited as case studies.
The first half of the book has the meat the next half is related about politics of design in the organization or how to gather popular support for design thinking and rally your organization around it, which is quite tiring to read. The second half of the book also talks about sustainable design and design activism, the last chapter of the book is absolutely useless as it recalls all the previous chapters.
The second half of the book could be left alone, without any loss of value!
The book adds little value to a seasoned designer, but it is useful for someone getting started in the discipline to organize their thoughts and carve out a path for them to follow.
As such the book was extremely difficult to read without the round about language, most of the book is written deliberately using complicated sentence structures that are difficult to absorb. The contents of the book are not that complex to grasp but are made very difficult with the constant context switching from one topic to the other without giving us any heads up about why the narratiave hops from one topic to another in a disarray of thoughts. Though the mind map works for someone who has an eagle eye view of the topic, the mind map never works for the end user, i.e. someone who is trying to absorb the content first and then connect the dots later, after absorbing the book completely. I am not sure how the author missed this simple fact about UX of reading a book.
The author wrote the book to please himself rather than make it easy for the audience to absorb it. So much for a designer who goes into field work.
Needless to say the book has gathered a lot of hype among designers, much of it unwarranted. They book does not add so much value page to page, compared to the work of Dan Norman.
The book is not a design text book or does not contain design priciples, or theorems, in fact the book is just a huge collection of best practices used and developed at IDEO and how they were developed across the decades as the company rose from the small starup to a huge MNC, along with the author. This is in fact a account of the design journey of the author and the notes that he has gather on the way.
Snippets from the book
Black Swan
Silent Spring
Opposable Mind
Whole New Mind
In Defense of Food
Animal Vegetable Miracle
Nonzero
The Paradox of Choice
Design for Real World
Fortune at the bottom of the pyramid
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); and desirability (what makes sense to people and for people).
Over the course of their century-long history of creative problem solving, designers have acquired a set of tools to help them move through what I have called the "three spaces of innovation": inspiration, ideation, and implementation.
It is helping people to articulate the latent needs they may not even know they have, and this is the challenge of design thinkers. How should we approach it? What tools do we have that can lead us from modest incremental changes to the leaps of insight that will redraw the map? In this chapter I'd like to focus upon three mutually reinforcing elements of any successful design program. I'll call them insight, observation, and empathy.
These questions are essential to identifying what we call latent needs, needs that may be acute but that people may not be able to articulate.
A third layer—beyond the functional and the cognitive—comes into play when we begin working with ideas that matter to people at an emotional level.
y colleague Jane Fulton Suri has even begun to explore the next stage in the evolution of design as it migrates from designers creating for people to designers creating with people to people creating by themselves through the application of user-generated content and open-source innovation. The idea of "Everyman the Designer" is a compelling one
The best ideas emerge when the whole organizational ecosystem—not just its designers and engineers and certainly not just management—has room to experiment.
2. Those most exposed to changing externalities (new technology, shifting consumer base, strategic threats or opportunities) are the ones best placed to respond and most motivated to do so.
3. Ideas should not be favored based on who creates them. (Repeat aloud.)
4. Ideas that create a buzz should be favored. Indeed, ideas should gain a vocal following, however small, before being given organizational support.
5. The "gardening" skills of senior leadership should be used to tend, prune, and harvest ideas. MBAs call this "risk tolerance." I call it the top-down bit.
6. An overarching purpose should be articulated so that the organization has a sense of direction and innovators don't feel the need for constant supervision.
At IDEO we have dedicated rooms for our brainstorming sessions, and the rules are literally written on the walls: Defer judgment. Encourage wild ideas. Stay focused on the topic. The most important of them, I would argue, is "Build on the ideas of others." It's right up there with "Thou shalt not kill" and "Honor thy father and thy mother," as it ensures that every participant is invested in the last idea put forward and has the chance to move it along.
At IDEO we use them to submit ideas to the "butterfly test."
In The Opposable Mind, based on more than fifty in-depth interviews,
David Kelley calls prototyping "thinking with your hands," and he contrasts it with specification-led, planning-driven abstract thinking.
First, we now live in what Joseph Pine and James Gilmore christened an "experience economy" in which people shift from passive consumption to active participation. Second, the best experiences are not scripted at corporate headquarters but delivered on the spot by service providers. And third, implementation is everything. An experience must be as finely crafted and precision-engineered as any other product.
Among the most compelling is Daniel Pink's analysis of what might be called the psychodynamics of affluence. In A Whole New Mind, Pink argues that once our basic needs are met—as they already have been for most people in the affluent societies of the West—we tend to look for meaningful and emotionally satisfying experiences.
The growing popularity of farmers' markets, community-supported agriculture, the slow-food movement, and a burgeoning literature ranging from Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food to Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, suggests that consumers crave a different experience of food shopping.
IDEO designers decided to develop a two-piece program called "Scenography," intended to equip general managers with the tools to anticipate the needs and meet the expectations of their guests.
First, a successful experience requires active consumer participation. Second, a customer experience that feels authentic, genuine, and compelling is likely to be delivered by employees operating within an experience culture themselves. Third, every touchpoint must be executed with thoughtfulness and precision—experiences should be designed and engineered with the same attention to detail as a German car or a Swiss watch.
In his provocative book Nonzero, the journalist Robert Wright makes the case that consciousness, language, and society have developed an intimate relationship with technologies of storytelling throughout the forty-thousand-year history of human society.
But there are other reasons why thirty-second spots no longer serve as an effective vehicle for new ideas, including what the Swarthmore College psychologist Barry Schwartz has identified as "the paradox of choice." Most people don't want more options; they just want what they want.
In each of the preceding chapters I have tried to identify techniques that originated in the design community—field observations, prototyping, visual storytelling—that lie at the center of a human-centered design process.
Second, business thinking is integral to design thinking. A design solution can only benefit from the sophisticated analytical tools—discovery-driven planning, option and portfolio theory, prospect theory, customer lifetime value—that have evolved in the business sector.
First, there is a seemingly inexorable blurring of the line between "products" and "services," as consumers shift from the expectation of functional performance to a more broadly satisfying experience. Second, design thinking is being applied at new scales in the move from discrete products and services to complex systems. Third, there is a dawning recognition among manufacturers, consumers, and everyone in between that we are entering an era of limits; the cycle of mass production and mindless consumption that defined the industrial age is no longer sustainable.
Environmentalism entered the cultural mainstream with the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962, but it would take another forty years—after two oil crises and a broad scientific consensus—for a general awareness of the crisis to sink in. A major stimulus was the release of Al Gore's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, in 2006,
Victor Papanek's Design for the Real World was required reading when I entered art school three decades ago, and I still recall our late-night discussions about design being for "people, not profit."
The influential business strategist C. K. Prahalad has written about the fortune to be found at the "bottom of the pyramid" by companies that dare to approach the world's poorest citizens not as suppliers of cheap labor or recipients of their charitable largesse but rather as partners in creative entrepreneurship. Prahalad's description of the Aravind Eye Hospital in Madurai, India, is a case in point.
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On the plus side, the book has a sprinkling of ideas about how businesses can
Incredibly self-serving, overlong, rambling, vague buzzy nonsense, and 90% filler. It often reads like it was computer generated - the sentences are grammatically correct, but they don't mean anything.I will now flip to a random page and random sentence for an example: "Insights lead to insights as seemingly insignificant physical details accumulate. A second layer of understanding is less physical than cognitive...."
On the plus side, the book has a sprinkling of ideas about how businesses can engage in creative exploration. But it acts like doing so is a radical idea, which hasn't been true since the 1950's.
Though buried in filler, Brown does have a thesis. He argues that innovation can only by achieved via intuition, and explicitly argues against metrics and data analysis, claiming that anecdotal observation is superior. He also believes that businesses should be run by artists and not by engineers or business people. Brown is essentially the James T. Kirk of CEOs, "Damn your Vulcan logic and your Federation regulations!" Yet, in the intervening 8 years since this book was published, many of the specific success stories that Brown mentions have since proven to be failure stories.
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(1) Tim Brown's own table of contents that he provides in the inside cover of the book (don't worry, the classic format is still there in the usual place) fails the test of design thinking. It's visual, yes, and it maps the book. But it is not functional because the damn thing doesn't even include pag
My professional development group at work read this, and in the interest of a speedy review for a book that is unmercifully long for what little insight it provides, I just wish to say three things:(1) Tim Brown's own table of contents that he provides in the inside cover of the book (don't worry, the classic format is still there in the usual place) fails the test of design thinking. It's visual, yes, and it maps the book. But it is not functional because the damn thing doesn't even include page numbers. How is a table of contents without page numbers, visual or not, designed well?
(2) I'll spare examples, but the first seven chapters are rife with dreadful execu-speak and deprived of meaningful examples. In the event of an example, it, too, is described in vague language that doesn't translate to anything readers could absorb and apply. Oftentimes the examples of the prototypes and solutions Tim Brown's company provides aren't accompanied by any viable metrics or viable results, leaving the reader wondering whether or not it was successful in any meaningful way. That's the necessary final point to any argument as to why design thinking is crucial: it yields significant positive results. Yet the book doesn't really give the how and why convincingly.
(3) Chapters 8, 9, and 10 are an OK attempt at doing what the first seven chapters failed to do (outside of a nifty quote here and there).
The best way to read this is probably to photocopy Chapter 10 and use the examples from Chapters 8 and 9 as integrated examples into that chapter. If I were to Thomas Jefferson-with-a-razor this book, I'd probably cut the examples and place them within Chapter 10 as supporting evidence or as endnotes/footnotes. I'd ditch the first seven chapters altogether, and recommend 'further reading' at the end. That way it's a much stronger, sleeker essay.
Thanks, Tim Brown, for equipping me with the skill set to understand why your book doesn't do a good job of utilizing the skill set it champions.
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If you are new to design concepts, the following tools are discussed:
brainstorming, scenarios, storyboards, story telling, mind mapping and prototyping. Since these are right-brain tools and my brain seems to prefer functioning in left-brain mode, this book provided an adequate mind meld to get both sides to recogniz
If you are new to design concepts, the following tools are discussed:
brainstorming, scenarios, storyboards, story telling, mind mapping and prototyping. Since these are right-brain tools and my brain seems to prefer functioning in left-brain mode, this book provided an adequate mind meld to get both sides to recognize each other.
I liked the author's definition of innovation: "a good idea executed well." However, my right brain kept searching for a nice neat definition of design thinking, and alas, it become frustrated. Upon review the best understanding I could come up with is that designers focus on a problem and design thinkers focus on a project.
The author also seems to prefer triplets when attempting to explain stuff. Examples:
The three spaces of innovation:
inspiration | ideation | implementation
The three overlapping criteria for successful ideas:
feasibility | viability | desirability
The three elements of any successful design program:
insight | observation | empathy
An unexplained sine wave chart:
hope | insight | confidence
Change by Design is more of a concept book that successfully makes the case that companies need to innovate to achieve success and remain competitive. Design thinking is a vehicle that can help your organization accomplish that never-ending mission to innovate or perish.
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I am a big fan of IDEO and kind of biased in a way (I see the book gets negative reviews too). I am also not new to the topic, so this was not an introduction to Design Thinking in my case.
And yes, it was a bit funny to read about the success of Nokia in applying design thinking to stay relevant (the book is like 7 years old), and where is Nokia now? One has to be careful with choosing proofs of the theory working indeed ;-)
Consider taking courses by IDEO or other mentors at Udacity, Novoed, Coursera, etc.
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He then shows us how we can apply the skills of traditional designers to develop the capacity for design thinking, and ways to create innovative, empathetic, human-centered solutions not only to organizational problems and redesigns, but also to pressing social and environmental challenges.
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Change By Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation
By Tim Brown (HarperBusiness)
Design is not just about making things. It's a tool for building better organizations, communities, and governments. It's an approach, unbound to a specific discipline—a way to organize information; to problem-solve; to synthesize new ideas. This is the crux of design thinking, a concept introduced by IDEO's Tim Brown in Change by Design. In this "blueprint for creat
Change By Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation
By Tim Brown (HarperBusiness)
Design is not just about making things. It's a tool for building better organizations, communities, and governments. It's an approach, unbound to a specific discipline—a way to organize information; to problem-solve; to synthesize new ideas. This is the crux of design thinking, a concept introduced by IDEO's Tim Brown in Change by Design. In this "blueprint for creative leaders," Brown is clear, persuasive, and often funny, writing with an authority presumably honed by his years of advising Fortune 500 companies and high-level government officials. But even for those of us without our own sovereign nation or blue-chip corporation, design thinking offers a guide for rethinking and organizing our everyday creative processes.

Interesting read
a little too much a memoir of IDEO
limited in its coverage of the fields of Design from where the author's principles of what he calls DESIGN THINKING come from.
Wish he had used a more linear structure to organize the development of DESIGN THINKING
Having worked in various design fields for over 20 years from licensed architect to interiors to graphics
bought this over a year ago along with a few other books devoted to DESIGN THINKING in order to learn about what DESIGN THINKING is.Interesting read
a little too much a memoir of IDEO
limited in its coverage of the fields of Design from where the author's principles of what he calls DESIGN THINKING come from.
Wish he had used a more linear structure to organize the development of DESIGN THINKING
Having worked in various design fields for over 20 years from licensed architect to interiors to graphics & Signage to exhibit design and having taught in both the art dept and school of environmental design after acquiring two college degrees in design I am not seeing what the true significance of DESIGN THINKING is suddenly becoming.
Much of what the authors says I experienced even in my electic design career over 30 to 50 years ago.
Will finish reading Part Two this weekend.
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It tells us about the importance of thinking with the hands (prototyping), communicating visually and with empathy, applying in the business world the tools that were typically used by design people. Those are the Design Thinkers.
In our connected world focus on the consumer experience is a must-have capability. To be able to create this consumer-focused culture people inside the company should first have their own experience, as collaborators, to be des
This book is being a career changer for me.It tells us about the importance of thinking with the hands (prototyping), communicating visually and with empathy, applying in the business world the tools that were typically used by design people. Those are the Design Thinkers.
In our connected world focus on the consumer experience is a must-have capability. To be able to create this consumer-focused culture people inside the company should first have their own experience, as collaborators, to be designed in the same way. In this era customers, collaborators, competitors and the hole community that composes the business ecosystem are in the same network and communities, and everyone can listen and respond to what anyone says.
Very good read!
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(Maybe I should now call my project #1SetOfBooksAmonth - perhaps as a way of broadening my perspective on the subje
So, I'm trying out this new thing for my #1bookamonth project. For six months now, I was able to consistently read two books a month—maybe because I'm bored—but whereas before, I read a second book for the month as a 'palette cleanser', now, starting this month, I've decided that the two books I'll give myself time to learn from every month are books that are related to each other.(Maybe I should now call my project #1SetOfBooksAmonth - perhaps as a way of broadening my perspective on the subject? Anyway…)
That's why for my second book this month, a complementary reading to Creativity: The Human Brain in The Age of Innovation by neuroscientist-neuropsychologist Elkhonon Goldberg, PhD, I am picking another book on innovation, this time by CEO and President Tim Brown of the award-winning design firm IDEO. More here: https://www.ideo.com/
As his take on innovation, Tim popularized the future-mindset 'design thinking'. The book jumps off from the basic premise of "there's a difference between being a designer and thinking like a designer." And then expands his argument to make a case that thinking like a designer is a skillset and mindset that is open to everyone and anyone, including the people from IT, Finance, HR departments, from farmers to scientists, from politicians to communicators, teachers to chefs.
Design thinking is a culture of doing the work to inspire innovation. Design thinking is an approach to solving problems though innovative solutions. Design thinking is an innovative way of improving everyone's quality of life.
Reading through the first five chapters now, Tim makes several good points. Good points that are simple and makes perfects sense. That design thinking is an iterative creative process versus a linear approach to attacking a brief (regardless of what industry you come from). That design thinking is a human-centered approach in creating a new product or service, in forming or nurturing an organization. That design thinking's principle is grounded on creating balance and harmony among desirability, feasibility, and viability. That design thinking is about failing early and failing often – hence the important role of prototyping (or testing, or sampling, or mocking up, depending on your industry language). That design thinking is more on fostering an interdisciplinary attack on a problem – hence, no one type of 'creative' or department should have a monopoly on solutions ("A culture of competing ideas" and "All of us are smarter than any of us.") That design thinking is about opening our eyes, seeing the obvious, and immersing in the 'Super-Normal' in order to have a deeper understanding of why things work the way they do ("Good designers thinkers observe; great design thinkers observe the ordinary.") And my personal favorite: That design thinking is not asking what, but asking the more important why…why is this the right problem to solve in the first place – "There is nothing more frustrating than coming up with the right answer to the wrong question."
I am reading the book as an advertising creative—a writer and not even a designer—but my mind is understanding the contents of Tim's book in terms of running a team, exercising leadership, influencing an organization, shaping an industry, nurturing a community, solving problems of local and global scale, or simply, as the book puts it, "designing life." With innovation at the core of the thinking and the output.
Perhaps because the author is coming from a multifaceted POV: "As an industrial designer by training, Tim has earned numerous design awards and has exhibited work at the Axis Gallery in Tokyo, the Design Museum in London, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He takes special interest in the convergence of technology and the arts, as well as the ways in which design can be used to promote the well-being of people living in emerging economies. Tim advises senior executives and boards of global Fortune 100 companies. He is a member of the board of trustees of IDEO.org and serves on the Mayo Clinic Innovation Advisory Council and the Advisory Council of Acumen, a non-profit global venture focused on improving the lives of the poor. In addition he chairs the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on the Creative Economy and writes for the Harvard Business Review, The Economist, and other prominent publications."
In a Harvard Business Review article, he writes: "Throughout most of history, design was a process applied to physical objects. But as it became clear that smart, effective design was behind the success of many commercial goods, companies began employing it in more and more contexts. High-tech firms that hired designers to work on hardware (to, say, come up with the shape and layout of a smartphone) began asking them to create the look and feel of user-interface software. Then designers were asked to help improve user experiences. Soon firms were treating corporate strategy making as an exercise in design. Today design is even applied to helping multiple stakeholders and organizations work better as a system. This is the classic path of intellectual progress." (2015)
This book lives and breathes design thinking that even its table of contents is designed in a way that that reflects an understanding on how the mind wanders and works. It's a mind map table of contents that can allow you to jump to and skip on chapters, vs a traditional linear table.
I'm excited to put into practice what I learn from design thinking via "Change by Design" (Tim Brown), and from how the brain works on innovation via "Creativity: The Human Brain in the Age of Innovation" (Elkhonon Goldberg, PhD)
#ChangeByDesign
#DesignThinking
#TimBrown
An industrial designer by training, Tim has earned numerous design awards and has exhibited work at the A
Tim Brown is CEO and president of IDEO. He frequently speaks about the value of design thinking and innovation to business people and designers around the world. He participates in the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and his talks Serious Play and Change by Design appear on TED.com.An industrial designer by training, Tim has earned numerous design awards and has exhibited work at the Axis Gallery in Tokyo, the Design Museum in London, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He takes special interest in the convergence of technology and the arts, as well as the ways in which design can be used to promote the well-being of people living in emerging economies.
Tim advises senior executives and boards of global Fortune 100 companies. He is a member of the board of trustees of IDEO.org and serves on the Mayo Clinic Innovation Advisory Council and the Advisory Council of Acumen, a non-profit global venture focused on improving the lives of the poor. In addition he chairs the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on the Creative Economy and writes for the Harvard Business Review, The Economist, and other prominent publications. His book on how design thinking transforms organizations, Change by Design, was released by HarperBusiness in September 2009.
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Tim Brown Design Thinking Video
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