Design Thinking
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Contents |
Overview
Design thinking: practices, approaches, activities, culture we find useful when making something new.
This isn't a checklist of activites you must do - it's an idea list, suggestions for how to work smarter. They are loosely ordered (and going in order often makes sense), but there are plenty of good reasons to jump around.
Design is fractal; you can use its tools for a whole project, then on a smaller scale for some sub-part, then on a smaller scale still for some tiny detail. You can use design to create furniture, of course, but also to get past a tricky software implementation problem, or devise a new marketing campaign.
You can even go meta: design the tools and process you'll use to design.
Work iteratively; you'll use these tools over and over, often on the same project.
Seek an alternative to jumping to the answer. Don't have a debate with the topic "What should we do?" - instead, go do research, go generate alternative ideas, go prototype some of the best ones... then you may find the choice is simple. Or at least far better-informed.
Design emphasizes DIFFERENT rather than MORE. Disruptive rather than incremental ideas.
Tools
- Define the problem. When have you succeeded?
- Research. Learn everything you can. Focus on observation, not speculation.
- Ideate. Generate as many ideas as possible.
- Prototype. Try the ideas out. Keep it fast and simple.
- Choose. Pick the ideas to run with for this iteration.
- Implement. Make the idea reality.
- Learn. What went wrong? Great! Now you know more next time.
Culture
Some frames of mind go better with these activities - a rough sense:
- Bias for Action - don't have a big argument, just prototype both ways and see!
- Bias for Learning - real-world research, then rapid prototyping; facts over speculation, fieldwork over lone genius at a desk
- Play - if you're obsessed with being "serious" you won't try new things and have new ideas
- Collaboration - fan out in parallel and research; brainstorm in groups; everyone makes some prototypes; mutual respect
- Individual Judgment - individuals are bolder than groups; collaboration need not mean democracy
- People First - development by people, for people; not by technologies, for technologies
- Controversy - you have to break some eggs to make an omelet
- Failure - fail often to succeed faster. Celebrate failure as one step closer, like Edison's first zillion lightbulbs
- Opportunity - focus on opportunity for gain, not risk of loss
- Different - disruptive not incremental
- Fear of Stagnation - recognizing the risks in staying the same, not only the risks of change
Reading Materials
- Red Hat VP David Burney in Red Hat Magazine
- Bringing Design to Software by Terry Winograd
- Design books that inspire us in Red Hat Magazine
- Book recommendations from 800-CEO-READ
- Designing for People by Henry Dreyfuss
- The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley
- Rules of Play by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman
- Getting Real from 37signals
- Design at Davos
- The Business of Design in Fast Company
- The Power of Design in Fast Company
- The Empathy Economy in Business Week
- Tomorrow's B-School Might be a D-School in Business Week
- Design Thinking and Business
- Strategy by Design in Fast Company
- Kathy Sierra on Bravery, Feature Requests, Evils of Professionalism, check the blog for other good stuff
- Seth Godin on Different Not Better, which is in many ways a concise summary of his book Purple Cow
- Marketing Malpractice: the Cause and the Cure, Clayton Christiansen's strongly design-compatible manifesto about marketing
- Design Thinking on Wikipedia
- The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin
Viewing Materials
- MIT World: Innovation Through Design Thinking, video of a talk given at MIT Sloan by Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO
