Hello! I want to start an internal column in which I will write short reviews of interesting books I have read in the field of design, business, psychology and the world around us. I will also try to correlate the main thoughts of the author with the current situation in the web design and interface design market. Let's start!
The column's first guest will be Tim Brown, author of Design Thinking in Business. He is the CEO of the largest design company IDEO, which cooperates with global giants such as Apple, PepsiCo and others.
Design thinking by example
Imagine that you have the following task: to make the process of traveling by train more comfortable. The designer will start thinking about the ergonomics of the seats, convenience and other local problems of the cabin. The design thinker will go the other way. First of all, he will observe where the journey begins. In the course of studying, he will understand that a person faces the main problems even while buying a ticket, waiting for a train, searching for a platform. And it is these factors, based on surveys of travelers, that affect the overall impression of the trip the most. The design of the chairs goes to the background.
- The industrial revolution gave birth to a consumer society and a lot of useless and unnecessary things for people (a reference to Victor Papanek).
- The designer designs the thing, and the design thinker designs the interaction process (looks at the problem more broadly).
- In the modern world, the services of design thinkers are becoming very popular. there are many areas that need optimization (for example, almost any hospital).
- Everyone can become an innovator by applying design thinking to their subject area regardless of position in the company.
- Problem solving should be done by a team of people, consisting not only of designers, but also of people related to the subject area of professions.
- The accumulated knowledge should be publicly available, this contributes to progress in general.
- In the top guide of each big company there must be designers-managers who will contribute to the introduction of innovations.
About interface design
If we talk about the industrial revolution in a modern way, then I want to say the following: accessibility graphic editors and a small threshold of entry into the profession gave rise to many beautiful, but absolutely useless interfaces. Redesigns of large portals on behance do not carry any value, because it is necessary to understand what processes are taking place within the company, to study the accumulated experience and knowledge. Only then will the work done make sense.
A UI/UX designer must first and foremost be a design thinker in order to design products that will solve the real problems of users, making them enjoy not only the external image, but the very process of interaction. Design does not begin with Photoshop, but with a deep study of the subject area and identifying the main problems.
Conclusion
Think globally within the product, identify problems and come up with solutions. Don't be afraid to involve other people in your research and share your experiences. Think process first, not appearance. Only in this case, you can become not just a designer, but a powerful Jedi, or rather a design thinker.
Almost everyone who has been to England has seen the Great Western Railway, the crowning achievement of the greatest engineer of the Victorian era, Isambard Kingdom Brunel. I grew up very close to this railway, in Oxfordshire. As a child, I often rode my bicycle up to the tracks and waited for the huge express train to roar past at over a hundred miles an hour. Today's trains are more comfortable (they have springs and cushioned seats), and the view outside the train windows has certainly changed, but a century and a half after its construction, the Great Western Railway is still an example of design changing the world.
Although Brunel was an engineer to the marrow of his bones, there is more than just a technical side to his creations. During the design of the railroad, he insisted on keeping the embankment as low as possible - he wanted passengers to feel as if they were "floating" through the fields. He built bridges, viaducts, roads and tunnels - and at the same time he thought not only about the efficiency of transport, but also about maximum convenience. He even drafted an integrated transportation system that would allow a traveler to board a train at Paddington station in London and get off a steamboat in New York. In each of his projects, Brunel has shown an amazing - and surprisingly perfect - talent for combining technical, commercial and human aspects. He was not just a great engineer or a talented designer. Isambard Kingdom Brunel was one of the first design thinkers.
Since the construction of the Great Western Railway in 1841, industrialization has changed our world in incredible ways. Technology has helped millions overcome poverty and raised the standard of living for most of humanity. However, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we are increasingly aware of the other side of the revolution, which has changed the way we live, work and play. Black puffs of smoke that once covered the sky over Manchester and Birmingham have changed the planet's climate. The flood of cheap goods produced by their factories and workshops became the basis of a culture of overconsumption and horrendous waste. Industrialization Agriculture made us vulnerable to natural and man-made disasters. Innovative breakthroughs of the past have become the daily routine of the modern world, where companies in Shenzhen and Bangalore use the same management theories as companies in Silicon Valley and Detroit - and face the same downward spiral of mercantilization.
The technology has not yet become obsolete. The communications revolution that began with the advent of the Internet has shortened distances and given people a never-before-seen opportunity to exchange views and create new ideas. Biology, chemistry and physics have united in biotechnology and nanotechnology, promising us the emergence of new drugs and amazing materials. However, these incredible achievements are unlikely to help get off the sad path that humanity is moving on. Vice versa.
We need new solutions
A purely technocentric view of innovation today does not provide stability, and a management philosophy based on the choice of old strategies will give way to new developments in our country or abroad. We need new solutions - new products that combine the needs of individuals and the needs of society as a whole; new ideas to address global issues of health, poverty and education; new strategies that lead to changes in the world, new goals that capture people around. It is hard to imagine another time when the problems facing humanity would be so superior to our creative resources to solve them. Passionate innovators brainstorm, learn a few tricks and tricks, but rarely bring new products, services, or strategies to the world.
We need new approach to innovation - powerful, efficient, widely available, integrable into all aspects of business and society; an approach that individuals and entire teams can use to create breakthrough ideas that can be brought to life and thus change it. Design thinking, the subject of this book, offers just such an approach.
Design thinking begins with the skills that engineers and designers have been trained for decades in their quest to combine human needs and available technical resources subject to natural business constraints. By integrating what is humanly desirable, technologically feasible, and economically viable, designers were able to create the products we use today. Design thinking takes us one step further by giving all these tools to people who never considered themselves designers, but who can now apply such tools to a wide range of problems.
Design thinking takes advantage of the possibilities that each person has, but not taken into account in standard problem solving methods. Design thinking is not just anthropocentric, it is human in nature. Design thinking is based on a person's ability to feel intuitively, to recognize patterns, to create ideas that carry not only a functional, but also an emotional component, to express themselves not only in words or symbols.
Nobody wants to run a company based on feelings, intuition, and inspiration, but over-reliance on rationalism and analytics is just as dangerous. The integrated approach at the heart of design thinking offers us a third way.
I was trained as an industrial designer, but it took a long time before I realized the difference between what it is to be a designer and what it is to think like a designer. Seven years of study and fifteen years of professional practice passed before I began to understand that I was not just a link in the chain between the design department and the marketing department.
My very first professional developments steel products for a well-known equipment manufacturer - Wadkin Bursgreen. The company's management brought in a young and untested designer to help them improve their woodworking machines. I spent a whole summer designing and building better looking circular saws and easier to use spindle machines. I think I did a good job. My products can still be found in factories - and thirty years have passed since then. But Wadkin Bursgreen is no more, it ceased to exist a long time ago. I didn't realize then that the problem was the future of the woodworking industry, not the design of woodworking machines.
It was only gradually that I began to see design not as a chain link, but as a wheel hub. When I left the hothouse world of art school—where everyone looked the same, acted the same, and spoke the same language—and got into the world of business, I had to spend a lot more time explaining what design is than actual design work. I realized that I was looking at the world with operating principles that were different from those of my clients. And the resulting confusion hindered my creativity and productivity.
In addition, I noticed that the people who inspired me were not necessarily from the design profession: they were engineers like Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Thomas Edison and Ferdinand Porsche, who had an anthropocentric, not technocentric view of the world; behavioral scientists like Don Norman, who asked why foods are so unreasonably uniform; artists like Andy Goldsworthy and Anthony Gormley, who seemed to turn the audience into one of the elements of creation; business leaders like Steve Jobs and Akio Morita who created unique, meaningful products. I realized that behind the words "genius" and "visionary" is the use of design thinking principles.
Tim Brown is the president of IDEO, one of the most successful design companies in the world (in particular, its specialists designed a computer mouse for Apple, a children's toothbrush for Oral-B and a tube for Crest toothpaste). According to Tim Brown, design thinking is required quality for modern manager and an entrepreneur, without understanding the philosophy of design in business, it will be difficult to achieve real success. With the permission of the SmartReading service, we publish a summary - a "compressed" version - of Tim Brown's bestseller "Design Thinking in Business".
smartreading is a project of the co-founder of one of the leading Russian publishing houses of business literature "Mann, Ivanov and Ferber" Mikhail Ivanov and his partners. SmartReading produces so-called summaries - texts that summarize the key ideas of bestsellers in the non-fiction genre. Thus, people who for some reason cannot quickly read full versions books, can get acquainted with their main ideas and theses. SmartReading uses a subscription business model in its work.
Introduction: what is design thinking
Thanks to technology, millions of people have been lifted out of poverty, and a significant part of humanity has begun to live better. However, the industrial revolution had more than just a positive impact on people's lives: clouds of smoke changed the climate, the flow of cheap goods led to overconsumption and the production of incredible amounts of waste, and the industrialization of agriculture caused natural and man-made disasters.
Today we need innovative products that balance the needs of the individual and society as a whole, as well as ideas to improve health, education and living standards.
Design thinking is the use of design tools by people who are far from design to solve a wide range of problems.
Design thinking is based primarily on intuition, the ability to recognize patterns of behavior and create ideas that are not only functional, but also emotional. Unfortunately, few of us take the risk of creating a business based on feelings, intuition and inspiration, but in today's world and a completely rational business, there is little chance of success.
The most progressive companies choose the third way - the integration of emotions and calculation: designers do not just "decorate" the finished product, but take an active part in its development.
The principles of design thinking are applicable to fields ranging from treating childhood obesity to crime prevention, from the rocket industry to climate change. Design thinking is no longer limited to the creation of new tangible products, it extends to various processes and services, as well as interaction, communication and collaboration.
The transition from design doing to design thinking reflects the realization of the incredible possibilities of design, which are too attractive to be used only by designers. The evolution of design doing to design thinking is a movement from creating a product to analyzing the relationship between people and products and interpersonal relationships.
1. Who are design thinkers
Unlike proponents of scientific management, design thinkers know that there is no single right path to a goal. Wherever they are, they become the initiators of innovation.
1.1. Innovation
When creating something innovative, pay attention to the starting point and all sorts of signs along the way. The innovation itself is at the intersection of three cycles:
- inspiration- what motivates to search for solutions and opportunities;
- generating ideas- the process of generating, developing and testing ideas;
- application- the way from the office to the market.
Projects optimize ideas and explore new directions. The repetitive, non-linear nature of the project is due to the exploratory nature of design thinking, and not at all to weak discipline and lack of organization. At first glance, an iterative approach threatens to drag out the process. In fact, just the opposite is true: a team that is not bound by clear time limits is more productive.
Predictability leads to boredom, and boredom leads to the loss of talented team members and results that are easily copied by competitors. In addition, there are many cases in history when projects managed by traditional methods dragged on for months and even years. Proactive design thinkers don’t face these kinds of delays: they release prototypes from day one and improve them regularly. As they say in IDEO, “whoever fails sooner will succeed faster.”
At the heart of design thinking is a positive attitude towards competitive constraints. In the first stage of the design process, it is important to identify significant constraints and evaluate them. Constraints are best viewed in terms of three criteria for successful ideas:
- feasibility How functional is the idea?
- viability- can the idea become part of the business model;
- expediency- whether the idea has meaning and value for people.
A skilled designer can overcome each of these limitations, and a design thinker can balance them.
The popular video game console, the Nintendo Wii, is a great example of the balance of marketability, viability, and expediency. Nintendo realized in time that it was possible to shift the focus from on-screen graphics, and developed gesture control technology, which reduced production costs and increased profits many times over.
Design thinkers don’t solve individual problems, but deal with the project as a whole. The project is the one driving force which leads an idea from conception to realization. Design thinking creates a natural time frame that provides discipline and gives you the ability to see progress, make changes at any stage and change direction. Thus, the clarity, direction, and boundaries of the project help to maintain a stable high level creative energy.
Google and bicycle maker Specialized have jointly come up with the "Invent a New Bicycle or Die" design competition. The goal of the competition was to use bicycle technology to change the world. After weeks of brainstorming and prototyping, the future winning team has set a direction: more than 1 billion people in developing countries do not have access to clean drinking water. Questions were discussed: mobile or stationary? trailer or trunk? As a result, a working prototype was created, which was called aquadact. These three-wheeled bicycles, which filter water during transportation, are now traveling the world, supplying remote areas with clean water. The secret to the success of this invention lies in the clear limits (pedal technology), development budget ($0) and specific deadlines.
1.2. Training
A successful project is a carefully prepared project. Main elements preparatory phase: creating a brief, selecting team members and providing a creative workspace for this team.
Any project starts with a brief, which indicates possible limitations, criteria for measuring progress, goals to be achieved, budget, available technologies, market niche, etc. The art of creating a brief helps raise the bar and separates great companies from ordinary ones.
The complexity of modern projects forces designers to unite in teams. So, several dozen designers are working on a car model, and hundreds of architects are working on each new building. Moreover, designers often have to collaborate with psychologists, business experts, writers and filmmakers. AT creative teams vacancies constantly appear, the requirements for which indicate the ability to interact at the intersection of disciplines. This skill distinguishes representatives of interdisciplinary teams from employees of multidisciplinary teams, where each specialist does his specific job.
A design thinker can be an architect with a degree in psychology, an artist with an MBA, or an engineer with a background in marketing. In a multidisciplinary team, everyone defends their professional point of view, which becomes the cause of ongoing disputes.
In an interdisciplinary team, ideas are collective property, and everyone is responsible for them.
For the entire period of the project, the team must be assigned a special space for experiments and iterations. Project sites should be large enough to accommodate all research materials, photographs, plans, data, and prototypes. The visual accessibility of all materials promotes model identification and stimulates creative synthesis.
Well organized workspace maintains communication between team members, even if one of them is absent, significantly increases the productivity of the team due to the close interaction of employees and improves communication with customers and partners.
1.3. Transforming a Need into a Necessity
For a design thinker, there is no right or wrong behavior, all behavior has a certain meaning. His job is to understand what people want and give it to them.
Recognizing the real needs of people is very difficult, because people are very creative at adapting to any inconvenience: they sit on seat belts, write pin codes on their hands, hang jackets on doorknobs, and tie bicycles to park benches. Henry Ford said: “If I asked customers what they needed, they would say: “a faster horse.”
This is why traditional methods, such as focus groups and surveys that simply ask, “What do you want?” do not provide unique information. The real art of design thinkers lies in their ability to help people express their hidden needs that they may not be aware of. This can only be achieved by focusing on the three mutually reinforcing elements of a successful design program: insight, observation, and empathy.
Insight- this is an exit from the office to the outside world and a careful study of the behavior of people in everyday life. It is unconscious actions that provide invaluable clues about what people really need.
A patient and attentive observer will notice that the store owner puts a hammer under the door so that it does not slam shut from the wind, and the office worker sticks colorful stickers on the wires under the table.
Observation- the ability to see what people don't do and hear what they don't say. Moreover, observation of ordinary people will not give any new information. Instead of studying the habits of customers in the center of a market niche, you need to find special users who live differently, think differently and consume differently than everyone else. A collector with 1,400 different Barbie dolls or a professional car thief can inspire unique ideas.
A few years ago, the Swiss company Zyliss was working on a new collection of kitchen tools. To begin with, the team studied two "polar" consumer groups: children and professional chefs. So, a seven-year-old girl who could not cope with a can opener in any way suggested the idea of optimizing physical control, and the chef's life hacks, peeped in the process of his work, prompted the idea of models that would be convenient to wash. The result has been a hugely successful line of products, united by a common design but with a specific handle design for each tool.
Empathy- this is "trying on someone else's shoes", that is, the ability to perceive other people not as laboratory mice and let their feelings, expectations and thoughts pass through oneself. First you need to realize that certain subtle elements of human behavior are ways to deal with the complex and contradictory world in which they live. The mission of design thinkers is to be able to transform their observations into valuable information, and information into life-changing products and services.
Tim Mott and Larry Tesler, who designed the GUI for Xerox PARC in the 1970s, came up with the "desktop" metaphor. This image, familiar to every potential user, helped transform the computer from a distant, complex and highly scientific technology into a tool that can be used in the office and even at home.
1.4. Experiments
The creative team must have space, time, and budget for mistakes. Real design thinkers are open to finding new directions and ideas.
In the 1960s, Chuck House, an ambitious young engineer at Hewlett-Packard, broke corporate rules and set up a secret lab to develop large-format CRT screens. This illegal project resulted in the first commercially successful graphic display, which was subsequently used to broadcast Neil Armstrong's "walk" on the moon and in many other areas.
However, excessive risk is rarely justified. Where the best results are given by the balance of experiments "from below" and coordination "from above". The following rules ensure the development of creativity among staff and can be applied in almost any field:
- The best ideas come about when the entire ecosystem of an organization, not just designers and engineers, has room to experiment.
- Team members in a changing environment (new technologies, changing customer base, strategic opportunities) are the most motivated employees.
- Ideas should be judged without regard to the regalia of their creators.
- Ideas that can "make a lot of noise" are the most promising.
- The "gardening" skills of top management help to nurture ideas, shape them, and reap a rich harvest.
- Objectives must be clearly articulated so that employees have a clear sense of direction and are free to innovate rather than constantly seeking clarification and permission from management.
1.5. Prototyping
You need to spend exactly as much time, effort and money on creating a prototype as it takes to promote the idea and get feedback. The more expensive and complex the product, the more complete it seems and the less likely the creators are to want to hear constructive criticism. At the same time, information about strong and weaknesses models helps to identify new directions for creating more complex prototypes. Non-physical prototyping involves the creation of scenarios and stories in which potential future situations or states are described using words or pictures.
To get started, you can come up with a character that matches a certain set demographic factors, for example: a divorced working woman with higher education, two small children... Then a scenario is created for this character to use online pharmacies, taking into account her daily activities, preferences and needs.
Scenarios are also valuable because they allow you to put a person at the center of an idea. This will prevent developers from getting too deep into technical or aesthetic details. Most effective method motivate early prototyping - set a goal to make the first prototype by the end of the first week or even the first day of work. There should be many prototypes during the project, they should appear quickly and be imperfect, even ugly at first.
1.6. Experience Design
The modern economy is an experience economy: people want not just to consume, but to take part in the process. Customers are becoming more and more sophisticated and picky, so the experiences they are willing to acquire must be original and of high quality. To meet the needs of modern customers, you need to remember the following rules:
A good idea is not enough. Everything matters: product quality, attractive packaging, creative and reliable delivery, original marketing, realistic pricing and much more. Your product is really good if it is remembered and discussed.
In order for people to want to try something new, there must be some familiar elements in this new one..
In 2004, Shimano, a leading bicycle equipment manufacturer, invited IDEO to participate in a joint project to expand its market niche in the United States. To start, the multidisciplinary team set out to find out why 90% of Americans don't ride bikes, despite the fact that 90% of them rode bikes as children. It turned out that most adults have happy memories of childhood bike rides, but they are afraid to start riding again because of the negative shopping experience, the difficulty in managing and the high cost of both the bike itself and its maintenance. Thus, a huge new market has emerged.
The design team created a new bike with a comfortable padded seat, straight handlebars and puncture resistant tires based on an old Schwinn touring bike. The new model was maintenance-free, and braking was done in the old way: turning the pedals back. In the year since the successful launch of the new model, 10 manufacturers have also launched new simple touring bikes.
2. Business transformation
Organizations today face a dual challenge: how to teach problem-solving designers how to think strategically, and how to engage others in design thinking. Business thinking is part of design thinking, and any design decision benefits from the use of analytical tools.
Product companies and brand management firms (Procter & Gamble, Apple, Hewlett Packard) already have designers and even design thinkers on staff. In manufacturing and service companies, it is much more difficult to convince management of the strategic role of design and the need to change the company's internal culture.
In 2003, Kaiser Permanente, which provides medical services community, decided to improve customer and employee satisfaction. Representatives of IDEO proposed not to involve external designers, but to teach the principles of design thinking to the company's staff. A series of seminars with doctors, nurses and administrators resulted in several innovative projects. One of these, a project to change how information is shared between nurses' shifts, has been implemented at all four Kaiser hospitals. Working group determined that the main problem was that informing nurses from the next shift about the condition of patients was unsystematic. As a result, some information was lost, and patients and nurses were disappointed. After several days of brainstorming, prototyping, role-playing and filming, we decided to change the shift change location. Now the nurses exchanged information not in the nursing room, but in the patient's room, so that the patient could participate in the process and the information was transferred completely.
Design thinking has already become a popular trend. MBA programs at many universities now include the theory and practice of innovation, and more and more graduates of these programs are facing challenges that require design thinking.
Some business schools have students working on design projects: the Haas School of Business at Berkeley, the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, and the Hasso Plattner Design Institute at Stanford. The California College of Art in San Francisco says "MFA is the new MBA" and is offering an "MBA in Strategic Design" program.
3. Design your life
Design skills can be applied to a wide variety of problems because they are more accessible to the general public than is commonly believed. The unifying, complex skills of a design thinker will come in handy in business, public and private life.
3.1. Design thinking and organizations
It is useful for companies to invite design thinkers to boards of directors and involve them in the development of marketing strategy. Design thinking integrates and balances users, technology, and business. Design thinkers observe people's behavior and see how their life experiences influence the perception of products and services. Along with the functionality of things, they take into account the emotional response they evoke in people.
The art of asking the right questions largely determines the success of a new product
Does it meet the needs target audience? Does it carry a semantic load along with material value? Does he create a new model that is associated only with this product?
When starting a new business, entrepreneurs often make the following mistakes: they completely concentrate either on the business side (marketing budget, purchasing, sales, etc.) or on technology. The first tactic leads to creating a product that is easy to copy, the second often entails huge investments and the creation of a product that is not in demand. Only by making the person the number one priority can we invent something special and find a suitable market for it. The following tips will help you successfully implement design thinking in your business.
The sooner and more often you make mistakes, the better.. Leaders should encourage experimentation because mistakes are normal if they happen on a daily basis. initial stage and become a source useful information. The culture of design thinking means creating cheap and fast rough prototypes. Even if the prototype has been approved by the team, it must be submitted to the judgment of potential users.
The prototype must be testable, but not necessarily physical: Stories, pictures, scripts, films, and even impromptu performances can become successful prototypes.
Contact the professionals. Sometimes you need to go beyond your organization to expand your innovation ecosystem.
Share inspiration. Share your thoughts, knowledge, emotions with colleagues. This has a positive effect on efficiency. The Internet provides many opportunities to bring people together. Personal communication is the organization's most valuable resource and should be kept productive and creative.
Don't let bureaucracy slow down innovation. Design thinking is a fast, hectic, and revolutionary process. Don't kill him with bureaucratic procedures and complex financial reports.
Look for talent anytime, anywhere. There are design thinkers in every organization, but they need to be found, helped open up, and given the freedom to create. Look at your colleagues. Who is ready to listen to customers for hours? Who makes prototypes instead of writing long reports? Who sees the world differently? These people are a real treasure.
3.2. Design thinking and you
How nice it is to give the world something new: sample industrial design, a beautiful solution to a math problem or a poem for the school newspaper. The feeling of self-realization is a powerful driving force.
Ask: "Why?" Doubt is an opportunity to reformulate a problem, identify limitations, and find a more innovative solution. Instead of immediately accepting the complexities and limitations, ask yourself: Am I solving the right problem? We need faster cars or best quality transportation? Television with the best effects or a wide range of entertainment programs?
At first, your endless “whys” will annoy colleagues, but in the long run it will help direct energy towards a solution. necessary tasks. There is nothing more offensive than giving the right answer to the wrong question.
Keep your eyes open. Throughout life, we do not notice important things, especially in familiar surroundings. Good design thinkers are good at observing. Great design thinkers find ideas and inspiration in ordinary things. If we learn to pay attention to familiar phenomena and objects, great insights await us.
At least once a day, stop and reflect on a normal situation. Look at the thing or action from the point of view of a detective at a crime scene. Why are manhole covers round? Why is my son wearing this strange hat today? How would I feel if I was colorblind?
Create visuals. Draw sketches in a notebook or take pictures of objects of observation on your phone.
Use other people's ideas. If an idea belongs to one person, it will soon disappear. If it spreads across countries and continents, taking different forms, it will live and prosper! Jazz musicians and improvisational actors create new forms based on works previously created by their colleagues.
Look for Opportunities. Don't settle for the first idea that comes to mind, don't settle for a single solution to a problem. The search for new opportunities takes time and sometimes complicates life, but only in this way creative and original solutions appear. Your co-workers may be frustrated and your clients may be impatient, but in the end they will be happy to get brilliant results. However, deadlines should not be ignored: the art of stopping on time cannot be taught, but it can be learned.
Collect portfolio. It's good when the results of the work of design thinkers are tangible. Shoot videos, store sketches and pictures, be sure to find a place to store physical prototypes. Collected in a portfolio, these materials will reflect not only your personal growth, but also the impact of your activities on people (this is necessary for evaluating effectiveness, interviews, or in order to explain to children the essence of your work).
Be the designer of your life. You can plan your life, go with the flow, or become the designer of your life. Designers work within the limits created by nature and try to emulate it in elegance, economy and efficiency. Imagine that life is a prototype. It is given to us to experiment, discover and change focus. Turn processes into projects, find joy in creativity, and measure the success of ideas beyond bank account but their impact on the world.
What is this book about
Tim Brown is the CEO of IDEO, one of the world's most successful design companies and, according to Fast Company magazine, "the world's most award-winning new product design company." She has developed 5,000 new products, including a computer mouse for Apple, a children's toothbrush for Oral B, and a tube of Crest toothpaste. IDEO is one of the most desirable employers in the world.
Design thinking is the foundation for truly innovative company and most important business quality her leader. Who knows, maybe you'll read your own success story in Brown's next book? All in your hands!
Who is this book for?
For pragmatists in business and designers at heart. And also for executives, project managers, as well as all those who want to catch new ideas on the fly and masterfully dodge creative crises.
Why did we decide to publish it
Because design is becoming an essential part of our lives. Even the very word "design" in the context of business becomes synonymous with efficiency and fruitful work.
From the author
By looking at three broad areas of human activity - business, markets, and society - I hope to show how design thinking can be used to create new ideas that equal the challenges we face. If you run a hotel, design thinking can help you reimagine the essence hotel business. If you work for a charity, design thinking can help you understand the needs of the people you want to serve. If you are a venture capitalist, design thinking can help you know the future.
Today, the most progressive companies don't just hire designers to make the finished ideas more attractive, but they charge them to develop the ideas from the very beginning. The former role of designers was tactical - it built on the existing one and usually allowed for a little improvement on it. The new role is essentially strategic: it takes design beyond the workshop and unleashes its destructive, world-changing potential. It is no coincidence that designers can be found on the boards of directors of the most developed companies. How Design Thinking Moved Closer What's more, the principles of design thinking can be applied to the most various organizations and not just in companies developing new products. A competent designer can always improve new devices, but a multidisciplinary team of experienced design thinkers can solve more complex problems. From childhood obesity to crime prevention and climate change. Read online or download the book “Design Thinking in Business. From new product development to business model design" at fb2 by Tim Brown. The book was published in 2012, belongs to the "Business" genre and is published by Mann, Ivanov and Ferber.
Every week, H&F reads one business book and picks interesting points from it. This time we read a book by Tim Brown, director of one of the most creative companies in the world, IDEO, about how to use design thinking in business.
Don't ask "what?"
Ask "why?"
Every parent knows how annoying a five-year-old child can be when he constantly repeats the question “why?”. Probably every adult once or twice retreated for the authoritarian "because I said so." For the design thinker, the question “why?” is an opportunity to reframe the problem, to identify limitations, to try to find a more innovative answer. Instead of accepting given constraints, ask yourself: does this problem need to be solved? Do we really need faster cars? Or do we want to improve the efficiency of the transport network? Do we need a TV with extra features or better quality entertainment content? A more beautiful hotel lobby or a restful night's sleep? The desire to ask the question "why?" will annoy your co-workers in the short term, but in the long term will increase your chances of investing your energy in solving the right problems. There is nothing worse than finding the right answer to the wrong question. And this is just as true of a project assignment or the development of a new strategy for a company as it is of achieving a meaningful balance between work and life.
open your eyes
Most of our lives we don't notice the most important things. The more familiar the situation, the more normal we consider it, so only a relative who comes from afar can force us to visit Alcatraz, the Golden Gate Bridge, or go to the Wine Country for the weekend. My buddy Tom Kelly likes to say that “innovation starts with observation,” but I want to go even further. Good design thinkers observe. Great design thinkers watch the ordinary. Make a rule for yourself: at least once a day, stop and think about the most ordinary situation. Look at an action and an object that has only been looked at once (or never) as if you were a detective examining a crime scene. Why are manhole covers round? Why is my teen going to school dressed like this? How can you figure out how far you need to stand from the previous person in line? What is it like to be colorblind? If you dive into what Naoto Fukusawa and Jasper Morrison call "supernormal", you can get the most unexpected information about the unwritten rules that govern human life.
Visualize
Express your ideas and observations visually, even if it's just a rough sketch on a notebook or a photo on your phone. If you think you can't draw, what can you do, draw anyway. Every designer I know carries a notepad around with them the way doctors carry a stethoscope. And then the drawings become a source of ideas. The same is true of the way people develop ideas. Ludwig Wittgenstein was the most intellectual philosopher of the 20th century, but his motto was "Don't think, look." Visualization helps to look at the problem differently than we would look at it, guided solely by numbers or words. I felt it would be better to visualize this book as an mind map rather than just a regular content. So I was able to see the whole, which is not possible with normal content. Biologist Barbara McClintock used to talk about "feeling the body." Colleagues stopped ridiculing her "sensual approach" to science when she won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Al Gore helped us visualize melting glaciers in Greenland, and artist Tara Donovan helped us visualize a million plastic cups. One picture can be worth a thousand words. And perhaps more.
Develop the ideas of others
Everyone has heard of Moore's law or Planck's constant, but ideas that are too closely associated with the people who first thought of such ideas should be treated with some suspicion. If an idea becomes private property, it will most likely harden and become brittle over time. If the idea goes into the organization, where it goes through constant mutations, changes and mergers, it will flourish. The natural environment needs ecological diversity, and corporations need a culture of competing ideas. Jazz musicians and improv actors have created art from their ability to develop stories created in real time by other artists. Our company is full of "IDEO-isms", but what I like the most is the phrase that we repeat very often: "All together we are smarter than any of us individually."
Demand Options
Don't settle for the first good idea that comes to your mind, do not jump at the first good solution that is offered to you. Where they come from, there is much more. Let a hundred flowers bloom, but then cross-pollinate. If you don't explore a lot of options, you won't provide enough variety. Your ideas will not carry an element of innovation, they can be easily copied. You may have a hard time. Finding new options takes time, complicates the situation, but this is the path to more creative and better solutions. Although colleagues may become irritated and clients lose patience, the end result will please everyone. You just need to know when to stop. This art cannot be taught, but it can be learned. Setting deadlines is one way. Such deadlines will not only limit the time spent searching for options, but will also increase productivity as you approach them. Damn deadlines all you want, but remember: time is the most creative limit.
Illustrations: Natalia Osipova
