Design Thinking + Innovation
by Bryan deBlois, Director, Discovery + Development
Perhaps you have come across the term “design thinking” in recent articles on innovation and wondered; “What is design thinking and how could it help my business or organization?” Let us try and explain. Design thinking is a process for practical, creative resolution of problems or issues that seeks an improved future result. At first glance, design thinking may not appear to be all that much different than current new product development principles for moving through the front-end of innovation. At closer examination, the important and powerful difference lies in the way a team utilizing design thinking actually thinks and works throughout the innovation space. Design thinking is the essential ability to combine empathy, creativity and rationality to meet user needs and drive success, and is a fundamental behavior of innovative, human-centered enterprises. Practitioners and proponents of design thinking in product development, credit this approach as a way to achieve “longer reach” for more innovative, higher-impact results.
Unlike analytical or deductive thinking, design thinking is a creative process that focuses on collaborative and iterative work styles whose behavior “builds” or “crafts” solutions throughout the discovery and preliminary development phases. In this way, the use of design thinking is more emergent than convergent. Knowledge, insight, ideas and solutions are crafted in an iterative and organic manner throughout the process rather than relying on approaches that specify the opening and closing of a phase before the next one can begin.
Design thinking utilizes an abductive mode of thinking. Abductive reasoning starts when an inquirer considers a set of seemingly unrelated data, armed with an intuition that somehow this data is connected and results in a hypothesis that is tested and assumed true through the use of heuristics. Heuristic methods utilize experience-based or empirically-derived evidence to form conclusions. Heuristics are “rules of thumb”, educated guesses, intuitive judgments or simply common sense. A heuristic method is particularly useful to rapidly come to a solution that is hoped to be close to the best possible answer, or ‘optimal solution’.
An important and powerful characteristic of the successful application of design thinking is found within the common set of values that drive the gathering of insight and the shaping of solutions: these values are mainly; creativity, ambidextrous thinking (concrete, abstract, to learn, to make), collaborative teamwork, end-user focus, and curiosity.
The design thinking process has some generally agreed upon stages: authorship and definition, research, analysis, synthesis, ideation, implementation, and learning. The steps are not linear; knowledge, problems and ideas are iterative acts throughout the process. Much like a potter starting with a rough lump of clay and a general need, knowledge and skill shapes the idea and the idea often re-defines the problem to be solved.
There are no judgments early on in design thinking. This helps minimize the fear of failure and encourages maximum input and participation throughout the research, ideation and early design phases. Lateral thinking and unexpected connections between research, insight and capability are also encouraged early in the design thinking approach, since this can often be the source of breakthrough solutions.
Visualization is another important behavior of design thinking. Rather than rely on text alone- research, insights, problem frameworks and ideas are modeled and illustrated to make them tangible and encourage collaboration. These same teams will create many “prototypes” of ideas throughout the discovery and development process, some of them simple and crude. Final solutions and design directions are determined and refined through the use of these prototypes rather than hold off for a later, more robust (and generally more expensive) specification and prototype phase. The choice of these work styles results in both speed and agility, which are important benefits of the design-thinking approach. A credo often cited in design thinking with regard to the use of “prototyping technologies” such as graphic diagrams, images, video, sketches, virtual models and physical prototypes is “fail early to succeed sooner”.
While a debate continues as to who were the founding fathers of modern design thinking, its application in product development was being practiced by early industrial designers, architects, researchers, and human factors specialists in the design community 40 years ago. Generally, the term characterized the collaborative, creative and analytical approaches used by these same groups in the pursuit of solutions in product design and architecture. Today, there is considerable academic and business interest in understanding design thinking. Current practitioners and researchers of design thinking are evolving its application in the innovation space to include its use for working with large complex problems that often lead to solutions that are not products. As design thinking becomes more generally understood and practiced, it is also evolving to include its use by non-designers.
If you have further interest in understanding design thinking we have created a small presentation called “Thinking About Change”. Please take a few minutes to look it over. We would be happy to discuss any questions or comments you might have.