The Process of Design Thinking

Narrator: he book Change by Design asserts that the best innovations are those created through design thinking. Author Tim Brown explains the process of design thinking whereby a designer's sensibility is matched to people's needs. Tim Brown: We tend to think of design thinking as making things easy to use, more attractive, or more functional. For example, one of my earliest briefs as an industrial designer was to design a fax machine. But for the time I was brought into the project, someone else had already thought through the process, and I was basically hired to map out where the buttons went. These days’ designers are being used earlier in the process at the problem solving stage and continue to be involved in the experimentation and implementation of the idea. Designers have a holistic approach: Working with human beings to understand the issues rather than being focused solely on business or technology issues. This concept is the basis of design thinking, a methodology that is not just applicable in the so called creative industries but any industry. Now, let me explain how design thinking turns people's needs into demands. Design thinking is integrative by nature, a balance of people, technology, and business. But of the three parts, the people or human scented approach is the most important to innovation. Design thinkers observe how people behave and relate to products and services. They take into account the emotional meaning of things as well as their functional performance. From their observations they identify people's various needs and translate them into opportunities. A great example of this is Bank of America's Keep the Change Program. Building on a common savings habit of tossing change into the jar, Bank of America created a program in which it automatically rounded up debit card purchases to the nearest dollar and transferred the difference into the customer's savings account. This creative goodwill approach spawned more than 700,000 new checking accounts and one million new savings accounts in its first year. A perfect example of how design thinking converts needs into demands. But how does one go about creating a culture of design thinking within an organization? Here's one way. If you want to know the strength of your company's innovative culture, look at how rapidly ideas within your organization are made tangible enough so that they can be tested and improved. Design thinking encourages experimentation and accepts that there is nothing wrong with failure as long as it happens early and becomes a source of learning. The best way to test any idea is prototyping quick, cheap, and dirty within the company and in the real world. Prototypes need to be testable, but they do not need to be physical. Storyboards, scenarios, movies, and even improvised acting can produce highly successful prototypes. Whole Foods is an example of a company that encourages experimentation literally on the shop floor. They create small teams in each department and in each store and encourage them to experiment with product selection and layout. But innovation or design thinking doesn't happen without design thinkers. You must find them, nurture them, and free them up to do what they do best. Design thinkers may be in short supply, but they exist in every organization. Who among your staff spends time watching and listening to customers? Who would rather build a prototype than write a memo? These people are your raw material and your energy. They're money in the bank. The giant health care provider Kaiser Permanente Nurse Knowledge Exchange is a case in point. Kaiser had a problem with how nurses managed shift change. It took too long, created inconsistencies, and made patients uncomfortable. Kaiser picked a core group from its own staff including nurses to tackle this issue. After weeks of observation they realized that patients wanted to hear the exchange of information when one nurse's shift ends and the other begins. So after much brainstorming, prototyping, and role playing, the nurses designed a new way of exchanging information in front of patients rather than in private. This act not only created better relations with their patients, it also made the nurses much more efficient and engaged. As you can see, design thinking isn't limited to so-called Creative Industries. Creative leaders can infuse design thinking into every level of an organization, product, or services. Thank you for reading Change by Design.