The purpose of this article is to get everyone up to speed on what design thinking is and why you should care. The idea behind design thinking is that creative principles found in design methods can be used to develop new and innovative solutions for business. So, if design thinking is based on creative principles found in design methods, the question is of course, what are the creative principles?
I recently went to a seminar where Heather Fraser, from the Rotman School of Business, gave a talk about why business people should see themselves as designers and she listed several design principles integral to design thinking along with some great examples of how each principle was being used in the business world.
Empathy and Deep Human Understanding
The “Keep the Change” product from Bank of America. Bank of America used empathy and deep human understanding to find out that people need an extra push to help them save their money. The idea was that when somebody buys something, using their debit card, the bank would round up the cost to the nearest dollar and transfer the difference from your checking account into your savings. The product helped open 700 000 new accounts because of its ability to deeply understand its consumer.
Multi-disciplinary and Cross Industry Collaboration
When Nike realized the connection between running and mp3 players, they teamed up with Apple to create a product which would benefit both companies. They developed a sensor that you could put into your new pair of Nike+ shoes to track your running distance and have the data sent back to your iPod. Based on the data it receives, your iPod then lists your time, distance, pace, calories burned and whether or not you’ve reached your workout goal. It will even play your most motivating song for you while you’re running over that last hill. In the end, due to the successful multi-disciplinary and cross industry collaboration, the product boosted Nike’s shoe sales and Apple’s mp3 player sales.
Ability to Imagine New Possibilities
Aravind, an Indian eye care hospital, created an entirely new way to treat people with blindness. Dr. G. Venkataswamy, the founder of Aravind, had a vision of eliminating blindness among the poor. In India, many people with blindness are in remote locations and are unable to pay for costly medical procedures so Aravind travels to these rural areas to look for poor patients suffering from cataract, and transfers them, free of charge, to the nearest Aravind hospital where they receive state-of-the-art cataract surgery. Aravind performs 1.7 million surgeries a year, seventy percent of which are performed for free. The fees obtained by the paying minority covers the costs of all the free surgeries performed. The company has expanded by building new hospitals, creating training programs, and manufacturing their own medical equipment and eye glasses. Today, Aravind is by far the number one eye care company in the world and is a paramount example of the ability to imagine, and execute, entirely new possibilities.
Embracing Constraints as a Source of Creativity
IKEA answers the question of how to get a well designed product to the consumer at the lowest possible cost. The products you get at IKEA are of good quality, good design, and are very cheap. The business is also sustainable in that they save themselves and the consumers money on the shipping by keeping the products in their original flat packages and having the consumer assemble the product themselves. By setting constraints to the services they offer, they succeed in providing their consumers with what is most important to them.
Making the Abstract Visually Concrete
Its common in the business world to hear ideas, read proposals and then hear the opinions of everyone at a meeting or over a conference call. Ideas are often kicked around and discussed while they are still abstract, and pictured slightly different in the minds of everyone involved. A common creative principle is to make the abstract visually concrete. Frank Gehry, the infamous architect, is famous for doing this. He’ll publish a scribble of a building that he envisions, and from there, people begin to discuss the scribble. The discussions are focused because each person discussing the scribble is talking about the same scribble, not a different scribble that only exists in their mind. There is not an idea in the world that cannot benefit from immediately becoming visually concrete – which builds onto the next creative principle.
Iterative Prototyping and Co-creation with Users
Iterative prototyping means prototyping rapidly and repetitively, with each prototype getting closer and closer to a functional prototype. Designers commonly create prototypes alongside its consumers to help gain valuable insights which guide the design of the prototypes. Industrial design company IDEO is famous for designing the products and services with the users. They’ve created a deck of cards tagged the “IDEO method cards” which suggest to you fifty-two possible ways to better understand your consumer and have them influence your design. From ethnographic research, to having the user create a camera journal or draw their user experience, these method cards can help guide your design, through the aid of your users, in a much more informed direction.
Intuition and Common Sense
Designers are known to make decisions based on instinct and gut feelings. Business could be a lot more efficient if it would trust its intuition sometimes and trust the people that they work with when making decisions as opposed to gathering tons of data and doing a bunch of research which doesn’t really move anything ahead. Its important to keep a sense of urgency and to always be action oriented. If something can be decided on and moved ahead promptly its almost always worth it to make the intuitive and common sensical decision. The most obvious case of intuition and common sense in business is the decision to start putting wheels on luggage. How we ever went without wheels on our luggage for so long is mind boggling.
Systems Engineering Thinking
One of the best examples of systems engineering thinking is Apple. On the surface, Apple is a clean, simple, and experience friendly. What you don’t see is the complex, exhaustive and fine-tuned innards of the company that make it so successful. Much like an architect who plans every detail of each air duct and electrical wire when designing a building, Apple has thought through each detail of their business systems to help support the vision and design of their products and services.
Drawing Inspiration from a Broad Repertoire
As any designer will tell you, its important to diversify everything in your life so that you have a broad range of experiences to learn from. Diversify the types of projects you work on, the people you hang out with, the books and journals you read, the places you travel, the people you meet, the things you experience and the movies you watch. When you diversify everything you expand your thinking, you make new reference points and are able to make new connections between one subject and another. When you expand your repertoire of experiences, you will be able to draw inspiration from them when you are flexing your creative muscles. A great example of this in business is Virgin. Virgin goes into markets that have become stale or complacent and they use their ability to delight people and win them over as customers to succeed in each avenue. Each project and experience the company has informs the next and they are able to pull inspiration from places that no other company can and, as a result, they generate countless unique ideas.
Vision and Perseverance
Good designers follow through with their visions. When they become inspired to design something, they visualize the design, start working, and they see it through until it is complete. A great business example of perseverance is the story of the Four Seasons Hotel. Isadore Sharp, from Toronto, was working on a construction site building a motel when he developed a vision of building and running a motel of his own. After six years of endless rejections from lenders and developers, Sharp finally gathered enough money from his family and friends to build his first motel. He built his first motel in 1961. It was a motel with a warm atmosphere, friendly service and a personal touch that became very popular with the local businesspeople. Sharp, determined to please his guests, built larger hotels offering more business amenities such as convention centers, fitness centers and teleconferencing facilities however he noticed that these larger buildings caused the hotel to lose its personal touch that was so favoured about his smaller motels. Several hotels later, Sharp developed a hotel which offered all the business amenities while maintaining the friendly and intimate atmosphere which, at the time, was unheard of. Four Seasons is now one of the most prestigious and well known hotel chains in the world all because Sharp persevered with his vision.
The creative practices outlined here are practices found in design methods that can be used to develop new and innovative solutions for business. A shift in thinking like this is important, now more than ever, because the world is in a state of change. Technology, global economies and the urgent need to innovate to help solve today’s challenges are just some of the forces that are causing this shift in thinking in the business world. We need to begin to use these creative principles in everyday business so that we can make the changes necessary to meet today’s challenges and empower ourselves with the tools necessary to continue designing a better future.
Jesse is a graphic designer who is passionate about developing business
concepts through the use of design. A graduate of the Design Management program at George Brown College in Toronto, Jesse has learned to bring business concepts to reality in unconventional but effective ways. After he receives his MBA, he aspires to become a business design consultant, bringing design thinking and practices into the corporate world. His favourite negotiating technique is the triangle choke.
“Design is everything, and everything is design. By integrating form,
function and design thinking & practices into business as usual, you can
create better products, procedures, strategies, and services which result in
a happier end user.” – Jesse Thompson