Tim Brown on design thinking (HBR)

For those who haven’t read Tim Brown’s recent article published on Harvard Business Review, here is the link to download it.

Everyone talks about how to become more innovative, etc, but not many people know how to DO IT. Tim Brown outlines a few key points to help people ‘think design’:

• be empathic: try to step on other people’s shoes (your customers, your colleagues, your superiors) to understand the world from their perspective
• Integrative thinking: desing thinkers can draw insights from many sources and come up with new ideas
• prototype: it’s really important to try and test different ideas and approaches early in the process. Mistakes are allowed. The earlier you make a mistake, the easier is to make changes and move forward. This iterative process is key to generate new and innovative ideas
• collaboration: teamworking and diversity is always welcome, and very fruitful

via IDEO

Designing services podcast

Carnegie Mellon School of Design has been doing a great job in pushing the boundaries of service design. Over the last two years, the school hosted the Emergence Conference, which brought together top professionals in the service design arena.

Business Week interviews Dan Boyarksi, head of Carnegie Mellon School of Design, who talks about why service design is becoming an emergent practice and the role designers have in helping companies to innovate.

you can download the podcast here

Bill Moggridge’s keynote presentation

Bill Moggridge delivered a really cool talk during the Service Design Symposium, hosted by the CIID. It’s really interesting the way he explains how design has evolved over time. Just after graduation, back in the 60’s, he thought he would spend his whole life designing kettles and washing machines.

But as technology evolved, and life became more complex, he realised that designers needed to design the systems that actually surround a product. For example, how to make a train journey more delightful? Designers need to not only worry about making a comfy seat, they actually need to think about the whole customer journey, and how systems, processes, people impact a customer’s experience. Welcome to the amazing world of service design!

via CIID

from ciid.dk posted with vodpod

IDEO eyes open

The folks at IDEO launched a the IDEO eyes open, a website to enable ’social network’ of stories about great experiences:

Ideoeyesopen.com is about casting a wide net to find inspirational experiences in the unlikeliest of places—the things we do and see everyday.

Michele Dougherty published a really interesting post about the airport experience. Working for a company that specialises in producing film titles, she drew an interesting parallel between the airport experience and the process of creating a film title sequence:

“When Fred asked me to think about a place or experience that embodied some of the key elements involved in creating film titles, a few places sprung to mind. But none seemed quite as compelling as the airport.

The three main things I focus on when I start a project are: choreography, typography, and telling a good story (which is largely dependent on the previous two things in my line of work). Upon thinking about this assignment, I realized that the airport is chock full of all three. Not to mention, it’s an intriguing place to observe how they all come together in a highly staged narrative experience with literal steps that must be taken—which is remarkably relevant to the kind of timing and delivery moments that are so critical to the kind of work we do.”

I particularly liked the idea of choreography and typography when creating, or innovating customers’ experiences. At the end of the day, it’s all about staging a story.

Tim Brown on design thinking

“It’s remarkable how often business strategy, the purpose of which is to direct action toward a desired outcome, leads to just the opposite: stasis and confusion. Strategy should bring clarity to an organization; it should be a signpost for showing people where you, as their leader, are taking them — and what they need to do to get there. But the tools executives traditionally use to communicate strategy — spreadsheets and PowerPoint decks — are woefully inadequate for the task. You have to be a supremely engaging storyteller if you rely only on words, and there aren’t enough of those people out there. What’s more, words are highly open to interpretation — words mean different things to different people, especially when they’re sitting in different parts of the organization. The result: In an effort to be relevant to a large, complicated company, strategy often gets mired in abstractions.” Tim Brown

You can download the presentation here

Prototype thinking

I was watching a TV documentary yesterday about Frank Gehry, and what really struck me is his approach to prototyping as a creative process. Frank and his team use lots and lots of really low-fi, quick and dirt prototypes to translate their ideas into tangible shapes and formats. So far, nothing new.

The interesting fact is that Frank and his team always work with different types of prototypes simultaneously (models in different scales or different media) to remind them that those models are only representations of their ideas. In some way, this helps them keep their minds focused on the real building, avoiding going off on a tangent and designing something suitable for a model maker, but not for humans.

Service design also relies on a number of prototyping techniques: storyboarding, role-playing and acting, amongst others. But I guess that the message here is: the use of several types of prototypes simultaneously might help you get the bigger picture. A single prototype has limitations, and the use of different media and techniques might help you cast a more holistic view of the solution you might be looking for.