How Design Thinking Can Lead Business beyond Success
- naditaamalia
- Jun 12, 2021
- 9 min read
My reflection on Change by Design book by Tim Brown.
The paradigm of design and innovation has shifted in many aspects, from the development process, until the marketing strategy when the new design is delivered to the market. During the past decades, design has focused on making products look pretty. Today, since human-centered approach is recognized as a sufficient method for creative problem solving and innovation for today’s society, designer’s task has also shifted from creating pretty looks to discovering new ideas.
What "Change by Design" book is all about?
It's all about design thinking and how it can be implemented in project at any scales. In the first part of the book, readers might find cases that are parallel to the issue that design students might face in design school. While the 2nd part of the book explains further about how we, as a design thinker, face the society and business today. This book gives a lot of mind-opening examples that clearly describe that business thinking is also fundamental in design thinking especially in helping design team to deal with constraints.
So, what is design thinking?
In “Change by Design” book, Tim Brown proposes the term of design thinking to explain best this new approach in problem solving, that is not only applicable in design project but also to be applied in different levels of organizations. Therefore, by using some real case precedents, this book explains more about what happens when design thinking has to deal with reality rather than explaining academic side of design thinking itself. The wide range of examples offered in the book preferably evokes reader’s mind to realize that design thinking plays a big role in every level of innovation.
In the first part of the book, Brown demonstrates what design thinking refers to essentially. It is clearly explained that design thinking is more than about determining style. It is a series of iterative activity consist of inspiration (the motivation), ideation (the generating process), and implementation (from project execution until the delivery to the market) which is started by a defined brief and embodied in interdisciplinary team, the project, and physical space of innovation where the project goes into reality to be examined profoundly.
The ideal team & elements to make a successful design thinking
Many of us probably are more familiar with the term multidisciplinary team, but there is a fundamental different between working with multidisciplinary team and interdisciplinary team. In the interdisciplinary team, each member needs to have the competence of a T-Shaped person who has deep knowledge and the ability to extend his skills and knowledge by associating different perspectives from different specialties and experience. I consider this as one of the most important aspect in conducting a design thinking within a team, because no matter how smart is a person (considering one’s specialization), if a person is not able to cross the axis of his depth skill, it will lead to a tough negotiation of divergent perspectives instead of a balance in meeting people’s desire in technologically possible and deliberately viable way.
Subsequently, the overall system of design process itself is not as easy as transforming people’s demand into design solution. The basic problem is spotted on the discovery of people’s demand, because people are not aware when they are adapting to an inconvenient situation. This is the task of designer to articulate the hidden need. At the end, successful design thinking will lead the result to the paradigm shifting in the society and will becloud the boundaries between creator and consumer. Brown suggests that there are 3 reinforcing elements of successful design thinking, such as insight, observation, and empathy. Although, I believe that all the process will not guarantee that we will meet the best idea since it is hard to judge which idea is the best after all. However, it is highly recommended in order to prepare the mind to discover insight.
Participation design
The third chapter of the book is the most thought-provoking part for me personally. It mostly explains about participation design. In the term of participation design, methodical background of a design thinker will narrow one’s perspectives, because one may have ‘utopian’ version of structured process, while in doing participation design there might be no process. Involving people into the process sometimes will be confusing, complicated, but taking these risks is actually the most fun part of the game and where the insight will mostly begin to arise. Brown illustrates the pattern of hope, insight, and confidence in design process in a well-ordered flux (pg. 65), which I think would occur differently in different cases, especially if we take it into detail. The ups and downs might even have no pattern. In this phase, as a design thinker, what will help is to structure the unstructured. What I mean by that statement is that participation design could be done in different levels and by applying different strategies depending on the condition of each use case.
Nevertheless, the messy part of participation design can result to tons of idea, and it will be a good beginning of design process. Being open to every possibility, capturing every opportunity, and taking every problem into account are things that should be done by a design thinker in order to gain a lot of ideas. Then it is necessary to combine our structural competence to think divergently (creating problem) and convergently (finding solution). That is what we generally call as the bottom up experimentation and top down process. Afterwards, in order to understand a complex problem on the research and experimentation in design thinking, a design thinker should be able to find out the pattern (analysis) and to extract the meaning from the pattern (synthesis). This process will give sense to the raw data that have been collected.
Building trust in the team
Aside from all the need to understand the structural thinking process, it is also important to build a positive energy of optimism among the team during the whole process. It can be built by having confidence among the team, by building trust on each other. Along with the confidence, brainstorming is a good alternative technique to explore ideas within a confident team. This process could be wild, fun, mind-blowing, and even gone too far somehow, but again, that’s how we have fun during the process. In addition, adding visuals in brainstorming can help to boost the process, because images express better what goes beyond words, or sometimes what words are not even able to express. However, conversely, Brown remarks “Brainstorming is a structured way of breaking out of structure” (pg. 78). In any case, this is one of the iterative part of design thinking, it goes always back and forth. At the end of this stage, we still have to bear in mind that the objective of brainstorming process is to make decision.
Start thinking with our hands
According to the results it will lead to, I could consider this process and the next one are the most critical point since the workload lays on the decision making. Even the team may loose the confidence of the project also at this stage. We have a lot of ideas after brainstrorming, and it will be difficult to make decision after, because all idea will seem reasonable and we have no media to compare them. That is why we need to visualize those ideas, and it is what Brown suggests as “to start thinking with our hand”. It is the stage of prototyping. This stage will be fairly quick and rough. But the benefit of prototyping is that we can see whether the idea may work or not work as planned, so it will push us to move forward and force us to make a decision between clearer options. Important thing to keep in mind before starting to prototype is to set a goal on what we want to learn and to achieve, so we know when to stop. Prototyping is not merely visualizing the physical things, but it goes even beyond the intangible part, which in the case of designing a product would be the scenario; the user journey.
Creating user journey
User journey has a great role in creating a connection between people’s emotion with a design object. To create a scenario of user journey is about shaping a sequence of certain behaviors and experiences. This is not as easy as it sounds. It is difficult to change peoples’ behaviors. The only way is to create a behavior that is familiar to them. For instance, in designing a playful product for adults, design thinker needs to articulate the experience that would recall the idea of playfulness they have experienced before. In this case, applying experience as a kid playing with his toy will be relatable, as all adults have experienced it during their childhood. It is not merely about colorful look, but the whole experience, the sense of touch, the sound, or even goes beyond the fantasy.
In addition to the emotional connection, user journey is also strongly related with 3 correlated issues. The first is the fact that we are living in the era of ‘experience economy’ in which people are no longer passive consumers of products or services. Furthermore, experience turns out to be the commodity, thus active participation of the consumer is fundamental to enhance the quality of commodity. The second issue is that the best experience would be achieved if it is delivered fluidly on the spot instead of being scripted. The last but not the least important is the precision in the execution of the experience itself in every ‘touchpoint’.
In creating user journey, a sequence of events in a certain order is created across the time. Brown states that designing a set of dynamic interactions is transformative (pg. 134). We have to understand our target and their action to the object. There is an interesting statement that Brown cited from Moggridge; “We are designing verbs”. From which I understand that the statement does not only carry the definition that a verb is an action, further than that, the verb will depend on who is doing the action, when it is happening, or even to whom it is intended. This analogy might only be related to certain languages. As an example, in my native language, Indonesian, the verbs do not depend on the subject and time changes. So, in this case designing a verb will be the same as designing a noun. However, at the end, designing with time means that we take into consideration that people are thinking, living and growing individual who can create their own scenario. People’s role in the scenario even goes further into the marketing stage. Instead of creating advertising, now we are living within a generation in which the consumers take part as well in spreading the story instead of only being a passive audience of advertising.
People’s demand is evolving
Nowadays, consumers expect a relationship with the brand that goes beyond the activities of purchasing. Brown tries to demonstrate this condition by stating that design thinking needs to be turned toward the formulation of a new participatory social contract. The difference between product and service is being unclear. Products, nowadays, always come along with something that goes further in the service field, while service goes beyond to the profound level of experience. In parallel to that, design thinking works to create a multipolar hub of experience where everyone can take part into the interactions and also to find a way to encourage people to move toward more sustainable behavior. At the end, with this level of people’s participation, we will be able to extend the behavioral experience for a longer period of time.
When we get too much familiar, we often don't notice
Sometimes, we have to go out from our familiar surroundings, to see what is happening in the most extreme situation, the unfamiliar part of the world we often neglect, to get inspired. Learning from the case of Aravind Eye Hospital, we can capture the value of empathy and social impact in design thinking. Innovation of products or services is more likely easier to first emerge where people have no options. That is why Brown suggests that sometimes necessity is the mother of innovation (pg. 206). I can relate my personal background to this statement, as I come from a developing country where everything is still limited, thence opportunities are everywhere.
However, not all critical social design issues are found in the poor or developing countries. Some years ago, I worked on several design studio projects, which took site in Rome, Italy that is not considered as a poor country. However, being an ‘outsider’, helps me to spot the problem easier than my local colleagues, since I figured out more unfamiliar things than my local colleagues did. Sometimes, we just often do not notice some important things around us, as they are familiar to us.
We also need to look closer, observe our surroundings deeper than before, to understand about the local behavior, capturing the local problem, and giving the best solution to it. What is created locally, somehow lead to a good community based social design service. In addition, to create a whole atmosphere of design thinking in a community, it is also to need to be built from the earlier stage, which is possibly done by nurturing the children and young generation with a creative atmosphere through educational system and professional life afterwards.
Think beyond profit for private benefit
At the end, design thinking will not only lead to a success of a design project or company at different levels, but most of all, to the contribution of improving the well being of the society. We can perceive life as a prototype from which we can change our perspective, discover something new, and above all, learn by doing experiments. By doing so, the contribution of design thinking will be more meaningful for the whole society instead of only to gain profit for private benefit.
What do you think on this topic? Feel free to share your thoughts and leave a comment bellow. If you enjoyed this post, I'd be very happy if you'd help it spread to a friend or sharing it to social media. Thank you!
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