Design Thinking for Better Innovation
Overview of Post: Helene Cahen gives a real world look at using Design Thinking in her consulting business, and breaks it down into three main areas of focus.
Thoughts on Post: I always like to see how people are able to apply the Design Thinking concepts and principles to their work. Helene gives a good breakdown of the process, but also show the continued “grayness” of defining the difference of Design Thinking and Human Centered Design and User Experience.
Original Post at Creative Problem Solving Institute website
Posted by: Helene Cahen
Design Thinking is best defined as applying the principles and mind-sets used by designers and architects, in other fields that require innovation. Non-designers can learn to use and apply the mind-sets and process to those challenges that require innovation. Design Thinking presents a creative problem solving approach that is somewhat similar to CPS, but focuses on areas that CPS does not fully articulate given its origin in the design world. In the past couple of years, I have integrated design thinking not only into my consulting business practice (I do training and facilitation around innovation) but also as a different way of thinking. Here are the three mind-sets that have made the deepest impact for me.
Being human-centered
My background is in Marketing Research. While consumer needs have always been important to me when working on new product related projects, the human-centered principle takes this idea much further and requires me to remember all those people that may be affected by the changes throughout the process, whether I am working on a product, a service, a training program or for a non-profit. The mind-set of being human-centered with a focus on empathy has impacted the way I work on projects. I now start with an observation and/or interview phase first. When facilitating creative projects, I suggest that the participants learn more about the product or service in an experiential way in addition to the traditional secondary research, talk to customers or users and observe people. For instance, if the project is about a consumer product, participants may watch people using a product; if the project is related to manufacturing, participants may visit a plant, observe how the products are made and talk to the employees; if the project is a non profit project, participants may talk to the customers or spend time observing at the place where the services are delivered. In my personal life, while writing my master project, which focused on design thinking, I interviewed designers and scholars, and then created a Google group with experts, scholars and people interested in the topic, where many conversations helped me articulate my project.
Visual Thinking
This is perhaps the most challenging concept for me since words are my most natural way of expressing myself. Despite extensive studies in business and creativity, I used very little in the way of incorporating visuals and visual thinking. Very few of my peers or mentors have been using visuals in their presentation. In addition, I had to overcome my personal belief that since I cannot draw any better than a five year-old, I should not use visuals to communicate with others, or even when I was thinking for myself. Arnheim, a Harvard professor in Psychology of Art explains that drawings serve as an “aid in the process of working solutions to a problem” (Visual Thinking p.129). In the past few years I have been challenging myself to use visuals and drawings in my presentations, to use mind mapping for taking notes or organizing my thoughts, and to encourage people to draw in my training or facilitation sessions. I found out that drawing is a powerful problem-solving tool and it has helped me find solutions that I had in my mind but was not able to put in words. For instance when I draw a model for integrating Design Thinking and CPS, it became obvious to me that Design Thinking is a more open model than the traditional circular CPS model, and that the combined model needed to look open to the outside influences.
Adopting a prototyping attitude
This again requires a mind-shift, as the prototyping attitude compels you to ask yourself: how to create a small version of the solution to try and evaluate it quickly and cheaply? Tom Kelley said “prototyping is problem solving…. What counts is moving the ball forward, achieving part of the goal” (Art of innovation, p. 103). A prototyping attitude means that when I am facilitating a group and we are developing solutions, we start making fast prototypes (by fast I mean done in 10 minutes) which help tremendously with narrowing down options, getting group buy-in and equally important, selling to management. In a creative session I facilitated recently, I had the group representing their different solutions using play-doh and it really helped the group to get specific about their feasibility discussion. A prototyping attitude also means trying solutions in the real world on a very small scale to get feedback, while saving time and money. When one of my clients was considering opening a new business in San Francisco, I encouraged him to try a small scale project first, using his current structure and an informal partnership agreement, rather than creating a partnership venture that would involve legal costs and capital investment.
For me Design Thinking is a perfect complement to CPS, as it brings more attention to an external focus based on the principles of being human-centered, adds visual thinking and prototyping as a complement to words, and helps with the action portion of CPS by offering an outcome that is easier to sell because it is tested prototype(s), rather than a solution on paper.
