Thoughts on this post: Pretty good example of how synthesis in particular can be used.

Original Post HERE

My business partner John and I have recently started working with the Beal Centre, a design institute in Toronto, to invent and extend the application of ‘aware’ personal portable electronic devices. The chemistry between us is intriguing, as we each bring very different skills to the table. The Beal mandate is “to enhance education with new methodologies in imaginative thinking, explore ways of improving the human condition, and contribute to the development of knowledge and economic well-being…using research exploration to push the limits of the imagination and arrive at breakthroughs in products, services, communications, systems or experiences.”

The associates at Beal are extremely creative, and our association with them is aimed at adding a level of business savvy, pragmatism and value awareness to channel their creativity into productive, realistic activities (they are mostly a generation younger than we are, which also helps deepen our collective knowledge). John is an excellent analytical thinker, very well read and very attuned to the business viability of big hairy ideas.

He is extremely knowledgable about innovation, the process of identifying great realizable ideas and bringing them to market. I’m the definitive lateral thinker, with an exceptional if sometimes impractical imagination, a learned ability to transfer ideas from one domain and see how they might apply in another, and an ability to provoke thought by manifesting dissatisfaction with the way things are now (’cause I believe creations are only valuable if they tap a deep unmet human need).

This begs the definition, I suspect, of the difference between creativity and imagination. The way I make the distinction is to say that creativity (the domain of artists) is an ability to model things concretely in the real world, while imagination (the domain of dreamers) is an ability to conceptualize something not limited to the real world.

Artists are creative but (IMO anyway) often not very imaginative.

They are perceivers rather than conceivers. But that doesn’t mean imagination is ‘better’ or more advanced intellectually than creativity. We all imagine, but I believe our modern world suffers from horrific imaginative poverty. Most people’s imaginations, from what I can see, are terribly derivative, incapable of coming up with anything more original than a sexual fantasy about a favourite movie star in a different setting.

It’s tempting to blame TV and video games for this, but I think this is more due to the fact that people no longer have the time, the intellectual and emotional bandwidth, needed to support a rich imagination. Like our appendix, imagination is no longer essential for survival.

Einstein said that imagination is more important than knowledge, and he wasn’t referring to mundane fantasizing, he was talking about the imagination it takes to invent an utterly new language, or to imagine how the knowledge that a butterfly wing’s colour is due to refraction rather than pigment (pigments would make the wings too heavy) could be applied to prevent counterfeiting in banknotes, or to make exotic new eco-friendly eyeshadow).

So perhaps you can see how the Beal staff, John and I together make for some extraordinary collaborations. An intriguing idea or discovery can come from any of us, or perhaps from Alex, Beal’s director, asking one of his famous (and very imaginative) “what if” questions.

John will focus it, possibly identifying some major commercial obstacle. I’ll pitch in with a suggestion of how the idea might be applied in some way or in some area no one had thought of. The Beal guys will amplify it, drawing on their own experience to make it more concrete. John will extend it, show how the market for it could be broadened by thinking of the idea as a platform, not just a one-off product.

I’ll invent a future-state story that pushes it a little further. The Beal team will illustrate it, bring it to life in a drawing that shows its context, and that will set off a flurry of other ideas of how it might be made better, more powerful, easier to use, smaller, more portable, or better connected to other technologies that would increase its value even more. Together we’ll synthesize. And so on.

Recently, Chris Corrigan pointed me to an article by German blogger Ralph Beuker summarizing recent writing on something called Design Thinking, which is kind of what we do with Beal. Combining the thinking of Dan Saffer, Victor Lombardi, and Hans Henrik this ‘rule set’ for Design Thinking (more useful than a definition, I think) emerges:

1. Focus: It is focused on people’s (customers’) deep personal needs, and addresses ‘wicked problems’, the intractable, complex-system challenges that require parallel iterations of both the ‘problem’ and the ‘solution’, until both become clearer at the same time (and sometimes once you find the ‘solution’ you realize your concept of the ‘problem’ was wrong).
2. Objective: It is aimed at discovering new alternatives, creating new options beyond those people usually think of, that effectively deal with the ‘wicked problem’ you’re focused on.
3. Prerequisites: It requires a (preferably self-selected and self-managing) team with diverse skills and knowledge (ideally including customers and representatives of IDEOs ten innovation personas), understanding of the context for the ‘problem’, great tolerance for ambiguity, and passion about finding a resolution.
4. Methodology:It uses knowledge and idea sharing, reciprocal learning, collaborative, interpretive brainstorming, inductive/abductive reasoning, improvisational,holistic, integrative thinking, and models (rapid, parallel prototyping and improvement by continuous experimentation).

You may notice I keep putting ‘problem’ and ‘solution’ in single quotation marks. That’s because in complex systems, you often don’t know what the real ‘problem’ is (such systems don’t lend themselves to deductive processes like root cause analysis). I tend to use the term challenge or need instead, but we’re all so used to the terms ‘problem’ and ‘solution’ that it’s hard to avoid using these well-understood words.

Likewise, what comes out of projects in complex systems is rarely a ‘solution’, but more often actionable findings (each person taking responsibility for deciding on appropriate actions in their personal context), opportunities or resolutions that effectively deal with rather than ‘solve’ the ‘problem’.

Now, you may be wondering What does any of this have to do with design? The dictionary runs the gamut on the meaning of this word, but perhaps the shortest definition — intentional creation — is the best. So the rule set above is a mechanism for the intellectual process of intentional creation. It is much more than just imagination, or invention, or creativity, or project planning, though all of these are a part of it.

I’m trying to imagine what would happen if we used the Open Space approach, embedded in the design thinking methodology. In the meantime I’m thinking of renaming my pet project AHA! Design Thinking.

By Ben Hammersley|03 November 2009

It’s the hot design company hired by Apple to create its first mouse, (and by Microsoft to create its second), by the Post Office to rework the postbox, by Muji to create its wall-mounted CD player and by Procter & Gamble to reinvent toothpaste tubes. It made the Nokia N-gage, the Palm V and the Head Airflow tennis racquet.

Now IDEO is being retained by Barack Obama’s White House to help to reinvigorate the American civil service; by the government of Iceland to help the country to innovate its way out of financial crisis; and by the Kellogg Foundation to reinvent education.

It might seem bizarre that a company used to designing products is now solving country-sized problems, but it all comes down to the technique it pioneered and preached to its clients. It calls this philosophy “design thinking”.

Design thinking defines the practical way in which IDEO approaches its problems, but as a phrase it also allows design to be talked about in a meaningful way by non-designers. After all, what is a designer? In the popular mind, it’s the person who lends his or her name to a range of sunglasses or shoes – beret-sporting chaps who add several noughts to price tags.

Or it’s the engineer surrounded by technical drawings, making machines. Either way, for most people – and most companies – the idea of the designer does not involve solving problems that don’t involve making a product. But proponents of design thinking say that they can extend this creative mindset to address all forms of problem-solving.

Designing products, yes, but also designing new businesses, new strategies, even new additions to society. Tim Brown, IDEO’s president, calls it “a way of describing a set of principles that can be applied by diverse people to a wide range of problems”.

Practically speaking, the approach isn’t complicated. In stages, it goes like this:

Firstly, immersion, whereby the designers research the problem by plunging themselves into it – talking to the people they’re trying to help, working with them, interviewing experts.

Secondly, synthesis – whereby they gather together their findings and look for patterns.

Third, ideation – brainstorming solutions to the real problems identified by stage two.

Then comes prototyping, making mock-ups of solutions to try out against the problem.

After that comes the product.

Only at the end, at the prototyping stage, are judgments made; until then, all ideas are given equal weight.

This methodology is radical in that it differs from traditional approaches to business strategy in two key ways. Whereas in many companies the concept for a new product may have already been based on, say, an idea from the marketing department with a designer later brought in to make it look pretty, design thinking places the designer at the heart of the innovation process.

Secondly, the methodology gives a firm framework within which a wider team can work. It takes the cliché of the lone creative mind being struck with genius, and replaces it with a process that a whole team can follow.

Creativity, therefore, isn’t a thing that magically appears, but a process you work through.

And work through it they have. IDEO was founded in 1991, through the merger of four companies: David Kelley Design, ID Two, Matrix, and Moggridge Associates. That year, it won 15 awards, 12 of them IDEA awards (perhaps the most prestigious international design competition). By 2009 it had won more IDEA awards than any other company.

Fast Company magazine named it tenth in its top 25 list of innovative companies; by some reports, IDEO has worked for the other 24. Fortune placed it 15th in its list of companies most popular with MBA students. BusinessWeek, too, named it one of the world’s most innovative companies.

It’s the open-minded approach to ideas and innovation that defines design thinking – a term made famous by founder David Kelley. The methodology has led to a distinctive feature of IDEO offices around the world: walls full of Post-It notes, intended to help teams share their suggestions.

In group brain-storming sessions, every idea, every observation is written or preferably sketched on to one of the sticky sheets and then displayed. During four months of Wired’s visits this summer to IDEO’s London office – an open-plan loft-like space in Clerkenwell – the areas set aside for each of its current projects ebbed and flowed in the form of the sticky notes.

Research was written, sorted and synthesised with them; brainstorming sessions, where every member of staff is invited to contribute their input to a project, produced walls full of the things; prototypes even more so.

But there’s no better way to understand how creative people work than to be part of the process. So Wired commissioned the London office to tackle a problem as if we were commercial clients (detailed at the end of this article). The brief, we decided, would be unlike any conventional design project. It would be to resolve one of the UK’s most pressing social problems: urban rage.

Bill Moggridge, the twinkly-eyed grey-bearded British co-founder of IDEO, a Royal Designer for Industry and the designer of the world’s first laptop, explains how IDEO, design thinking and his own ideas came about. “I think in the early days, in an industrial- design consultancy, people probably came to us because they thought we could do cool-looking stuff,” he says. “The difference was that I always insisted on trying to understand what people would think and what they would want.

The simplest way of doing that was to make sure that we saw the real world.

So, for example, one of the earliest projects John Stoddard, who still works with us in San Francisco, worked on was for a Danish marine radio. We sent him to Hull and got him to go on a fishing trip up to Iceland so he could see what it was really like.

If you don’t get out there and see what it’s like, then you couldn’t really design it right. That was my basic thinking. I remember doing something for bone surgery, when we were first starting to do artificial joints. So I put on the wellies and green gown and went into the operating theatre and watched what the surgeons did as they were carving people’s legs up. It was pretty nasty, but very informative.”

Increasingly, as products become more sophisticated, consultancies such as IDEO are focusing less on individual devices and thinking more about designing systems. The iPod, for example, is a design classic because it is part of a system that includes iTunes, its music store, its packaging, even the real-world Apple store, and the way in which the music you buy is charged to the credit card attached to your account. It’s a product, yes, and a system too, but also a service.

Another example is the work IDEO did for Bank of America. Asked to help attract new customers from a specific target market – middle-aged women with children – the firm, along with a team from the bank, conducted interviews with potential customers across the US. They observed that some of them rounded up their bill payments for speed and ease of mental arithmetic: if an electricity bill came in at $42.23, they found that many would pay, for example, $45, knowing the difference would go towards the next bill.

It meant household accounts were simplified, and also that the customer’s psychological relationship with the utility company was subtly changed. Other potential customers they met had difficulty saving. These insights led the IDEO team to develop not an advertising campaign nor a set of branding guidelines, but instead a whole new bank account: one in which any money spent on the accompanying debit card is rounded up to the nearest dollar, and the difference automatically placed into a separate savings account.

Since its launch in 2005, the Keep The Change account, based on observation and developed through design thinking, has brought Bank of America up to ten million new customers, and has resulted in $1.8 billion of savings.

Today’s new technologies, of course, do not necessarily add any complexity to designing a system or a service over designing a single device. The lines have become blurred. As more devices are made to connect to the internet, to communicate between themselves as well as with their users, and to interact with the ever-more complicated new systems that make up modern life, their design becomes hugely more complex. Bill Moggridge offers the example of traditional telephone design.

“In the old days, you’d go into the hall and you’d pick up this thing and stick it to your ear and wind the handle, and then you’d speak to another human being. There was a bit of design for the infrastructure, which was an engineering  thing connecting you, and there was a very simple piece of exchange that the operator did, and there was a very simple piece of product design – the instrument – but nothing challenging about it. The really interesting challenges were human-to- human.

The operator had to be trained to learn how to deal with rude people or to know the addresses of two Mrs Smiths. Human intelligence was simply relied on, and businesses would think of this as a training opportunity or problem, rather than as a design opportunity or problem.

“Contrast that with today,” he continues. “You take the telephone, and now you’ve got human-to-machine first, then machine-to-machine, and finally machine-to-human, so there are design challenges all the way because of the process – because you can’t rely on human intelligence to do the interpretation. The thing becomes a design opportunity and need.

“Then you add all this other stuff like SMS and email and internet access, and you have a whole other set of design challenges and opportunities. Which means there is this very sophisticated object which is pretty intimate – you put it up to your face like a wine glass – with all sorts of interactions going on with tiny screens, controls that are too small to be easy to use, and there’s this range of things you can do with it, all of which you have to try to align. It becomes a very difficult, complicated system with lots of layers and a hierarchy of complexity, but every one of those layers has to do with design, as opposed to training.”

Here, then, is a third new field of design: interaction design, which considers how humans interact with devices and systems – in a way more involved than simple ergonomics. Moggridge may be most famous for the GRiD Compass, widely seen as the first laptop. But his most lasting contribution may come from having pioneered this field of interaction design – again, the study of how we use technologies, not just how they look or how they’re built.

The two go together, though, as Moggridge recalls:

“I had my first prototype [laptop] in 1981. I took it home and I started thinking, ‘Now I have a chance to use this myself.’ I sat down to work, trying to understand what was happening in this little electroluminescent screen. And within about five minutes I’d forgotten everything about the physical form of the product, I was so focused on that interaction with the software – I found that I was sort of sucked through the screen into this virtual world. Occasionally I’d remember, ‘Oh yeah, I designed this physical thing,’ but beyond that, the important aspect – the interface -was something that I didn’t yet know how to do. And so I decided to learn how.”

That decision – to leave behind industrial design – was a fateful one; it led Moggridge to become a trustee of the Design Museum, a visiting professor in interaction design at London’s Royal College of Art, a lecturer in design at the London Business School, and a founder of the short-lived but hugely influential Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy.

Today at IDEO he helps 550 staff (roughly equally split between men and women) and ever-more unusual clientele to “create impact through design”, as the firm’s mission states.

Impact is key. Indeed, Moggridge sees the designer’s job as embracing not just the person, but the entire planet.”You can think of design as three concentric circles. You have the person in the centre, and then you have the environment they live in, and then you have the world as a whole. For the person, we can also think of health and welfare – so you’re designing actual improvements in the way people exist in their relationship to the world in a holistic sense.

“The larger version of that is just a holistic look at the planet… and that becomes political. It’s no good just thinking about CO2 emissions in one country, it really has to be a global thing in order to have an effect. So the design of political systems that enable greater sustainability and that really will have an active effect is a much better problem outcome than looking at nice materials to make packaging or something.

“I think that the smaller circles are still always there, but you’ve got this bigger one surrounding them as well.”

Somewhere there’s a new pack of Post-it notes ready to tackle it.

When WIRED first approached IDEO, we were seeking a few bold ideas for a wider feature (in next month’s issue) on how to upgrade government in Britain. We thought the design firm responsible for the Apple mouse, the Palm V and countless other products and services would creatively address such a wide brief without too much prompting. Perhaps they would give us ideas for education or health – they work in both fields in real life, after all, designing insulin pens for Eli Lilly, for example, and primary-school syllabuses for the Kellogg Foundation. Yet as we got to understand how the firm works, and became inspired by its approach to innovation, we had our own breakthrough idea. Why didn’t IDEO create something unique for Wired readers – something new and useful?

Not a problem, said IDEO, we actually already have an idea of the problem we want to solve. Urban rage, they said. We would like to try to solve the problem of rage. The multidisciplinary team, which comprised Lydia Howland, Mike Albers and Ben Forman followed the classic IDEO pattern of immersion, synthesis, ideation and, finally, prototyping.

Their research took them in many directions: they met an anger-management therapist and a white-collar boxing coach; they undertook sessions of brainstorming with their colleagues; and Mike Albers took a four-day course that would qualify him to work as a nightclub bouncer. This preliminary work done, the team found that one of the major causes of urban rage was queuing. The traditional British skill of standing in line is a matter of pride to many urbanites, but the stresses caused by fellow citizens holding up the queue, jumping the queue, or simply being annoying nearby, were said to be enough to drive many of our sample interviewees crazy.

But the team couldn’t re-engineer all of the shops and services in the UK in order to reduce all of their queues; nor could they resolve the problem of all shops and banks and post offices employing too few staff.

But by changing the psychology of how we feel when we’re queuing, the team thought, we can reduce the amount of stress that we have learnt to feel, and so reduce our rage when we’re waiting. By queuing, they proposed, we should be able to do some form of good. Then the longer we queue, the better we can be made to feel about it.

They developed a teaser campaign to promote the strategy, with posters positioned wherever people are likely to be queuing or waiting: the bus stop, the post office, traffic black spots. It reads: “Queue Britain – the longer you queue, the better Britain gets!”

Visitors to a website address given on the poster and advertised in the media are invited to register for a Queue Britain card, which is then sent to them by post. Like a Tesco Clubcard, this is individual to the queue frequenter and allows them to earn Queue Minutes. And indeed it doesn’t have to be a card – it could be anything that can hold a barcode. In addition to the card proposal, IDEO also produced a prototype key ring.

These Queue Minutes, the team posits, could be earned from any of the partners in a Queue Britain alliance. The member company, such as the Post Office, will then pledge to award Queue Minutes to all participating people who have had to queue in their stores. Reach the front of a queue, and the shop assistant will add some Minutes to your account.

This might vary – you might perhaps get Minutes from the moment you enter the line, or only after a certain annoyance threshold has been reached; but either way, the longer you endure this inconvenience, the more Minutes you accrue. This is a good thing.

Minutes can also be earned in virtual queues, too; members of the Queue Britain alliance can advise their call-centre staff when it’s appropriate to award Queue Minutes to those who have been kept on hold for a long time, or whenever the website has been down.

But whichever way you earn the points, the clever aspect of the proposal happens here: once a cardholder has accrued more than a set number of Queue Minutes – and they can check their balance via the website – they can donate those Minutes to the charity of their choice.

So if you find that you’ve spent 15 hours in line in Tesco over the past few months – not an unlikely number – and if Tesco is a participating member of the Queue Britain alliance, then you can donate those Minutes to charity, and Tesco will fulfil those 15 hours either by making its staff available for community work, or by creating paid opportunities for public volunteers to help out. And now a few hours of your time spent standing in a queue is worth, say, a few hours of Tesco staff helping out at a soup kitchen.

The time you spend queuing, therefore, isn’t wasted time any longer. The more you queue, the more opportunities you have to donate other people’s time to your favourite cause.

Keeping this in mind as you stand annoyed in the post office, the team believes, will go a long way towards reducing ambient levels of rage in the city.

Furthermore, this system makes the really annoying transgressions – queue-jumping – into something even more socially unacceptable. Jumping the queue, of course, means you are not earning Queue Minutes, and you are therefore actively choosing not to do good. Being a little rude is one matter, but actively choosing not to do good is quite another.

The side effects on the companies involved in such an alliance are also interesting. The corporate-social responsibility movement is ever-more powerful – and the larger companies with queue-forming habits are exactly the same companies that would most benefit from being seen to be doing something positive and beneficial within the so-called “third sector”.

Of course, a company might decide to pay out Queue Minutes as a cheaper option than reducing its queues through employing more staff. But would anyone seriously mind if Tesco were to do nothing about the length of time that you had to wait in its lines, if you knew that the missing till operator was instead out doing something charitable?

This final product design from IDEO is not a device, nor a business, nor even a service. It’s not really even a product as such. As an amalgam of an advertising campaign, a technological system, and a concept based around the psychologies of the individual, society at large and big companies, Queue Britain is an idea that exemplifies the “design thinking” that IDEO is helping to introduce into the mainstream.

Designers are looking at solving the problems on an ever wider scale – from personal products, right up to focusing on changing wider society, and then the world.

Overview of this Post:

Thoughts on this Post: It is interesting to see the process play out with those who are just learning the concepts.  This update also crosses into social uses of Design Thinking.

Original Post and Comments HERE at the d.school projects site

Redesigning Retirement

Our Bootcamp students wrapped up their second design projects this week, and the results were spectacular.

Twelve teams spent three weeks using the design process to re-invent “the Golden Years” for rebellious Baby Boomers. Students were asked to give particular focus to the empathy phase of the process, and develop a strong user Point of View (POV).

How do you do that? Partly by getting out into the world, spending time with people to understand their needs, then narrowing down to develop your solution when you’ve found a really rich need. Here’s an example of how that’s done:

This team–Micol Seferin, Lee Redden, Ashutosh Bagaria and Jacob Klein–had been out talking to users all over town. But when they realized they’d only talked to men, Ashutosh set up another interview, with a Stanford librarian who’d he’d met in his first week on campus. Her rediscovered passion for sewing and need to share it was so compelling, that they did what any great design thinking team would do: they narrowed down to focus on designing for her. That meant moving fluidly past the other users they’d talked with rather than getting stuck trying to design a one-sized-fits-all solution for everyone they’d talked with.

Another fundamental aspect of the design process is iteration: the ability to keep re-inventing your solution based on feedback you’re getting from users. That can be tough when the feedback is: “This sucks,” and you need to start over again. But that’s exactly what the Time Capsule for Superheroes team did when their first idea fell flat with users. Team members Juan Valverde, Karen Cheng, Matthieu Rouif and Tanya Flores tossed out their first idea and came up with something new. You can some of their iteration process through the story they told:

A huge congrats goes out to all of the Bootcamp teams for their great work on the Boomer challenge!

Caroline O’Connor on October 27, 2009 in

[d.school Tags: Agile Aging, Boot Camp, Design Process, Empathy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ShareThis]

Question of the day

Our bootcamp students are deep in prototype-test-iterate cycles for their second design project, and they’re asking a question that’s fairly universal for design-process learners:

Do I have to test my prototype with the same users I designed it for?

The short answer is: Heck no!

It’s always best to get as far out of your own experience as possible when you’re looking for users, because outside your comfort zone is where you’ll find the deepest insights. But when it’s crunch time and you’re zooming through prototypes, don’t be constrained because you don’t feel like you have time to go back to users. Sure, your roommate, classmate, or those veteran user-testers otherwise known as d.school staffers can always test a prototype in a pinch, even if they’re not the Baby Boomer you’re designing for. But before you go that route, spend one minute brainstorming a quick way to get to your user group, or a good analogy for your user group. (The analogous testers can sometimes produce the most serendipitous results.) Even if time is so short you think you can only get one user, go get them! A tiny time investment in user-testing can pay massive innovation dividends.

(Pictured user tester: maureenhanratty)

Caroline O’Connor on October 23, 2009

Overview of Article:

Thoughts on this Article: I like the questions that are raised and David Butler’s honesty in his answers.  This is a great “rest of the story” to go with the original interviews.

Original Post and Comments HERE at Adaptive Path

by Henning Fischer

Photograph by Jake Chessum

Brandon Schauer and I (Henning Fischer) recently sat down with David Butler, VP of Design for the Coca-Cola Company and MX 2009 speaker. Here’s part 1 of “Designing on Purpose.”

[Henning Fischer] Could you tell us a little about yourself, your team, what you do for Coca-Cola and where you sit within the organization?

[David Butler] We have a global design function and that entails four design centers around the world: one in North America, one in Europe, one in Asia and then on in our corporate headquarters. I personally sit in our corporate headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia.

It might be interesting to understand a little more about the company. We have over 450 brands in our portfolio, operate in over 200 countries, the largest in the world, 900 plants (7x Procter and Gamble), 500,000 trucks (5x UPS), 20 million customer outlets (McDonalds, etc.), 10 million coolers and vending machines, 1.5 billion packages sold every day and almost 1 million employees world-wide.

Another thing that’s sort of interesting is the relative state of our global brands. For instance, the Coca-Cola brand has been in China for less than 25 years, which creates a different scenario when we’re designing for a lesser known brand in that market versus a market like the US or UK, which is a very established market. The challenges that we face as a design organization really vary depending on the area that we are taking about.

[HF] There was a big Business Week article on you a while back. You were given a mandate early on that you needed to “do more with design, go figure it out.” Where did that mandate come from?

[DB] At the time, the directive came from the Chief Creative Officer as well as the CEO, indirectly. We have a long legacy of design as a company but it had lost its focus without a clear vision, strategy and plan. I was fortunate enough to be tapped to figure out what to do with design.

[HF] That’s a hell of a question to get in a career.

[DB] Yeah. The Business Week reporter asked me the question and I said it sort of jokingly, but it’s true: the objectives I got were literally on a Post-It note, and they basically said “I know that you can figure out what we need as a company, so go figure it out.” Not a lot more direction than that. It was literally, “walk out there and figure it out.” So that’s what we’re doing.

[HF] The article talked a little bit about a manifesto for design that you laid out. Can you tell us a little bit about that and the vision that you sketched out and perhaps a bit on how it’s changed? It was four CEOs ago. Has it evolved and changed since then?

[DB] The manifesto was more of a reaction, which led to a strategy. The reaction was very Jerry Maguire like. Once I had been here for a few months, I wrote this manifesto. It was simply called “Designing on Purpose.” What I meant by that was that we as a company design literally millions of things all around the world, but a lot of it was without purpose and really not driven by user needs and opportunities that would build our business. That was a really new concept for the company—to think about design as a business strategy. I sent it out, and honestly, I wasn’t trying to do anything, but it stuck a chord, and everyone resonated to “designing on purpose,” even if they didn’t know what it meant. At least they got the phrase, and we built on that. That led to the strategy, which was written shortly after that. We have been implementing it since then.
The strategy circles around three areas: brand identity, user experience and sustainability. We have hired people and have expanded our teams, capabilities, and our process in those three areas to push design forward.

[HF] What does user experience mean for Coca-Cola? We have our own interpretation of it here on the West Coast and in the digital community, but I imagine it’s something quite different for you guys.

[DB] For us it has to do with the usability of packaging and equipment and as well as communications through clear information hierarchy, etc. We’ve brought new focus to ergonomics and the use of our packaging, which is how people touch and experience our brands and products.

[Brandon Schauer] In those activities, how do you give the rest of the Coke organization a feeling for the value of what your design group does and brings?

[DB] Around here, and I’d venture to say around the world, the word design has virtually lost its meaning. Strangely enough, I never use the word design or usability or phrases that we are used to as designers. I really try to communicate in terms of the people we are talking to inside the organization. A simple way of talking about the way the thing work versus the way things look. I use basic ways of communicating usability and try to shy away from anything that would cause dissonance or confusion.

[HF] Has design become any less of a dirty word?

[DB] Design was never a dirty word, just meaningless in the sense that it’s difficult to understand in the worlds of marketing, finance and science. As soon as we start talking about value, things that have or build value for brands, people get it. You don’t have to use the word design to talk about making something more legible or making something more usable. Up until then no one had associated these types of phrases or expressions to the word design. We don’t use the word very much around here, but we talk about the value and what it can do.

Our intention is to build a design thinking organization. To distill that type of knowledge into people, we shy away from anything that would cause confusion or impede that progress.

[HF] Design thinking—there’s a loaded phrase. Could you elaborate how Coke views it and where you are trying to push it?

[DB] The thing that I found out quickly was that this company and many other global companies have the opportunity to leverage massive scale. Not only do they have billion dollar brands, but also the scale they operate in is crazy. When you’re talking about the impact of design, you quickly see that it’s not just about designing the perfect label for something like Fanta, it’s really about helping this organization see differently, think differently and leverage design as an integration or synthesis capability along with making sure the label is right. That’s what we do: we focus on the highest value opportunities to build value for our company and our brands through redesigning vending machines, packaging labels or whatever. But we also use our time to build the capability of design in the company. The more popular phrase used today is “design thinking,” even though Richard Buchanan and others have been writing about that for 10 to 15 years. It’s interesting to see how that idea is moving into the popular culture of design.

[BS] Can you give us an example of helping Coke see the world in a different way for perhaps synthesis or integration?

[DB] Sure. Again, it comes back to the word design. If you come into a situation thinking that design equals aesthetic values or balancing aesthetic elements then it’s difficult to get past a sort of “applied art” scenario. A lot of times inside this company and I’m sure a lot of others, we talk about design in terms of innovation. To get to an innovation or to solve a problem that would speak to innovation requires a cross functional synthesis of things. In other words, our supply chain, brands, communications, markets, etc. all have to come together to get to an innovation. That’s just another way of designing toward a solution. We’re taking these elements and synthesizing them. We can leverage what we do best looking at multiple concepts, quickly prototyping them and reducing them down to the most useful solutions.

[HF] I love the fact that you’re taking about synthesis and bringing together disparate parts of the organization. How much time do you find yourself playing the role of a facilitator as opposed to the maker of things?

[DB] It goes back to the scale of the organization. Depending on the market, or the brand or the group that you’re working with it can really vary. I’m not trying to avoid the question. In some instances, all we really need is to improve the communication value of something so it’s much more tactical and it becomes more about information hierarchy or something like that. That’s more design as a function. Other times, it’s more about design as a discipline—more about “wicked problem” solving. It’s the problems that we can’t figure out, that we have no clue as to how to design a product or it hasn’t been done before. That’s when we tend to get brought in as facilitators and integrators across different functions.

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For those of us who teach and practice Design Thinking, there is still a huge debate over the “true” definition and whether the process that is used should even be called “Design Thinking”. Our internal debate can be challenging at times.

What we do agree upon is that the single most significant contribution of Design Thinking is that it offers  a holistic  approach to solving problems/creating products.  “Holistic” in that it is not self limiting – it does not focus one “type of knowledge” or “school of thought” to find possible solutions.

Design Thinkers in the field of mobile devices are just as likely to go to the zoo for insights and inspiration as they are to look at other Industrial Design concepts.  The arrogance so often associated with “pure” schools of thought is absent for true DTrs. (This is actually where Design Thinking departs from traditional Design).

It is also holistic in the emphasis on tapping the ENTIRE brains’ ability to bring insight and create solutions.

While this is not a new concept (LB/RB approaches have been around for at least 25 years) Design Thinking has given a reliable development and delivery approach for the concept.  In most of the LB/RB models, each group is given the opportunity to have input into the project, and someone takes the input and decides which group really has the better approach.  This does not bring the SYNTHESIS that Design Thinking values, but rather a push towards discernment of one view over the other.

Creatives FEEL they have the best approach, Analytics KNOW they have the best approach…and the two groups will argue and dismiss one another almost every time. Design Thinking provides a way for both RB (creatives) and LB (analytics) to VALUE each other and BUILD on each others’ insight.

Another holistic factor is that the person(s) that will be most impacted by the solution (UX, user, customer, patient) is allowed to be part of the project from the very beginning.  Their perspective is unique and important.  They give insights into the underlying problems that may have been overlooked, and provide valuable  feedback along the way. They can also speak to the likelihood of proposed solutions actually being adopted and advise on how best to present the final product/service to those who are expected to use it.

While having end users as part of the process is not new (focus groups have been around for a long time) what is new is the level of importance that is placed on the insights they bring to the process.

Every now and then I will have someone bring up the infamous quote attributed to Steve Jobs “We don’t build for focus groups – we build what we like”.  Clearly, Apple has done a fantastic job figuring out what to build that works well, looks great, and people will use.

So does that kill the entire argument for users being a part of the process?  No.  It validates the concept.

In reality, what Apple does is function in all three areas (LB/RB/UX). They hire great engineers and designers and let them build stuff they would like to use. But in most situations, the company/organization working on a new product or solution does not have that privilege.  They are somewhat removed from those that are end users of the product/service.

Another interesting variation of Apple’s approach is the group Mother Teresa led, the Missionaries of Charity.  They live and work with those they are serving.  They use all their God given abilities to understand the problems of those they serve and bring them effective solutions.  And they have also been very successful.

If there is one area that Design Thinking has not effectively addressed is it the implementation challenge.  In some situations, the biggest challenge is not really determining the best product/solution, but getting that product /solution implemented.  Design Thinking teams should put as much effort into making sure that it happens as they do into making sure it is created.

Overall, Design Thinking really does have tremendous advantages over most traditional approaches.

It is a framework that is holistic,

a method that is teachable,

and a process that is proven.

Why wouldn’t you want to use it?

Thoughts on Post: Robert touches on one of the biggest challenges that Design Thinking faces when applied to the social/human application:  How do you create an effective rapid prototyping experience?  I look forward to reading his thoughts on this.

Original Post HERE at FastCompay

Live From PopTech: Bringing Design to Social Innovators

BY Robert FabricantWed Oct 21, 2009 at 11:58 AM

Every year (at least for the last two) I have had the honor of serving as part of the core faculty of the PopTech Fellows Program. This means I’m involved in the planning stages for this five-day retreat. No matter how much time I spend preparing for the program, I’m always astounded when I finally meet the fellows. It’s difficult to comprehend the variety of innovations that this incredible group is driving, from virtual mobile phones and paper diagnostics to batteries made of common soil and building materials made of mushrooms. What’s even more astounding is the fact that the people driving these ideas are both incredibly special and shockingly ordinary.

My role is to introduce them to the design process–to provide some tools to help them think through and challenge the assumptions they’re making about their interventions. As always, I’m struck by how open-minded and creative these social innovators are (otherwise they would not have achieved anything close to the outcomes they’ve already seen). Creativity is not something they chose as an identity or practice–it’s a means, not an end. They many not spend a great deal of time talking about design, but research, prototyping, and abductive reasoning are at the heart of their work.

One of their most refreshing qualities is their orientation towards technology. This struck me while listening to Deb Levine, a longtime innovator in the area of technology and sexual health. She has an unparalleled track record–in the past 15+ years–of using digital technologies to increase access to information. Yet to hear her talk you wouldn’t think technology is anything special–though she was one of the first people to offer sexual health info on the Web and mobile devices in the U.S. In her intro talk, she described a teen-focused project she initiated in 2006. The default assumption is that the info would be delivered via the Web. But Deb started hanging out in front of schools and watching all of the kids “doing that thing with their thumbs.” Her simple observation led to a very early health intervention using SMS.

So what am I doing here? I don’t know much about the power grid in Namibia or low-cost diagnostics in Saudi Arabia. It’s interesting to be in a position of expertise with a group that has gone down roads and achieved things I don’t think I could achieve myself. My focus, as always, will be on behavior. I continue to see social impact largely through that lens. So we will be doing a deep dive into how you create the right conditions to drive changes in behavior. I will work with the group to help them answer the following questions:

• How do you link a set of behaviors together to achieve the desired impact of your intervention?
• How do you design prototypes and other interventions to test your assumptions around behavior and the underlying motivations that will support behavior change?
• How do you look at the barriers to behavior change and use them to your advantage?

This last point is key. Most designers (and social innovators) look at prototyping as a way to test their ideas, to see what works from a functional perspective and what appeals from an attitudinal perspective. But the most useful dimension of prototyping, I find, is to think about it as a tool for understanding behavior. Think about each prototype not as an intervention, but as a set of conditions to better understand the behavior you are trying to drive. It’s an important distinction because it shifts your orientation from what you are prototyping to the impact you are trying to create.

I will be blogging from PopTech throughout the week. Next up, a deep dive into how you design for impact. Please stay tuned.

[Photos by Erik Hersman]

Related Stories: Inside PopTech’s Solar-Powered Bag

Read Robert Fabricant’s Design4Impact blog
Browse blogs by our other Expert Designers

Robert Fabricant is a leader of frog’s health-care expert group, a cross-disciplinary global team that works collectively to share best practices and build frog’s health-care capabilities. An expert in design for social innovation, Robert recently led Project Masiluleke, an initiative that harnesses the power of mobile technology to combat the world’s worst HIV and AIDS epidemic in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa.

Robert is an adjunct professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts where he teaches a foundation course in Interaction Design. In 2009, he joined the faculty of the School of Visual Arts in New York and is a faculty member of the Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellowship Program. A regular speaker at conferences and events, Robert recently gave a keynote speech at the 2009 IxDA Interaction Conference. He is a frequent contributor to a wide variety of publications, including I.D. Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.

Overview of Post:

Thoughts on this Post: This a a good guide for practitioners who are learning how to put the concepts into action.

Original Post HERE at Usability.net

Summary

Parallel design is a method where alternative designs, often interface designs, are created by two to four design groups at the same time. The aim is to assess the different ideas before settling on a single concept for continued development. The design groups work independently of each other, since the goal is to generate as much diversity as possible. Design groups should not discuss their designs with each other until after they have produced their draft design concepts and presented them in a design workshop. The final design may be one of the designs or a combination of designs, taking the best features from each.

Although parallel design might at first seem like an expensive approach, since many ideas are generated without implementing them, it is a very cheap way of exploring a range of possible concepts before selecting the probable optimum.

Benefits

• Allows a range of ideas to be generated quickly and cost effectively.
• Parallel nature of the approach allows several approaches to be explored at the same time, thus compressing the concept development schedule.
• The concepts generated can often be combined so that the final solution benefits from all ideas proposed.
• Only minimal resources and materials are required to convey product feel.
• The technique can be utilised by those with little or no human factors expertise.

However, parallel design requires a number of design team members to be available at the same time to produce the concepts and it requires a lot of time to be invested over a short period for the design work to be carried out. Also, time must be allocated to compare parallel design outputs properly so that the benefits of each approach are obtained.

Method

The method requires design team members to be available concurrently in order to carry out design work in parallel. A requirements document is needed to make sure that the design groups are given the same information so that design work starts from the same starting point.

The following procedure may be adopted for implementing this method:

• Define clearly the boundaries for the parallel design, i.e. goal of system, tasks that it should support, user characteristics, etc. Each design team should receive the same set of requirements before starting the design activity..

• Each design teams may use whatever media they prefer to present their designs. It is recommended to use a low level of prototyping. No extra points should be given for ‘sophisticated’ prototypes.

• Design teams should have roughly equivalent skills.

• Decide beforehand how much time to allocate to the design work and set a clear time limit. 10 – 20 hours per group is often sufficient.

• Agree on the criteria by which the designs will be assessed.

• Allow sufficient time to carry out a fair comparison of the designs produced. This is often carried out in a design workshop, where all groups and their member participate.

• Discuss each design separately and then discuss how different aspects of the designs may be combined.

• The objective is to settle on one design concept based on the total effort.

Thoughts on this Post: This graphic and yesterdays video are from the same source (d.School) and are both really good resources.

Original Post and other content HERE

UNDERSTAND

Understanding is the first phase of the design thinking process. During this phase, students immerse themselves in learning. They talk to experts and conduct research. The goal is to develop background knowledge through these experiences. They use their developing understandings as a springboard as they begin to address design challenges.

OBSERVE

Students become keen people watchers in the observation phase of the design thinking process. They watch how people behave and interact and they observe physical spaces and places. They talk to people about what they are doing, ask questions and reflect on what they see. The understanding and observation phases of design thinking help students develop a sense of empathy.

DEFINE

In this phase of design thinking, students the focus is on becoming aware of peoples’ needs and developing insights. The phrase “How might we….” is often used to define a point of view, which is a statement of the:

user + need + insight

This statement ends with a suggestion about how to make changes that will have an impact on peoples’ experiences.

IDEATE

PROTOTYPE

Prototyping is a rough and rapid portion of the design process. A prototype can be a sketch, model, or a cardboard box. It is a way to convey an idea quickly. Students learn that it is better to fail early and often as they create prototypes.

TEST

Testing is part of an iterative process that provides students with feedback. The purpose of testing is to learn what works and what doesn’t, and then iterate. This means going back to your prototype and modifying it based on feedback. Testing ensures that students learn what works and what doesn’t work for their users