Overview of the Post: Tim Brown is interviewed by WNYC on his book and the concept of Design Thinking.
Thoughts on this Post: Pretty interesting interview. This helps those who are new to the concept to get a pretty good understanding of how Design Thinking works and can be used in non-design settings.
Overview of this Video: Tim Brown (IDEO) gives a talk on what Design Thinking is and why it is important in this TED talk from 2009.
Thoughts on this Video: If you prefer to listen over reading, then this is a great way to get a shortened version of most of Tim’s written interviews on Design Thinking and the core of the Changed by Design book. It is good stuff. I especially like the section on the rise of the participatory systems.
Overview of Video: David Kelley talks with BusinessWeek about what Design Thinking really is and how they teach it at the d.school.
Thoughts about this video: The best point in the video is that Design Thinking is a method that really isn’t just thinking like a designer. It can be applied to any area (even a dinner party!)
Overview of Article: Tim Brown gives the background story on how he ended up in Design and then became one of the leading voices in the field of Design Thinking.
Thoughts on this Article: This connects Tim’s new book Change by Design and the overall story of what Design Thinking is, how it came to be important and what it can offer.
The Making of a Design Thinker
It took years before this industrial designer realized that the true power of his craft transcended the physical object.
I was trained as an industrial designer, but it took me a long time before I realized the difference between being a designer and thinking like one. Seven years of undergraduate and graduate education and 15 years of professional practice went by before I had any inkling that what I was doing was more than simply a link in a chain that connected a client’s engineering department to the folks upstairs in marketing.
The first products I designed as a professional were for Wadkin Bursgreen, a venerable English machinery manufacturer. The company invited a young and untested designer into its midst to help improve its professional woodworking machines. I spent a summer creating drawings and models of better-looking circular saws and easier-to-use spindle molders.
I think I did a reasonably good job—it’s still possible to find my work in factories 30 years later—but you’ll no longer find the Wadkin Bursgreen Company, which has long since gone out of business. As a designer, I didn’t see that it was the future of the woodworking industry that was in question, not the design of its machines. Read the rest of this entry »
Overview of Article: This is a summery/review of Tim Brown’s new book “Change By Design” from the NY Times.LONDON — The bet was for $50,000. It was offered by George Washington Hill, president of the American Tobacco Company, to the designer Raymond Loewy, in 1940. The challenge was to spruce up the packaging of Lucky Strike cigarettes. Loewy accepted the wager, and Hill asked when he expected to finish. “Oh, I don’t know,” drawled the designer. “Some nice spring morning I will feel like designing the Lucky package… I’ll call you then.”
Loewy won the bet, and claimed the credit for the subsequent increase in Lucky Strike’s sales. That was nearly 70 years ago, and design has changed dramatically since then, as the designer Tim Brown relates in his new book, “Change by Design.” “Few designers today would even touch this type of project,” he writes of Loewy’s assignment. “What excites the best (design) thinkers today is the challenge of applying their skills to problems that matter.”
He’s kind of right and kind of wrong. Much as I’d like to believe that designers are too altruistic to bother fiddling with the graphics on cigarette packets, many still do. But it is true that more and more designers are devoting their time to serious stuff, like repairing environmental damage or kindling economic recovery, and it is their work that concerns Mr. Brown. Read the rest of this entry »
Overview of Article: This is an interview with Tim Brown on How Design Thinking can help bring solutions to some of the world’s current challenges.
Thoughts on this Article: This is a brief interview that could have had a great deal of substance if it were longer.
Original Article HERE at FastCompany
BY Linda TischlerMon Sep 28, 2009 at 7:07 AM
Better ballot design could have changed the results of the 2000 election. A better design for information sharing might have prevented 9/11. Now, could design thinking help fix something fundamentally broken in American democracy: how we engage in national debate?
Whether the topic is climate change, financial regulation, or health care reform, when asked to “discuss amongst ourselves,” the conversation devolves into who can shout the loudest, hurl the nastiest epithets, or pervert the facts to fit their own agendas. Can this process be saved?
We spoke to Tim Brown, CEO of famed design and innovation firm, IDEO, and author of Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation, (and Fast Company expert blogger) to see what might be done. Read the rest of this entry »
Overview of Video: Tim Brown – IDEO CEO gives a look at the content of his upcoming book “Change by Design”.
Thoughts on this video: Very short and not a lot of thought provoking info. Good visuals and a couple of quotables.
Overview of Post: Tim Brown weighs in on the challenges that some teams face using Design Thinking. The topic is primarily on the parts of the process that ‘feel’ odd to people unaccustomed to the process.
Thoughts on this Post: Tim brings a few common barriers to the forefront and prepares you for them. Getting past these can enable you to be successful.
Original Post Here Tim Brown »07 September 2008 » In design thinking, divergence and convergence »
John Maeda (President of RISD) would likely answer that question by saying “a banana”. He often talks about how hard it is to describe design and I agree with him.
On the other hand I think one of the biggest obstacles to using design thinking as an effective problem solving approach is anticipating what it feels like. We are not used to wondering about how processes feel. I think we assume they all feel the same and in conventional business that is probably true. Read the rest of this entry »
Overview of Article: Robert Sutton takes on the idea that group brainstorming is not an efficient way to generate ideas. He references his time working with IDEO and makes very good points on what actually constitutes “efficient” brainstorming.
Thoughts on Article: I give this one to you as a classic on the ‘Brainstorming’ element of the Design Thing process. Sutton makes very good points on the importance of having a team, but of making sure that you also have the right environment for that team to be productive. This is a very good article.
Should your team brainstorm as a group or as individuals? At creative companies, switching between the two modes can be seamless—and highly productive
A recent Wall Street Journal story took on the hot topic of brainstorming. Titled “Brainstorming Works Best if People Scramble For Ideas on Their Own,” the piece quoted research showing that people are “more creative” when they “brainstorm” alone rather than in meetings and offered supporting testimonials from managers.
This is a subject I am quite familiar with. Along with Andy Hargadon, I completed an 18-month ethnography in the 1990s on how the innovation consultants at IDEO do creative work, and we’ve both spent much of the past decade studying other innovative organizations. At the time, Andy was my PhD student, and now he is an associate professor at the University of California at Davis.
We agree that badly managed face-to-face brainstorms do stifle creativity and we agree that, even when brainstorming is done right, people probably can still generate ideas faster when they work alone. But it is total nonsense to conclude that if you want creativity, you ought to keep your people in solitary confinement where they can’t “waste time” listening to and building on the ideas of others.
Here’s the problem: Most studies of brainstorming are rigorous but irrelevant to the challenge of managing creative work. For starters, comparing whether creativity happens best in groups or alone is pretty silly when you look at how creative work is actually done. At creative companies, people switch between both modes so seamlessly that it is hard to notice where individual work ends and group work starts. Read the rest of this entry »
Overview of Article: This is a report from Memorial Hospital on what happened when IDEO consulted with them and the results they experienced.
Thoughts on the Article: For most of us, it is good to see the process in action, and to gain new insights into possible solutions to problems or challenges that we are facing. With the focus on Obama and Health Care reform, I thought this was worth a look.
Original Article Here at Quality of Life the website of Memorial Hospital and Health Systems
An Immersion in Innovation Culture: Memorial Dives Deep“Success depends on both what you do and how you do it.”-Tom Kelley, IDEO General Manager
The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America’s Leading Design Firm
Memorial Health System has long recognized that equally important to finding new solutions in healthcare is understanding the process that leads to those solutions. Underpinning this theory is the belief that good ideas don’t just drop out of the sky at random, but are likely to emerge from a culture which fosters innovative thinking and creativity as a core element of its identity and operations. IDEO, a leading design company, holds this philosophy as the pillar of its work. Known throughout the world, IDEO’s consultants have worked on such diverse projects as designing Apple’s first computer mouse to reinventing the dressing rooms at Prada’s New York store. Perhaps the only thing that rivals the ingenuity of their designs is the way they think of them. Their most riveting “product” can’t be held in your hand or touched, as it’s the methodology itself behind their designs. And experience is the best approach to understanding it.
In the fall of 2002, IDEO brought that experience to Memorial Hospital and Health System. Contracted to help with the development of the hospital’s new Heart and Vascular Center , IDEO consultants began observing the current hospital environment to find insights into how the Center might be best designed. A series of three two-day gatherings, dubbed “Deep Dives” by IDEO came next. It’s primarily from the last of these Deep Dive experiences that the following account is drawn. It’s our hope that these insights will be used to replicate elements of the process of innovation in many future Memorial projects and in the very culture of our lives. Read the rest of this entry »