Design Thinking Blog

Just had a very insightful meeting with Jeneanne Rae.  Jeneanne has been in the Design Thinking field since before it was called Design Thinking.  She was hired by David Kelley at IDEO to help grow the business integration part of that company as an MBA and a significant part of the growth into the company that they are today.  Since leaving IDEO, she has been working as a consultant to fortune 500 companies in the area of Service Design.

She regularly speaks at conferences and is an ongoing contributor to BusinessWeek.  She drinks dark roast coffee with both cream and sugar.

The majority of our time was focused on the best practices to involve End Users in the Service Design process.  One of the hallmarks of Design Thinking is breaking away from the “stakeholders only” mentality where insiders decide what they believe is needed, and then create and roll out the service or product. To be truly effective, the process must include regular involvement and feedback from those who will actually use the services (Users).

There are 3 key times for End Users to be involved:

1. When you are doing your initial research into the “problem” that you are solving (your service proposition)
2. When you are prototyping your services – BEFORE you implement
3. Immediately after implementation – to make sure that you are actually solving the problem.

Let’s go deeper into each of those. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, there has been a flurry of activity around some new terms, Design thinking and Design leadership. I think they are interesting terms, and describe some new directions for design. Design thinking, suggests to me, that designers have a different way of thinking – visual, abductive etc, which means that they have relevance outside of the product sphere (meaning also services).

Design leadership means two things to me. One is to achieve a leading position in the market through the strategic use of design (Apple comes to mind here… again). The second is to use design thinking in your role as a leader – that is – using design qualities in your leadership role. These are both exciting terms and a useful development from the design management term that has been around for quite some time. Read the rest of this entry »

Overview of Slide Show:   Arne van Oosterom (@designthinkers) has shared the slides from a presentation he gave on Service Design at a recent conference.

Thoughts on Slide Show:  Good stuff!  Would like to have a narrated version as well.