Thoughts on Post: Good notes from a rather long talk.  The notes are worth the read even if you don’t view the video.

A great talk by George Kembel of the Stanford D.School is available to watch online, so here are a few highlights from the talk that we find interesting here at Innoversity:

The d.school is the means of connecting different faculties in Stanford University. Students work in teams on real challenges with engineers, business students, designers and other varied disciplines on campus. They learn the design thinking process which is usually this:

empathy > define > ideate > prototype > test

Teams are not given a defined problem, based on the belief that half of businesses fail not because they didn’t solve the problem, but because they solved the wrong problem.

Instead, students are given a topic that they need to gain empathy for. This has included students visiting Nepal to understand how people deal with preterm babies, and teams visiting Myanmar to improve water irrigation. Because the teams take time to know the people they are creating for, become familiar with their situation and are able to discover needs they were unaware of, the teams are able to discover the meaningful problem that needs to be solved.

In the case of Myanmar, 10 teams went to discover irrigation and water needs. 9 teams came back with good information on what problems to tackle with water. One team discovered instead that 30% of the farmer’s income was spent on kerosene to extend their day. It was also dangerous for the lungs and was a fire hazard. The team decided that the meaningful problem to solve was not the water, but a new way to light the home so that income could be spent elsewhere.

This is now a for-profit business with 60 employees.

D.school has found that by mixing self-declared creatives with people who don’t think of themselves as a creative, that through the design thinking process, they are now more confident in their ability to innovate.

But it takes time for students to trust in the design thinking process, which usually comes after lots of practice and experience in that the methodology works. The unease appears to be the result of not having a defined problem at the start, with a defined goal to work toward. Instead, design thinking is about defining meaningful problems to solve, and then experimenting with as many ways to solve the problem as possible, without a specific target.

D.school as also found that the design thinking process improves collaboration, because teams are focused on external factors (such as helping the people that they have gained empathy for) and instead of competing for which idea to choose, the team chooses all of them and experiments with them in a quick and dirty fashion.

Here is an example of how the team uses the design thinking process to innovate:

1. EMPATHY. The team spends time with the audience they are creating for. This may involve living with them, working with them, asking them questions and observing their behaviour. This is in order to gain empathy. It also allows them to discover needs that the audience may not be aware they have. For instance the family that spent a large amount of money on kerosene may not question a new way to bring light into their home and feel that is just the reality of their circumstance.

2. DEFINE. Using the observations and empathy gained in the first stage, teams frame the problem, put it in context and start to define what problem is meaningful and what they will work to solve.

3. IDEATION. The team then generates as many ideas as possible, with the goal not to produce the best idea, but to produce many varied ideas to try in the next stage.

4. PROTOTYPE. Students take their ideas and express them in a way that can be shared QUICKLY. This are rough, unfinished prototypes, that communicate ideas or allow physical properties to be realised in a basic form.

5. TEST. Students take their prototypes back to the people they worked with from the start. Because the prototypes look unfinished, it sometimes encourages more feedback from the users. Insight is gained into how the prototypes can be improved.

This process allowed a team to develop a baby incubator for $25 instead of $20,000 using materials and low-tech solutions. (sound familiar?)

It requires a certain level of ambiguity and vulnerability in this process, where the goal is not defined until later in the process. Vulnerability is being willing to share unfinished ideas with the team or users. In any case, the teams are encouraged to wait to define the problem, until they have empathy for people. The emphasis is also on effectiveness rather than efficiency. This allows for many attempts, rather than a few choice ones.

Kembel says that they hold to a process rather than a goal. Empathy gives more meaning to their work. It appears that meaning is what drives teams to innovate. The d.school also focuses on innovators rather than innovation. The focus is on training students, rather than on the outcome.

Another note is that Kembel questions ‘what do we measure?’ in educaiton, stating that analytical thinking is easier to measure than creative thinking, and that is the possible reason why children lose their confidence in their creative abilities as they get older. Students are also told they can either be a scientist or an artist, but they can’t be both. This type of thinking is possibly what leads to latent creativity.

There’s much more in his talk, and if you watch it you may discover if you have perfect pitch. I myself was just a half-step away, does that count?