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.
By Tim Brown Original Post and Links HERE at MetropolisMag.com
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 »