Design Thinking Blog » Social Innovation

On Design Thinking and Beyond

@dTblog — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 22:41:49 +0000

Overview: A blog/article from a Design Thinking student

Thoughts: This article brings a collection of resources on the topic of Design Thinking to a good conclusion that Design Thinking is more than design.

On Design Thinking and Beyond

Original Post HERE by kshitiz at kshitizanand.com

Of late there has been a sudden rise in interest in the propagation of Design Thinking. The impetus to this has been hugely due to some articles in the Harvard Business Review(last year), and Businessweek (this year).

If the need of the hour is to think innovation and think beyond the obvious, Design Thinking is definitely an essential tool. A lot of companies like Apple, who are driven by Design, have been doing it for years now. A few more have joined the bandwagon, as mentioned in this another post by BusinessWeek.

Apart from these above, there has been the recent publicly available talk by Tim Brown at the TED conference this year. Brown is evangelizing that Design Thinking needs to go to a much larger scale and also that designers should start to think big.

Everyone seems to be acknowledging it. A few seem to understanding it, and a fewer seem to be to be understanding it. The interesting point about Brown’s talk is that he looks at going beyond the notion of consumerism with which Design has been traditionally associated with.

One of the other great design thinkers, who I admire, and have been a student of myself, Erik Stolterman also talks about the notion of Design Thinking in his blog Transforming Grounds. He also makes the very valid point that Design Thinking is been there since a long time and has found its applications in numerous fields.

I strongly believe that one of the areas where Design can play a huge role is Design for Social Impact. This also happened to be the topic of my Masters thesis at Indiana. The challenges are immense, and the solutions are rarer to find, and that is why Design Thinking becomes important.

The outcome of the application of Design Thinking to create Design Models, to create actual solutions for a social cause, is not been explored much. Therefore in the Design Research Company that I have started, Deskala, we are primarily aiming to achieve this. The questions that we ask day in and day out, in due course of our field studies, is how Design can be used to bring about the Social Change. Being in a country like India, where there is a certain amount of Social Innovation happening at the Base of the Pyramid, we stand a good chance to see the applicability of Design Thinking and its measure its success.

Design Thinking however need not be culminating in Social Innovations in the form of products only. The outcome could be an interface, it could be a service that is designed, it could be a model etc. Because Design Thinking itself tends to see its application in different areas, the outcomes vary.

Stanford’s d.school bootcamp project

@dTblog — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:39:07 +0000

Overview of this Post: The d.school at Stanford has a bootcamp for students of Design Thinking. This article is an update on the projects and experiences of the participants.

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

Design Thinking and Social Innovators

@dTblog — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 13:49:41 +0000

Overview of Post: Robert Fabricant is leading a group of Social Innovators through steps of the Design Thinking process during a conference.

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

Robert Fabricant will be reporting live this week from PopTech’s 2009 conference, America Reimagined.

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]

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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.