Overview of Article: This is an interview with Tim Brown, primarily on the information in his book, Change for Design, but also on his views of the implications of Design Thinking in a few specific areas.
Thoughts on this Article: I like both the questions and the answers in this interview. The S+B team did a good job of getting into the ideas and asking appropaite questions that give deeper insight into the topics that Tim addressed. This interview also continues to highlight for me the differences between Tim Brown’s views of Design Thinking and Roger Martin’s views. It will be interesting to see who becomes the primary voice on the Design Thinking movement.
The screensaver on Tim Brown’s office computer is a selection of photographs of classic automobiles. Some of the pictures came from colleagues at IDEO, including a few of the cars in company cofounder David Kelley’s collection. As one might expect, fascination with objects is a common trait at this 550-person design firm headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif. “We all grew up,” says Brown, “making or working with beautiful things.”
Another common trait at IDEO is a fascination with systems — especially those involving such complex, interconnected issues as reconceiving marketing campaigns, rethinking the materials in packaging, and redesigning health-care delivery and early childhood education. IDEO is perhaps the earliest and best-known design firm to promote what Brown calls “design thinking”: a holistic approach to innovation, including in-depth customer insight and rapid prototyping, aimed at getting beyond the assumptions that block effective solutions. This means addressing the look and feel of the product being designed, as designers conventionally do. But it also means reconsidering the way it meets consumers’ unspoken needs, as well as reworking the infrastructure that enables the product and the supply chain that delivers it. (more…)
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 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. (more…)
Overview of Article: This is a summery/review of Tim Brown’s new book “Change By Design” from the NY Times.
Thoughts on this Article: This is a simple overview of the book, but doesn’t really capture the heart of the book. Tim Brown is arguably the most visible spokesperson on the topic, and often sets the tone for what will happen in that industry. The NY Times reporter presents Tim as a designer who now practices Design Thinking, when in reality – he is an industrial products person, who understood the importance of design in creating a marketable product. That is a significant difference.
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. (more…)
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?
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.
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. (more…)
Overview of Post: LukeW (Yahoo.com) shares his take on a talk from Design Thinking Guru Tim Brown.
Thoughts on this Post: It looks like LukeW has done a pretty good job of getting the facts out of the talk. I think he gives a GREAT summary of the main points that Brown made. This is worth printing out and referencing as you navigate the ever changing waters of Design Thinking.
I recently caught a talk by Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, about the role of design in corporate innovation. Here’s what I heard:
Design in everywhere these days especially on the minds of many CEOs many of whom don’t know how to make use of it.
Designers have a unique process for solving problems that Tim refers to as design thinking. When most people think about design they tend to focus on the deliverables –the end results. Companies that view design as JUST making things pretty or are missing the point.
Design thinking can be used to tackle a wide range of creative & business issues including developing strategies that help determine where a company can go in the future. (more…)
Overview of this video: Tim Brown speaks at the MIT Sloan Innovative Leaders Series. This is a broad talk about IDEO and how they have used the Design Thinking process to challenge standard methodologies, and create more appropriate and effective solutions. Thoughts on this video: Worth watching and taking a few notes on!
Overview of this talk: At the 2008 Serious Play conference, designer Tim Brown talks about the powerful relationship between creative thinking and play — with many examples you can try at home (and one that maybe you shouldn’t).
Thoughts on this talk: Very entertaining talk with solid insights into the importance of playing and role playing as we define options for the problems we are facing.
Overview of the Post: Tim Brown is interviewed by WNYC on his book and the concept of Design Thinking.
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.
Overview of Article: This is a summery/review of Tim Brown’s new book “Change By Design” from the NY Times.
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.
