Design Thinking - Influences and Critiques - Essay Example

Design Thinking - Influences and Critiques al affiliation) Key Words: Design Thinking, Influences, Critiques Design thinking stands for design-specific cognitive activities that designers apply during the process of designing. Moreover, design thinking has come to be defined as combining empathy  for the context of a problem, creativity in the generation of insights and solutions, and rationality in analyzing and fitting various solutions to the problem context. According to Tim Brown, CEO and president of IDEO, the goal of design Thinking is "matching people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and viable as a business strategy." The premise of teaching design thinking is that by knowing about how designers approach problems and the methods which they use to ideate, select and execute solutions, individuals and businesses will be better able to improve their own problem solving processes and take innovation to a higher level. There is also considerable academic interest in understanding design thinking and design cognition. The first formal academic research symposium on Design Thinking was organized at Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, in 1991, and has developed into a regular series Unlike analytical thinking, design thinking is a process which includes the "building up" of ideas, with few, or no, limits on breadth during a "brainstorming" phase. This helps reduce fear of failure in the participants and encourages input and participation from a wide variety of sources in the ideation phases. The phrase “thinking outside the box” has been coined to describe one goal of the brainstorming phase and is encouraged, since this can aid in the discovery of hidden elements and ambiguities in the situation and discovering potentially faulty assumptions. One example of a design thinking process could have seven stages: define, research, ideate, prototype, choose, implement, and learn. Within these seven steps, problems can be framed, the right questions can be asked, more ideas can be created, and the best answers can be chosen. The steps arent linear; they can occur simultaneously and can be repeated. Define Decide what issue you are trying to resolve. Agree on who the audience is. Prioritize this project in terms of urgency. Determine what will make this project successful. Establish a glossary of terms. Research Review the history of the issue; remember any existing obstacles. Collect examples of other attempts to solve the same issue. Note the project supporters, investors, and critics. Talk to your end-users that bring you the most fruitful ideas for later design. Take into account thought leaders opinions. Ideation Identify the needs and motivations of your end-users. Generate as many ideas as possible to serve these identified needs. Log your brainstorming session. Do not judge or debate ideas. During brainstorming, have one conversation at a time. Prototype Combine, expand, and refine ideas. Create multiple drafts. Seek feedback from a diverse group of people, include your end users. Present a selection of ideas to the client. Reserve judgement and maintain neutrality. Create and present actual working prototype(s) Choose Review the objective. Set aside emotion and ownership of ideas. Avoid consensus thinking. Remember: the most practical solution isnt always the best. Select the powerful ideas. Implement Make task descriptions. Plan tasks. Determine resources. Assign tasks. Execute. Deliver to client. Learn Gather feedback from the consumer. Determine if the solution met its goals. Discuss what could be improved. Measure success; collect data. Document. Although design is always influenced by individual preferences, the design thinking method shares a common set of traits, mainly; Creativity, non-ambiguous thinking, teamwork, empathy, curiosity and Optimism. Furthermore, design in its most effective form is a process, an action, a verb not a noun, a protocol for solving problems and discovering new opportunities. To this end, techniques and tools differ and their effectiveness is arguable but the core of the process stays the same. It has taken years of slogging through Design high style to bring us full circle to the simple truth about design thinking. That it is a most powerful tool and when used effectively, can be the foundation for driving a brand or business forward. Basically, there are many ways in design thinking processes and they consist of four key elements: 1: DEFINE THE PROBLEM Design thinking requires a team or business to always question the brief, the problem to be solved. To participate in defining the opportunity and to revise the opportunity before embarking on its creation and execution. Participation usually involves immersion and the intense cross examination of the filters that have been employed in defining a problem. In design thinking, observation takes centre stage. Observation can discern what people really do as opposed to what you are told that they do. Getting out of the cube and involving oneself in the process, product, shopping experience or operating theatre is fundamental. No ones life was ever changed by a PowerPoint presentation. Design thinking in problem definition also requires cross functional insight into each problem by varied perspectives as well as constant and relentless questioning, like that of a small child, Why?, Until finally the simple answers are behind you and the true issues are revealed. Finally, defining the problem via design thinking requires the suspension of judgment in defining the problem statement. What we say can be very different to what we mean. The right words are important. It is not "design a chair", its…"create a way to suspend a person". The goal of the definition stage is to target the right problem to solve, and then to frame the problem in a way that invites creative solutions. Question; How many designers will it take to screw in a light bulb? Answer; Why a light bulb? 2: CREATE AND CONSIDER MANY OPTIONS Even the most talented teams and businesses sometimes fall into the trap of solving a problem the same way every time. Especially when successful results are produced and time is short. Design thinking requires that no matter how obvious the solution may seem, many solutions be created for consideration and created in a way that allows them to be judged equally as possible answers. Looking at a problem from more than one perspective always yields richer results. Many times we are not aware of the filters we may be burdened with when we create answers to problems. In this stage opportunities appear. The trick is to recognize them as opportunities. Multiple perspectives and teamwork are crucial. Design thinking suggests that better answers happen when 5 people work on a problem for a day, than one person for five days. Designers have an advantage in the use of 2D and 3D tools to demonstrate solutions and new idea, tools which are almost always far more effective to demonstrate what is meant, than words. 3: REFINE SELECTED DIRECTIONS A handful of promising results need to be embrace and nurtured. Given a chance to grow protected from the evil idea-killers of previous experience. Even the strongest of new ideas can be fragile in their infancy. Design thinking allows their potential to be realized by creating an environment conducive to growth and experimentation, and the making of mistakes in order to achieve out of the ordinary results. At this stage many times options will need to be combined and smaller ideas integrated into the selected schemes that make it through. This brings us to stage 3.5. 3.5 REPEAT (OPTIONAL) Design thinking may require looping steps 2 and 3 until the right answers surface. 4: PICK THE WINNER, EXECUTE At this point enough roads have been travelled to insure success. It is the time to commit resources to achieve the early objectives. The by-product of the process is often other unique ideas and strategies that are tangential to the initial objective as defined. Prototypes of solutions are created in earnest, and testing becomes more critical and intense. At the end of stage 4 the problem is solved or the opportunity is fully uncovered. Influences Design is not just about aesthetics, form, typography and economics, it is about intention and realizing that intention. It’s about wanting to do something and then figuring out how to do it. It’s a huge word in itself. Many of the best examples of design are things people don’t think are designed at all. From the moment we wake up everything that fills our world has been designed in one way or another. Do we ever think about a pen until and unless we have held a badly designed one? All the disciplines from architecture to jewellery is informed and influenced by design. So what is design thinking? Design thinking is a problem-solving mindset. It began with what Roger Martin called integrative thinking in his book, ‘The Opposable Mind’. Integrative thinking is the ability to exploit opposing ideas and opposing constraints to create new solutions. In the case of design that means balancing human desirability, technological feasibility and economic viability — a framework put together by Tim Brown in his book, ‘Change by Design’. Design incorporates three main components – being user centric, collaborative and experimental. To achieve all the three one has to encourage maximum participation during ideation, eliminate fear of failure and think out of the box. ... As a result, the design process can have a major impact on culture of any start-up in any sector. It can help entrepreneurs step out of the box and learn from failures early on in return saving time, money and effort. In a start-up we all try to step out of our job descriptions and do a lot more to make an idea work. Following the design process helps everyone to have a similar foundation to understand his or her users. Who they are doing it for, why they are doing it and how they should do it to make maximum impact to the target audience. The core of design thinking methodology is empathy and observation. As we become more aware and dive into this process it also starts to reflect on our behaviour, which in turn solves team dynamics and managerial issues. For example, the key tool in this process is brainstorming and has one of the rules which is defer judgment, initiating all team members to be on the same platform while ideating. Design thinking is user-centric; it’s about understanding needs and motivations. It’s collaborative and requires conversations, critic and team work. It is experimental as it creates a space to try something new. It gives you the permission to unlearn, fail and to make mistakes and come up with new ideas. We all have the opportunity with the generation we are in, equipped with a variety of tools in our pockets and access to the world on the click of a button to explore new possibilities, new ideas, new rituals and solutions. Using the process of design thinking we can make a much larger impact in the world rather than mere incremental inputs. Design thinking incubates hope. Contributions of design thinking to the field of design and to society at large are immense. By formalizing the tacit values and behaviours of design, design thinking was able to move designers and the power of design from a focus on artefact and aesthetics within a narrow consumerist marketplace to the much wider social space of systems and society. We face huge forces of disruption, the rise and fall of generations, the spread of social media technologies, the urbanization of the planet, the rise and fall of nations, global warming, and overpopulation. Together these forces are eroding our economic, social, and political systems in a once-in-a-century kind of way. Design Thinking made design system-conscious at a key moment in time. In addition, the rise of Humanistic Design would not have been possible without Design Thinking.  Consequently, design thinking describes a repeatable process employing unique and creative techniques which yield guaranteed results, usually results that exceed initial expectations and extraordinary results that leapfrog the expected. This is why it is such an attractive, dynamic and important methodology for businesses to embrace today Critiques According to critiques, the so-called “design thinking” is the new It-Girl of management theory. It purports to provide new ways for managers and companies to provide innovative, creative solutions to old problems. But design thinking alone will not solve these problems because a lack of creativity was never the issue. The real issue is one of power. Design is attractive to management because it is a de-politicized version of the well known socio-cultural critique of managerial practices. Design thinking is so popular because it raises only questions of “creativity” or “innovation” without ever questioning the legitimacy of managerial practice. Instead, design thinking aspires only to “better” management technique by investigating “contextual problems” or the truly innocuous “pain points.” The inconvenient truth is that the science of management fails because it treats people as either mere inputs into the production process or as faceless “consumers” who have no real stake in outcomes. Design thinking allows for these truths to remain unaddressed, thereby avoiding any discussion of power itself. Workers are cast as something to be organized or “incented.” Consumers are to have their “needs met.” And neither group is granted a meaningful stake in the creative process. Within this frame, design techniques attempt to solve managers’ typically tone-deaf executions of creativity without ever naming the root cause of workers’ and consumers’ dissatisfaction, which is their lack of meaningful participation in the design process. Managers’ ability to control both the organization of work and the availability of consumer goods is the true problem, not an inability to think “creatively.”Managers have control over the working conditions under which creativity is supposed to happen, as well as the distribution of the fruits of such labour. One significant reason workers’ creativity does not flow easily from studio or factory to consumers is because of management’s need to control costs and secure profits. Were it not for the profit motive, workers would be free to radically innovate continually and consumers would have unrestricted access to such new and innovative goods. In essence, because profit stands as the pre-eminent benchmark of business success, both workers and consumers are thwarted in their pursuit of supplying and demanding innovative goods. In other words, there is no shortage of creative solutions to “unmet needs,” only a shortage of profitable ways to provide them .Hence the inevitable ineffectiveness of design thinking, if applied in isolation to the problem of creativity. Thus, Designers must consider what role power plays in an organization’s inability to create innovative products. But more importantly, designers must be prepared to identify and name power and its sources, for example, the pursuit of profit at the expense of innovation. They must not simply use ethnographic techniques to uncover “unmet needs” the construction and framing of Design Thinking itself has become a key issue. Design thinking originally offered the world of big business--which is defined by a culture of process efficiency--a whole new process that promised to deliver creativity. By packaging creativity within a process format, designers were able to expand their engagement, impact, and sales inside the corporate world. Companies were comfortable and welcoming to Design Thinking because it was packaged as a process. There were many successes, but far too many more failures in this endeavour. Why? Companies absorbed the process of Design Thinking all too well, turning it into a linear, gated, by-the-book methodology that delivered, at best, incremental change and innovation. Call it N+1 innovation. CEOs in particular, took to the process side of Design Thinking, implementing it like Six Sigma and other efficiency-based processes. I had a conversation with IDEOs Tim Brown at Parsons recently and his analysis is spot on. Design consultancies that promoted Design Thinking were, in effect, hoping that a process trick would produce significant cultural and organizational change. From the beginning, the process of Design Thinking was scaffolding for the real deliverable: creativity. But in order to appeal to the business culture of process, it was denuded of the mess, the conflict, failure, emotions, and looping circularity that is part and parcel of the creative process. In a few companies, CEOs and managers accepted that mess along with the process and real innovation took place. In most others, it did not. As practitioners of design thinking in consultancies now acknowledge, the success rate for the process was low, very low. References Ambrose, G., & Harris, P. (2009). Design thinking. Lausanne: AVA Academia. Balaram, S. (2010). Thinking design. Los Angeles: SAGE. Brown, T., & Kātz, B. (2009). Change by design: how design thinking transforms organizations and inspires innovation. New York: Harper Business. Conely, J. (2010). Thinking Design. Leighton: Contour publishers. Lupton, E. (20112011). Graphic design thinking: beyond brainstorming. New York: Princeton Architectural Press ;. Martin, R. L. (2009). The design of business: why design thinking is the next competitive advantage. Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business Press. McAlhone, B., & Stuart, D. (1998). A smile in the mind: witty thinking in graphic design (Rev. & updated. ed.). London: Phaidon Press. Meinel, C., & Leifer, L. (2011). Design thinking understand - improve - apply. Berlin: Springer. Mitchell, C. T. (1996). New thinking in design: conversations on theory and practice. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. Plattner, H. (2012). Design thinking research measuring performance in context. Berlin: Springer. Rowe, P. G. (1987). Design thinking. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Upton, A. (1961). Design for thinking; a first book in semantics.. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Ware, C. (2008). Visual thinking for design. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann. Beard, C. (2014). Critiqued: inside the minds of 23 leaders in design. San Francisco: Peachpit. Brasseur, L. E. (2003). Visualizing technical information: a cultural critique. Amityville, N.Y.: Baywood Pub.. Elkin, S. L. (2006). Reconstructing the commercial republic: constitutional design after Madison. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goldenberg, S. (1992). Thinking methodologically. New York, NY: HarperCollins. Jones, M., & Marsden, G. (2006). Mobile interaction design. Chichester: John Wiley. Knuttila, K. M., & Magnan, A. (2012).Introducing sociology: a critical approach(5. ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. West, D. (2004). Object Thinking. Sebastopol: Microsoft Press. Read More