Tim Brown is the President and CEO of IDEO, one of the world's leading creative agencies. Tim Brown, President and CEO of IDEO, a world-class creative agency, is a multi-award-winning industrial designer whose work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, AXIS Gallery in Tokyo, and the Design Museum in London, and who has worked with clients in a wide range of industries, including Apple, Microsoft, Pepsi, P&G, Nestlé, Ford, and other globally renowned corporations.
The continuum of innovation is a system of overlapping spaces:
Inspiration, the problems or opportunities that motivate people to find solutions;
Conceptualization, the process of generating, developing, and testing ideas;
Implementation, the path that takes an idea from the project studio to the marketplace.
A design project may go back and forth between these three spaces as the design team refines ideas and explores new directions, because design thinking is by nature an exploratory process. The risk of this iterative approach may seem to be that it prolongs the time it takes to bring an idea to market, but usually this is a short-sighted view. Quite the contrary, visionary teams don't take the next step in an ultimately unproductive path following inherent logic. The more and sooner they fail, the sooner success will come.
The second way to consider the overlapping spaces in innovation is to consider boundary conditions. To an artist in search of beauty or a scientist in search of truth, the boundaries of a project may be unwelcome constraints. Yet the very mark of a designer is a willingness to accept constraints.
The willingness to accept, even warmly welcome, contradictory constraints is the very foundation of design thinking. In the first stage of the design process, it is common to identify which constraints are important and to establish a system for evaluating them. The best way to visualize the constraints is to use three overlapping criteria to measure whether the idea is feasible:
Feasibility, the likelihood of achieving functionality in the foreseeable future;
Continuity, the likelihood of being part of a sustainable business model;
Need, the fact that it makes sense to people.
All three of these factors will be repeated by the design team throughout the life of the project, but the emphasis on basic human needs is what drives design thinking away from the status quo, as opposed to ephemeral or artificially controlled cravings.
The fact is that most organizations don't take this approach to developing new ideas. They are likely to start with those constraints that fit within the framework system of the existing business model, although there is considerable justification for this approach. Because business systems are designed to be efficient, new ideas are likely to be incremental, predictable, and easily imitated by competitors. This explains why so many products on the market today are very similar.
An organization may be driven by judgments about basic human needs and wants. At worst, this can mean conjuring up tantalizing but essentially useless products that end up in landfills - as the controversial Victor Papanek once put it bluntly, it's about persuading people to "spend money they don't have on things they don't need, just to give things to people who don't really care about them," he said. just to impress neighbors who don't actually care about them."
Projects are the tools that take ideas from concept to reality. Design projects are not open-ended and ongoing. A design project has a beginning, a middle process, and an end, and it is these constraints that keep it firmly rooted in the real world. Design thinking is expressed within the framework of the project, which drives us to have a clear statement of objectives at the beginning of the project. This naturally creates deadlines that bind us tightly and provide us with opportunities to review progress, make mid-course corrections, and redirect for future action.
There's a popular saying within IDEO: "As a whole, we are smarter than any individual." And that's the key to unlocking creativity in all organizations. We ask people not just to provide expert advice on materials, behavior or software, but to actively participate in every space of innovation: inspiration, conceptualization, implementation. In cross-disciplinary teams, ideas are collectively ****owned and everyone is responsible for them.
The prerequisite for creativity is the environment - the social environment, but also the spatial environment - where people know they can experiment, take risks, and explore the full extent of their capabilities. If a culture believes that it's better to seek forgiveness after the fact than to get permission beforehand, that it rewards people for successes but also allows them to fail, then a major barrier to the formation of new ideas has been removed.
In the century-long history of creative problem solving, designers have found a range of tools to help them navigate what I call the "three spaces of innovation": inspiration, conceptualization, and implementation. What is needed now, I believe, is for these skills to be spread throughout the organization. Design thinking, in particular, needs to "swim upstream" and get closer to the core management that makes strategic decisions. Design is too important now, and it shouldn't be left to designers.
For design thinkers, behavior is never right or wrong. Behavior always makes sense. A designer's job is to "turn needs into wants". On the surface, this is a simple statement: figure out what people want and give it to them. But if it's so simple, why aren't there more success stories like the iPod and eBay? The answer, I think, is: people need to be put back at the center of the story, and they need to learn to put people first.
It's very hard to recognize people's needs and design accordingly, because people are so quick to respond to inconveniences, often without even realizing they're doing it: sitting with their car seatbelt under their butt, writing their PIN code on their hand, hanging their jacket on a doorknob, locking their bike to a park bench.
Henry Ford once said, "Ask my customers what they want, and they'll say, "A faster wagon". That's why traditional methods like focus groups and market research rarely yield important insights. In most cases, these methods simply ask people what they want. Traditional market research tools are useful in pointing to incremental improvements, but they will never lead to those out-of-the-box, game-changing, mindset-shifting breakthroughs.
Our real goal is not to design faster printers or more ergonomic keyboards to meet obvious needs; that's the job of designers. Helping people articulate latent needs that they don't even know they have is the challenge for design thinkers.
Insight is one of the key sources of design thinking, and it doesn't usually come from reams of quantitative data that can only accurately measure what we already have and tell us that which we already know. A much better place to start is to go out into the world and observe how the target population spends their days, to observe what they actually experience.
The vast array of unthinking behaviors that people do every day reflect what people want: shopkeepers use hammers to make door stops; commuters stick labels on the computer connections densely packed under their desks. As users of products and services, ordinary people are unlikely to be able to tell us what to do. But their actual behavior can provide us with valuable clues to unmet needs.
Fundamentally, design is a form of idea formation. In the workings of design, the answers to questions lurk in the creative work of the team. The creative process produces ideas and concepts that did not exist before. These ideas and concepts are more likely to be triggered by observing the eccentric operations of an amateur carpenter or the incongruous details of a machine shop than by filling out a questionnaire. Thus, the insight phase, which contributes to the project, is just as important as the engineering phase, which comes later, and we have to get insights from wherever we can find them.
The evolution from design to design thinking is really an evolution from creating products to analyzing the relationships between people and products, and then to analyzing the relationships between people. Indeed, a striking development in recent years has been the shift in designers' attention to social and behavioral issues, such as helping patients adhere to their medications, or moving from junk food to healthy snacks.
Observation relies on quality, not quantity. Companies are familiar with the buying habits of the mainstream customers in their current markets, because these are the people who will be testing whether an idea works on a large scale. However, focusing on the majority of customers alone is likely to confirm what is known, rather than lead to the discovery of surprising new discoveries. To break the mold and find new insights, we need to focus on the fringe, where we're bound to find "extreme" users who live, think, and spend differently than the average person.
Why would a chip company in Silicon Valley be interested in funding a group of deviant sociologists to study people or behavior in Eastern Europe or West Africa? It's because only about 10 percent of the world's population has access to online communications technology right now, and Intel knows it has to be ready when the next 10 percent comes online. Other industry leaders follow the same principle of extracting insights from observations and using them to inspire future goods.
Thinking differently is a mental habit. It helps us to stop thinking of people as lab rats or standard deviations. If we're going to "borrow" someone else's life to inspire new ideas, we first need to realize that these puzzling behaviors represent the different strategies these people use to cope with a confusing, complex, and contradictory world. A designer who designs solely according to his own standards and requirements misses a lot of opportunities.
We build bridges of insight through transpersonal thinking, an effort to see the world through someone else's eyes, to understand it through someone else's experience, and to perceive it through someone else's emotions. Helping people articulate latent needs that they don't even know they have is the challenge for design thinkers.
Collective thinking tends to converge to get to the only result. Convergent thinking is not good at probing the future or creating new possibilities. Imagine a funnel, with the larger openings representing a wide range of initial possibilities, and the smaller openings representing carefully aggregated solutions. Obviously, this is the most effective way to find a series of carefully crafted solutions.
If the convergence phase of problem solving drives us to solutions, then the purpose of divergent thinking is to increase the possibilities to create new options. By testing conflicting ideas, it's more likely that we'll get bolder, more creatively out-of-the-box, more compelling results. In order to have a good idea, you have to have a lot of ideas first.
The process used by design thinkers looks like a regular alternation of divergent and convergent phases, with each iteration being more focused and attentive to detail than the previous one. In the divergence phase, new choices emerge. In the Convergence phase it's the opposite: it's time to eliminate options and make a choice. It's painful to let go of once-promising ideas, and the coordination and communication skills of the project leader are often put to the test in these situations.
Synthesis, the process of summarizing meaningful patterns from large amounts of raw data, is fundamentally a creative activity. Data is just data, and facts never speak for themselves. Sometimes the data collected is highly specialized, as in the design of a precision component in a medical device; other times it may be purely behavioral, as in the case of a problem to be solved by encouraging people to switch to energy-efficient light bulbs. In each case, the designer is a master storyteller whose skill is measured by his or her ability to enact a compelling, consistent, and believable narrative from the data.
Creative teams must be given time, space, and budget to make mistakes. Tolerance for risk-taking is very much a function of an organization's culture as well as its business strategy. In an organization that encourages experimentation, there will always be projects that end up being fruitless. But viewing such innovative projects as wasteful, inefficient, or redundant may be a common problem in organizations that focus on efficiency rather than a culture of innovation, and which may fall into the trap of incremental growth.
In order to access the power of design thinking, individuals, teams, and entire organizations must foster optimism. People must believe that it is within their power to create new ideas that will fulfill unmet needs and have a positive impact. Optimism requires confidence, and confidence is built on trust. As we all know, trust is built by both parties*** together.
At IDEO, we have dedicated rooms for brainstorming sessions, and the rules are clearly written on the wall: hold off on comments, be whimsical, and don't get off topic. The most important of these rules is the "borrow 'em" rule. This rule ensures that each participant contributes to the ideas previously presented. There is nothing better than a brainstorming session when it comes to creating ideas.
Drawing a diagram expresses both the functional characteristics and the emotional content of an idea. Drawing is a way to express an idea accurately, because even the most precise language can't help us make a decision. Whether the task at hand is a hair dryer, a weekend in the country, or an annual report, the method of drawing pictures drives us to make a decision. Visual thinking can take many forms. We should not assume that visual thinking is limited to objective displays.
At the end of the in-depth research phase, the many brainstorming sessions, and the building of countless models, an entire wall of the project room is covered with promising ideas. A handful of small sticky notes are handed out to each participant, and ballots are then placed on the ideas they think should be moved forward. Team members walked around the room reviewing the ideas, and before long it became clear which ideas attracted the most votes. Design thinking is not an art, a science, or a religion. Design thinking is ultimately the ability to integrate thinking.
While it may seem like spending time on modeling slows down work, modeling gets results faster. Conducting a series of early experiments is often the best way to make decisions when faced with different options. The quicker we clarify our ideas, the sooner we can evaluate and refine them and focus on the best option. Early modeling should be fast, rough and cheap. The more invested in an idea, the harder it is for people to abandon it.
The amount of time, effort, and investment invested in a model is enough to get useful feedback and move the idea forward. The more complex and expensive the model, the more it looks like a "finished" product, and the less likely its maker is to benefit from feedback, or even to want to hear it. The goal of modeling is not to make a working model, but to give concrete shape to an idea, so that the strengths and weaknesses of the idea can be understood and new directions can be found to build the next generation of more detailed and sophisticated models. Experienced modelers know when to say, "That's it, that's good enough".
The inescapable value of scenario notes is that they push us to put people at the center of our ideas, preventing us from getting lost in mechanical or aesthetic details. Scene illustrations remind us at every turn that it is not the object we are dealing with, but the interaction of people and objects. Practical modeling visualizes an idea, lets us understand it, compare it to other ideas, and improve on it.
A useful and simple way of illustrating scenarios in the development of new services is the 'customer journey map'. This is a diagram that shows the stages a customer goes through from the beginning to the end of a service. In each case, the value of describing the customer journey is that it clarifies the circumstances under which the customer interacts with the service or brand. Each of these "touch points" points to an opportunity to provide value to the company's target customers or a reason to lose them forever.
Role-playing is not only fun, it also helps us understand and discover our internal scripts by which we, as adults, live in the world.
The model of success is not the one that is perfect, but the one that teaches us something about our goals, our process, and ourselves. We build models to advance our ideas and make sure that they incorporate the functional and emotional elements necessary to meet the needs of the marketplace. As the project progresses,
the number of models decreases and the accuracy of each model increases, but the purpose remains the same: to help refine and improve the idea.
Once our basic needs are met, we tend to seek out meaningful, emotionally satisfying experiences. The fact that service industries, such as entertainment, finance, and healthcare, are growing much more rapidly relative to manufacturing speaks to the fact that the affluent are more experience-oriented. Moreover, the services themselves have gone far beyond the satisfaction of basic needs: Hollywood movies, eco-tourism and customized shopping have grown rapidly in recent years. The value of these services lies in the emotional ****tone they create.
The real meaning of the experience economy is not entertainment in the first place. The value of products has shifted from being primarily about function to being primarily about the emotional experience that products and services provide. Relying solely on the performance advantages of a product no longer seems to be enough to attract customers or create superior brands to retain them.
Design enriches our lives by creating emotional connections with users through images, shapes, textures, colors, sounds, and smells. The inherently human-centered nature of design thinking points to the next step in design: designing customer experiences that use empathy and human understanding to create opportunities for active engagement and participation.
One way to get people to try new things is to build them on familiar behaviors, as we did when we evoked childhood memories of American adults to create a new bike riding experience for Shimano - the scooter.
Unlike the design of an office building or a lamp, an experience blueprint also depicts emotions. Experience blueprints document how people go through an experience over time. However, an experience blueprint is not about cataloging the process, but about identifying the most meaningful points in time and turning them into opportunities.
First, successful experiences require active consumer participation; second, customer experiences that feel credible, authentic, and engaging are likely to be designed by employees who are embedded in an experiential culture; and lastly, every touchpoint with the customer must be executed with thought and precision - the way a German automobile or a Swiss watch is made. The customer experience should be carefully designed and crafted.
The fourth dimension is design along the timeline. When we design multiple touchpoints along the customer experience journey, we are actually constructing a series of events that are sequential and interconnected in time. Storyboarding, improvisation, and scenario illustration are just a few of the many narrative techniques that help crystallize new ideas as they emerge.
Designing a series of dynamic interactions over time was a radical change for an industrial designer used to designing disconnected physical objects. It was then that I realized that I had to get to know the people I was providing design services for better; that I had to pay as much attention to the behavior of the user as to the product they were using. That's what Moggridge keeps reminding us: we're designing verbs, not nouns.
Designing some kind of interaction is about letting the story unfold over time. This realization has led interaction designers to experiment with narrative techniques like storyboarding and scenario illustration. For example, in developing a predecessor to the modern Global Positioning System for Ten Pao Navigation, the designer told the story of how a sailor navigated from one port to another. Each scenario depicted an important step that had to be designed into the system. Early interaction designers had a tendency to overemphasize specifications. Today's interaction designers, on the other hand, are learning to loosen the constraints and allow the user to have a greater say in how the product is used. Nowadays, almost everything has an interactive component. The distinction between software and the product on which it is based has become blurred, and time-based narrative techniques have entered every area of design.
IDEO has worked with several pharmaceutical companies on specific adherence to medication habits. These companies were using a traditional approach to selling their products that did not create an experience that allowed patients to persist with their medication.
There are three self-reinforcing phases in the medical treatment process: first, the patient must understand his or her condition; second, the patient recognizes the need for treatment; and finally, he or she takes the appropriate treatment. This time-based "adherence circuit" shows that. There are many different points in time in this structure, so it is possible to provide positive reinforcement for adherence at these points in time. Better information can be devised to inform people about their illnesses; medications can be distributed and administered in better ways; and patients can receive help from group support groups, websites, and nurse-answered call centers during the adherence journey.
Many good ideas die out. It's not because the marketplace doesn't embrace them, but because the people who come up with them don't check out the elusive conditions within their organizations. Any complex organization must balance many conflicting interests, and innovative ideas are disruptive. If an idea is truly innovative, it challenges the status quo. Often, such innovations can displace original successes and turn yesterday's innovators into today's conservatives. These new ideas can take resources away from other important programs. These new ideas can make things difficult for managers by offering new choices, because each new choice has unforeseen risks, even if no choice is made. Given all these potential obstacles, it is a wonder that new ideas survive in large organizations.
If you are trying to make an idea survive the treacherous journey from the organization to the marketplace, storytelling can play another, albeit obvious, but critical role: somehow communicating the value of the product to the target audience so that some people will buy it.
From a design thinker's point of view, in order for someone to know about a new idea. That new idea has to tell a meaningful story in a compelling way. Advertising still has a role to play, but rather than bombarding the audience with information, advertising should think about how to turn the audience themselves into storytellers. Anyone who has had a positive experience and feeling about an idea (or product) will be able to speak to its basic features, thus encouraging others to try it for themselves. Bank of America used heavy advertising to successfully launch its "fractional rollover" business, but the promotion of this business was largely based on the existing habits of many of its customers, and worked by turning them into advocates for the business.
IDEO and the Red Cross***, in exploring what motivates or discourages people from donating blood, concluded that it was more important to get people to share their stories, and in doing so, increase their emotional motivation to donate, than to have better-looking signage and more comfortable chairs. People who come back to donate blood may feel that their personal experience is connected to something great that transcends the individual. First-time donors may understand the range of motivations behind this altruistic behavior.
In the newly designed blood donation experience, staff will give each donor a card at registration and ask them to write a short story about why they want to give blood. Those donors who would like to have their picture taken can glue their photo onto the card, which is then posted on a bulletin board in the waiting area. Each donor has their own different reasons for giving blood, but they are all united by one **** same commitment. So what could be easier than telling a story and sharing that story with others?
Design thinkers need to use storytelling as a tool-in a sense not in the form of a regimented beginning, middle, and end, but in a sustained and open-ended way that engages people and encourages them to move forward with the story and draw their own conclusions. An Inconvenient Truth ends the movie by presenting viewers with evidence of global warming and encouraging them to come up with similar evidence themselves.
Smaller technology-driven businesses and innovative-thinking startups often have an advantage over large, successful companies. As the triple principle of "need, feasibility and continuity" explains, for a company to innovate in terms of technological feasibility, other factors must be adapted to cope with any new discoveries. New companies are in the start-up phase. They may not be able to determine their ultimate business model, in which case flexibility and adaptability are core competitive advantages.
Google realized the power of linking search to advertising only after it had been in operation for some time. It was the fledgling Apple Computer, rather than the ascendant Xerox, that succeeded in bringing Xerox's work on computer interfaces to market in the form of the May desktop icon and mouse.
Larger companies are better suited to finding breakthroughs in markets where they are already well established, and where technological superiority is not a guarantee of success. It may be wiser for these companies to advance innovation from a customer-centric perspective that allows them to capitalize on the resources they already have.
In a sense, every product is a service. Despite the fact that products feel like passive objects that have nothing to do with service, the actual_t customer's knowledge of the brand before purchase and the expectation of after-sales services such as maintenance, repairs, or upgrades that they can receive after purchase are all related to the product. Similarly, there is hardly any service that does not include something tangible, whether that tangible is the seat on the flight that carries the passenger across continents or the black-toxic cell phone that connects the user to a vast network of telecommunication services. The line between product and service has blurred.
Instead of creating a hierarchical set of fixed processes that are designed once and executed many times, we need to imagine how to create highly flexible and constantly evolving systems where every interaction between participants creates an opportunity for transpersonal thinking, insight, innovation, and implementation. Each interaction is a small opportunity to make the exchange more valuable and meaningful for all participants.
Communities of bees, ants, and humans must adapt and evolve if they are to succeed, and one way to do that is to give individuals some degree of control over the end result. The case of the Transportation Security Administration is a strong argument for the strategy of design thinkers handing over design tools to those ultimately responsible for implementation.
In January 2001, Wikipedia went live and invited users of the site to submit articles directly. Within a month, 1,000 articles were submitted up. By September of the same year, the number of articles had reached 10,000. To date, Wikipedia is the largest online publication, providing references for almost all secondary school written assignments and existing commercial books (including this book). By positioning Wikipedia as a non-profit foundation rather than a commercial organization, Jimmy Wales has kept to his core principle: unpaid contributors are essential to the cause.
Wikipedia's entries, written by people who care about the content of the site, rather than by professionals who are paid to do so, give Wikipedia credibility, control over the quality of the content, and the relevance of the content. Participation itself is a great power when the participants in the system have the same goal, and Wikipedia is empirical evidence of this.
We want to provide people with an experience that is respectful, effective, and participatory. Design is about delivering satisfying experiences. Design thinking, on the other hand, is about creating a multipolar experience that gives everyone a chance to participate.
Designers can't stop people from disposing of the goods they buy as they see fit, but designers don't use that as an excuse to ignore the larger ecosystem. When we get passionate about solving the problems we face, we often overlook the other problems that arise. Designers, and those who want to think like designers, have the potential to make important decisions about which resources society uses and where those resources end up.
Improving the lives of the needy is a top priority, and designing for the poor should always have cost at its heart;
What has not been achieved before is most likely to be achieved at the cutting edge;
Designing for people, not for profit;
Sometimes, necessity is the mother of innovation;
When it comes to design thinking in schools, the goal must be to create an educational experience that does not stifle a child's natural instinct to experiment and create, but encourages and reinforces it.
The tools of the design thinker: going out into the real world to get inspiration from ordinary people; using modeling and thus learning with your hands; creating stories to share ideas; and collaborating with others in the field, which deepens what is known and expands the impact of what is done.