Tag / design thinking
How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Design Thinking
If you like this article, you probably want to sign up to be notified when my new book on Visual Thinking is out (in less than a month, I promise!) Also, there is discussion and some clarification on the Medium version of the post.
When I first heard about Design Thinking, I thought it was a clever rebranding effort by IDEO to charge twice as much for user-centered design. What can I say, I’m an old fart of a designer, and when I read about design thinking, I didn’t really see the big whup. And I wasn’t alone.
But over time I’ve discovered that the oft-parodied approach to Design Thinking — a lot of post-its and a lot of prototyping — works better than nearly any other approach to product and service innovation.
Why?
Do designers truly think in a different way?
The key is the word “thinking.” I want to make an argument that Design Thinking is a kind of thinking based on three key cognition theories:
Distributed Cognition Expertise Thinking Iterative World Modeling Let me break ea..
A Survey of 3,000 Executives Reveals How Businesses Succeed with AI
Photo by Aaron Burson The buzz over artificial intelligence (AI) has grown loud enough to penetrate the C-suites of organizations around the world, and for good reason. Investment in AI is growing and is increasingly coming from organizations outside the tech space. And AI success stories are becoming more numerous and diverse, from Amazon reaping operational efficiencies using its AI-powered Kiva warehouse robots, to GE keeping its industrial equipment running by leveraging AI for predictive maintenance.
While it’s clear that CEOs need to consider AI’s business implications, the technology’s nascence in business settings makes it less clear how to profitably employ it. Through a study of AI that included a survey of 3,073 executives and 160 case studies across 14 sectors and 10 countries, and through a separate digital research program, we have identified 10 key insights CEOs need to know to embark on a successful AI journey.
Don’t believe the hype: Not every business is using AI… y..
The Creative Founder
Class Write Up: Three Years of Learning Creative Founder is in many way the anti-foundations of interaction design.It has no interest in designing interfaces, or usability (except as a means to an end.) Yet it is the ultimate design class, using design methodologies to understand customers and buyers, and to speak value in their language, and to provide change in their lives.
Creative Founder was the first class I taught at CCA, when it was called Designer as Founder. I suggested teaching a startup class to the chair of the department because I believe designers should understand business. I suspected designers would resist taking a class that admitted it was teaching them business, but would flock to sexy start-up land. It’s been waitlisted every year, though no longer for the original reasons. It has developed the reputation of being ridiculously hard, and the class that gets you ready for thesis, and then for life.
Zhiyou and Jaime working the BMC. The first one was spring of 2014..
Foundations of Interaction Design
I teach a number of classes at CCA, including Creative Founder, Story and Play. One year I tried on teaching Foundations. I love the Sophomores, and the class went great, but I found myself a bit bored teaching core concepts yet again. I passed on teaching the class the next year in favor of some other “weirder” ones (like Play!). I want to write up my choices as I designed this class so that other teachers can use this as a resource. And someday I may return to this interesting problem, “How do we make interaction and UX designers?”
Here is the syllabus. The best part of it is, IMO, the deliverable checklist.
This is the prettified version, made by Bibiana Bauer Goals and Process When I committed to teaching this class, I had a lot of decisions to make. My Foundation class would be 15 weeks long, once a week, for six hours. This may feel like a lot of time, but it’s not, really, to teach the foundations of interaction design. I believe it’s not enough to teach “pure” interactive des..
The Financial Industry Needs to Start Planning for the Next 50 Years, Not the Next Five
Despite rapid innovations in data processing and machine learning, many businesses have yet to make the leap from the Industrial Age to the information age, and the gap between technological and organizational progress is widening. Closing this gap requires much more than short-term fixes, like adopting new technologies. Businesses need to organize around long-term strategies for growth and partnership in a sustainable way. The consequences for not doing so can be dire.
Eastman Kodak is the textbook case for failing to prioritize an innovation agenda; business schools around the world study the ramifications of the company’s ill-fated decision to ignore the digital photography market until it was too late. It’s far from the only case of a failure to embrace a more digital approach; the larger shift to digital is changing the way every industry operates. Some industries, like photography and media, were impacted earlier. Others, like financial services, are only now experiencing this c..
The unity—and spectrum—of the discipline of design
You make great observations, Jonas, about UI/UX and the various other names used to describe design work. The frustration you describe really resonates.
Your discussion about design being one thing also rings true. I believe that the emerging idea (over the past half century) that design should revolve around human-centeredness has given designers a worthy banner to rally around and has been a major factor in unifying design as a discipline. This focus has given us principles of design that make sense whether talking about urban design, architecture, industrial design, service design, digital design, or many other types of design. I love that we can now talk about design as a thing across such a broad range of specialties and industries.
On the other hand, I strongly believe that although design is one unified thing, it is not carried out as a single skill. The design of any type of product or service requires distinct skills across a spectrum that covers:
strategic design: focused on ..
So, what is design anyway?
The word design is used in so many ways that you begin to wonder if it has any useful meaning at all. All of these may be regarded as acts of design:
Laying out a magazine adMaking an engineering plan for a suspension bridgeUsing A/B testing to improve user response to a websitePlotting an elaborate trapWireframing user interactions for a mobile appCreating the graphical look and feel of a mobile appPlanning the features of a product that solves a perceived user problemCollecting user feedback on a product or servicePreparing architectural plans for a beautiful buildingPreparing architectural plans for an ugly buildingSince folks refer to any and all of these examples (and many more) as “design,” the term design could be regarded as just a great big basket that holds many things that have no clear relationship to one another, except for the fact that someone, somewhere calls them design.
Why do people know what an engineer is, but not what a designer is?As a discipline, engineering is ..
Google’s greatest design triumph
And why they may never have another one like it
The state of search, circa 1998Many of you whippersnappers are too young to remember search before Google. Well this is what it looked like (and there were a bunch of others too)…
What’s all that cruft? Search options, advertising, links to sponsored stuff, non-search functions, and who knows what all else.
Besides the clutter, there was another, bigger problem: the search results. Search engines of that era either “crawled” the whole web, like HotBot, but were unable to display the results in a useful order, or they were based on a human-curated directory, like Yahoo!, but were not at all comprehensive. And as the web exploded in quantity of content, the chaos of crawler-based search and the lack of completeness of human-curated search both became increasingly painful.
Then…
Along came GoogleWow! Clutter gone. (And even more-so in subsequent iterations.) Even more importantly, Google rolled out a search algorithm that sliced the Gordian ..
Design thinking, unboxed
7 design thinking principles liberated from design thinking methods
Design thinkers were around a long time before “Design Thinking” was considered to be a discipline. These are some folks from America’s past that I see as design thinkers and the fields they impacted:
Benjamin Franklin — civic institutions: lending library, postal system, fire departmentFredrick Law Olmsted — landscape architectureHenry Ford — the automobile, manufacturingWalt Disney — animated films, theme parksSteve Jobs — personal technologyOprah Winfrey — personalized mass mediaThese design leaders followed principles that we may now regard as design thinking, though they never would have used that label. By their examples it should be clear that design thinking cannot be packaged into a fixed set of methods to be applied universally. If we try to do so, we may lose the spirit of design thinking itself. Rather, I think it would be useful to have two conversations that we keep separate:
To discuss the principles tha..
Disruption by design
Proposing that design innovation — not technological innovation — is what disrupts businesses and industries.
The idea of disruptive technology has been with us since Clayton Christensen released The Innovator’s Dilemma in 1997. Since then, we have seen not only major companies disrupted, but entire industries. We have observed incredible disruption in a very short time, but can we learn from this history how to reliably cause disruption? In this regard, I want to examine the premise that:
It is design innovation — not technological innovation — that causes disruption.I am using technological innovation to mean the use of engineering knowledge to create new processes and products and design innovation to mean the use of design thinking to create improved experiences using available technologies. If I am right, then those who want to innovate to disrupt must shift their focus from technological innovation to design innovation.
The real cause of disruptionConsider a few famous cases of d..