Design Thinking as a Creative Process: Technology, Business, & Human Values

I just discovered this whole field called “DESIGN THINKING.” It’s a process for designing practical and creative resolutions for an end action/product/program that brings about improvement for a group of people. What I like about this process is that it defines itself against ANALYTICAL THINKING - because design thinking is a “creative process based around the ‘building up’ of ideas. There are no judgments early on in design thinking. This eliminates the fear of failure and encourages maximum input and participation in the ideation and prototype phases.”

NO JUDGEMENTS!!! This is big! So much of “analytical thinking” is about coming up with ideas that don’t look or sound stupid and ideas with minimum chances of failure. But that prevents people from thinking creatively and working as a team because everyone is too invested in their ego or their discipline or their theory.

EVERYDAY KNOWLEDGE! What I like about this philosophy is that it mirrors how people think about solutions in everyday life before they are socialized into institutionalized forms of thinking that require theoretical considerations or busines models. All around the world people are engaging in design thinking! India has been really good at tracking innovations by ordinary people who don’t have “design degrees” or have elite business social networks. Check out the National Innovation Foundation and Honeybee Network.

MULTIDISCIPLINARY THINKING!!! Yah I love things that promote multidisciplinary in a genuine way that values the role of professionals who work on understaning human values - so lookie I know where I fit in! There’s me - ethnographer/sociologist/anthopologist! I have a place in this world - this is so exciting :)  I love learning about new business models and technologies - but at the end of the day i’m not a technologist or a hard-core business person - but my entry into both of those worlds is from the perspective of understanding the cultural practices and beliefs of new users who are consuming new technologies. Companies, like Google and P&G, are using this process to understand new markets. This makes me excited that I am employable in non-academic sectors! (thanks Tania Menendez! for the link)

IT’s ABOUT PEOPLE! Design thinking brings it all back to the humans - humans are the ones who use and interface with products - so this process is all about putting humans in all their capacities in the center.  So much of design in the past focused on creating “sexy” products - I think that’s why people associate design with “aesthetic”  - while I appreciate that aspect for I am just as enamored in beautiful packaging as anyone else - design thinking as a process beings the process back to the people and the people who use the products. GOOD DESIGN THINKING around a product CREATES SEXY PRODUCTS - designing for aesthetics only gets you so far - designing for people takes you a lot farther.

The three approaches to Design Thinking are (cited from here):

1. Proactively understand customer needs and cultural norms unique to each country.

2. Use those insights to run low-fidelity, strategic experiments.

3. Use the resulting assumptions to drive the development of local business models, including product development, marketing and branding, sales and distribution, and manufacturing.

Stanford has a whole institute dedicated to Design Thinking- The Hasso Plattner School of Design at STandford, started by David Kelly, the founder of IDEO.  The whole philosophy at IDEO is Design Thinking:

Because design is messy and non-linear, each project we do is bespoke. We customize it for the challenge at hand. The scoping of the project plan is when our approach starts to take shape, and where our partnership with you begins…An inherently shared approach, design thinking brings together people from different disciplines to effectively explore new ideas—ideas that are more human-centered, that are better able to be executed, and that generate valuable new outcomes.

And I love Tom Brown’s (CEO of IDEO) blog on Design Thinking.

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I would like to think through the Design Thinking process for my work in Mexico with Barry Brown, Gloria Mark, Jesus Favela and Tanya Mendendez. We are working with a village in Oaxaca on designing appropriate technology for the people of this village. All along we’ve approached it from the circle that would be called “Human Values” according to DEsign Thinking. After two years of ethnography fieldwork in Oaxaca, we are finally in the phase where we are bringing in the technologists of CICESE and the people of the village to brainstorm ideas that would be useful for THEIR lives - not ours! We are hosting  the design workshop in 2 weeks so I will post about that later.

Thanks Al Abut for pointing out some critiques of DEsign Thinking here and here - that essentially say this process nurtures the designer’s ego instead of removing it. Perhaps I am not clear about this process since my entry point isn’t as a designer nor as a corporation - but I would think that a more genuine implementation of Design Thinking requires an equal level of respect given to all the team-members that come from the all the other disciplines and the users. For me Design Thinking is exciting because it’s discusses a formal way to equally valorize the role of ethnographers/sociologists/anthropologists alongside the technologists and business heads. For too long psychologists were the only “people”-centered research folks allowed at the table.