Here’s an article I came across thanks to my (sometimes neglected) daily email Google Alerts on “Interaction Design”. It’s an article on Design Thinking by CEO and president of IDEO, Tim Brown. It appeared on the June 2008 issue of the Harvard Business Review. I was lucky enough to come across a link to the article in PDF (Thanks, ideo.com).  

Harvard Business Review? Yes. That may be because design thinking seems to be just as valuable and applicable to business, marketing and product-development as it is to user experience an interaction design.

Tim Brown provides a couple of simple examples to illustrate what design thinking is:

[design thinking] - a methodology that imbues the full spectrum of innovation activities with a human-centered design ethos.

This speaks directly to the need to go beyond the salient issues of a design problem or product requirements. It’s about more directly observing people’s lives, their wishes, their needs, their likes and dislikes about whatever is being designed.

That sounds rather compelling. And it should be. After all, user experience and interaction design never stops at the end-cycle of that mobile phone, that controller or that alarm clock.

This next example seems more concrete, in relation to a “real-world” example:

Put simply, it is a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.

It brings “constraints” to the mix —something that every designer has to take into account, regardless of the project.

Other points I found particularly interesting were:

• It reminds us yet again, that design is something that used to be introduced at the end of the production cycle of products, to make thinks appealing and more desirable. Advertising, mostly…
• Design innovation doesn’t come from the “lone, genious inventor”. It’s a team effort. The article recalls how Thomas Edison surrounded himself with number of gifted tinkerers, improvisers and experimenters.
• On “experimentation”, it highlights the importance Edison gave to continuous rounds of trial and error. There is something great to be learned out of every “iterative stab” in design. This approach towards innovation seems as relevant as it was today as it was for the inventor of the electric light bulb.
• Mentions of the main components of a design thinker’s “personality profile”: Empathy, Intergrative thinking, optimism, experimentalism and collaboration.
• Great examples of design thinking in action with Kaiser Permanente’s reengineering of nursing-staff shift changes, Shimano’s introduction to their famous “coasting” bicycles, Aravind’s eye-care outreach in rural populations in India and Bank of America’s “Keep The Change” savings programme.

Overall, this article provides great examples of real people and real companies who have successfully worked around the constraints involved in various exceptional projects. It proves how no matter the what the goals in mind are, they are all achieved through hard work, powered by human-centered processes and iterations composed of prototyping and continuous testing. It shows the extent of the impact design thinking can have, which (again) goes well past the GUI of a computer screen or the package of the latest portable digital camera.

Visit this link to read “Design Thinking” by Tim Brown, in full.