Design « Ingo Rauth

Design

Teaching Design Thinking – Innovation as a learning Process

If there is one paper I would recommend to every teacher, coach and student on who wonders about team leadership or the learning process in design thinking it would be the paper ”Innovation as a learning Process: Embedding Design Thinking” by Sarah Backman and Michael Barry. The paper not only introduces the design thinking, but connects it to learning theory (Kolb, Owen) and thereby combines good, practical advise with background knowledge.

Based on their understanding and observations they propose that every phase of the “process” needs different skills and therefor a different leader. Meaning that the leadership should alter within the team based on skills.

Beside this, the paper offers a list of guidelines for leading teams which I can only recommend:

How does a team know when it needs to shift phases? A good team leader is often critical to helping teams see when they need to move. What does that team leader look for?

There is no reframing going on. The team is stuck with one frame, or one perspective of the problem it is trying to solve, and has been unwilling to try other points of view.

There are no interesting stories being told about the current situation.

There are no “ah-has” from team members who are seeing the situation differently or in new ways.

The conversation and stories that are being told about customers and users are boring, and not inspiring to team members.

There are no challenges to existing norms.

The team is not being generative enough; it is coming up with interesting ideas that may well meet user needs, but none are real opportunities for the business.

The team is confused; the models or frameworks that it has come up with are too complicated or difficult to internalize.

The team leader must also understand the learning styles of each of the individuals on the team so that he or she hears each team member well, and in particular is tuned into the need to shift the process based upon the inputs of the team members and their particular perspectives. (Source: Sara L. Beckman, Michael Barry (2007) Innovation as a learning Process: Embedding Design Thinking)

From my own experience I think this as well as the rest of the paper is not only helpful to teams but also to coaches in design thinking since it provides a solid background as well as some hands on advice. It is full of example from the research’s experience teaching the subject. Although this might be considered as a very subjective view, this paper is definitely worth a read.

download the paper

download the presentation

Drucker and User-Centeredness

While I was reading Tims Brown’s “definition” of design thinking for the x-time now, I actually never checked his reference to Peter Drucker. Drucker is, according to wikipedia the “best-known and most widely influential thinkers and writers on the subject of management theory and practice”. True or not, I was quite curious about what he wrote on the subject so I searched his book, “The Essential Drucker” for converting need into demand and found the following in the chapter entitled “The Purpose of Business”:

“It demands that business start out with the needs, the realities, the values of the consumer. It demands that business base its reward on its contribution to the customer…. It will force business to become market-focused in their actions as well as in their pronouncements.” (p. 16)

Seems like a quite strong statement, taking Drucker’s reputation into account. But be aware that, also its sounds like a great statement for user-centered design, the argument was done to clarify the role of marketing and innovation (the “only two” basic functions of a business, according to Drucker).

Design / User Centered — No Comments
19
Apr 11

Q&A with Charls Eams

I stumbled upon the reference to this video just yesterday and immediately had to check if there is a version online. Although it seems as it has been cut, concerning the date (1972) it could be considered quite visionary. This makes one wonder if we have learned anything new in the last (almost 40) years. It seems like design is still trying to catch up to this ideal state, described in the video.

A transscipt of the video can be found here. Would have loved to see the original (if there is an un-cut version).

User Centered — No Comments
19
Feb 11

User-Led Innovation Can’t Create Breakthroughs

Just came accords this identically named article on fastcodesign. Wondering why somebody writes User-Led Innovation since I always thought it’s user centered innovation. Therefor finding unmet opportunities by understanding and observing (future) users, not by ask the users what they want. Who does that anyway? Of course a user can’t predict the future, and even if they “knows” what they want its most likely that they come up with “faster horses” (to paraphrase Henry Ford). We all know that, so, in my point of view, someone who really thinks that this is the way to go forward didn’t really get the point of user centered innovation. In addition I think someone has to be also critical not to miss the another point of the article which draws attention to the fact that there are other sources of innovation which got less attention at the moment, but which are equally important.

And, in the end, it is not – most of the time – the user that limits the radicalness of innovations,but the companies themselves which are unable or unwilling to met the challenges that radical innovations bring with them.

Design Thinking / Management — No Comments
17
Feb 11

Design Thinking, a toolkit for managers?!

Cover by Columbia Business School Publishing

This is the first publication, I’m aware of, that tries to address the operative nature of design methodology in management practices. A bit supprised by the monodisciplinary approach, (previous publications of other authors have favored mostly multi.- or transdisciplinary approaches) “Designing for Growth: a design thinking tool kit for managers” by Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilivie frames a good logical structure and sheds some light on the use of design thinking in management practices .

Since the book isn’t out yet, this review draws on the first two chapters which are online and definitely worth a read.

The main share of the first chapter is devoted to develop a convergence between design and business and point out four main reasons why design is beneficial to managers:

Design is all about action, and business to often get stuck at the talking stage.
Design teaches us how to make things feel real, and most business rhetoric today remains largely irrelevant to the people who are supposed to make things happen.
Design is tailored to deal with uncertainty, and business’s obsession with analysis is best suited for a stable and predictable world.
Design understands that products and services are bought by human beings.

Although these statements read like an ad campaign for design the authors clarify their view on management practices by stating: “The problem in many established organizations today is not that our analytical approaches are bad – it’s all we’ve got…”.

The second chapter offer an alternative visualization of the process. Instead of using a verb based vocabulary the authors identified four basic questions, underlying the design process. (Fig.1.)

Fig.1: Design thinking process description from "Designing for Growth" by J. Liedtka and T.Oglivie

In addition to these, the book suggests 10 tools which should be used within the steps to manage the journey from identifying today’s challenges till the learning lunch, a tool which moves concepts into the field to find out about disconfirming data to improve previously developed hypotheses (prototypes). Although these tools might not seem that many, its great to see a logical structured approach from ideation to insights to ideas and finally concepts, underpinned with tools that allow a replicable approach.

The second chapter ends with a WARNING that, despite all good intentions, the biggest obstacles with this lies in the inner barriers of companies who “still don’t get it”. Although I don’t know if that’s just the companies fault, the outlook on a final chapter addressing “moving a design project through an organization”, sounds promising.

All in all, I’m looking forward to the final book, which will be released (according to amazon.com) in June 2011. The only main critique which I would have right now is that design thinking, as far as I understood it in the first two chapters, is mend to be used as a toolbox, which I think differs quite heavily from recent approaches and misses a lot of the benefits one can get through collaboration.

Design Thinking — No Comments
10
Nov 10

What is Design Thinking?

Being asked to define it a couple of times, I just came across this very interesting video on the “Dialog on Design” blog.

Design — No Comments
6
Oct 10

Design Push

I think we all heard about tech push and market pull, but although I’ve read the terms multiple times, I never came across “design push”. According to the report (Educating for the Creative Workforce : Rethinking Arts and Education) – which quotes Verganti(2003) – design push is: where what is ‘new’ is not a technical innovation, but a largely symbolic difference (the Apple iPod as opposed to another portable music system would be an example of ‘design push’).
Although I would argue on the example, Verganti term and his description that ‘design is the brokering of languages’ are quite interesting.

Design / Management — No Comments
7
Sep 10

Managing as Designing – series on YouTube

I just discovered these videos while searching for the book “Managing as Designing” (thx. Christina). The videos are the result of an conference at the Weatherhead School of Management where 60 managers, designers and scholars gathered to talk about the topic of Managing as Designing.
It’s amazing that all this thoughts about “How the art of design can inform the practice of management” where thought about 8 years and how little has been applied (at least from what I experienced so far).

Introduction

Why This? Why Now?

About the idea of multiple models:

Thrownness:
Beeing thrown into a situation captures the experience of what an designer has to cope with while doing a project.

Collaboration

Liquid-Crystal

Legacy

Design — No Comments
28
Aug 10

Design Reseach Methods

I just read through an discussion at linkedin which featured some pretty useful links in terms of design research.
So for anyone interested who isn’t on linkedin, check out these links:

The Design Research Guide

InformeDeisgn
A magazine that transforms research into an easy-to-read, easy-to-use format for architects, designers…

An Evolving Map of Design Practice and Design Research

All about Design Research

You might also want to check the link collection of design methods, if you search for specific tools, used within the design process itself.

Design Thinking — No Comments
23
Apr 10

Integrative Thinking

Humantific just released a chapter of their forthcoming book “design thinking made visible”.

Within this chapter, it seems, they somehow redefined what “integrative thinking” is:

“Integrative Thinking (and it’s cousin integrated innovation) is the disciplined ability of recognizing, orchestrating and integrating the diverse brainpower of cross-disciplinary teams as they grapple with and navigate complex innovation challenges.” [Humantific, 2010]

This was formally done by Roger Martin who defines integrative thinking a this way:

“…the ability to constructively face the tensions of opposing models, and instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generating a creative resolution of the tension in the form of a new model that contains elements of the individual models, but is superior to each.”[Rotman 2008]

If you compare the two, the main difference is that Humantific looks into diversity as in the “diverse brainpower” of teams while Martin looks into them as “opposing models”. In a way, Humanific’s explanation re-frames integrative thinking a bit closer to the team approach and therefor towards design thinking.

Never the less, with this new publication Humantific enters the “Design Thinking” discourse which will give great new inputs for the community. For those who aren’t familiar with them, check out Humantific website or this publication NextD: Understanding Design Futures That Have Already Arrived!

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