Design Thinking:
Case for Design thinking: Interview With Tom Kelley
Introduction:
Tom Kelley is the CEO of IDEO and a pioneer of design thinking. Tom Kelley
is also the best-selling author of Creative Confidence, The Art of Innovation
and The Ten Faces of Innovation as well as a partner at the renowned design
and innovation consultancy IDEO. ... Tom is an Executive Fellow at the Haas
School of Business at UC Berkeley and holds a similar role at the University
of Tokyo.
Design Thinking is the industry standard for design. Design is essential to
engineering in the same way entering the correct destination into a navigation
app is essential to getting to where you want to go. There are many Design
Thinking processes, which all share many common elements. Today we will
learn about the steps in the Design Thinking process which we will use.
Design thinking has a human-centered core. It encourages organizations to focus on the
people they're creating for, which leads to better products, services, and internal processes.
When you sit down to create a solution for a business need, the first question should always
be what's the human need behind it?
In employing design thinking, you’re pulling together what’s desirable from a human point of
view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable. It also allows those who
aren't trained as designers to use creative tools to address a vast range of challenges. The
process starts with taking action and understanding the right questions. It’s about embracing
simple mindset shifts and tackling problems from a new direction.
Source: Admin. (2020). What is Design Thinking? IDEO U. Retrieved from
https://www.ideou.com/blogs/inspiration/what-is-design-thinking
Instructions:
1. Watch #16: IDEO's Tom Kelley is Design Thinking's ultimate disciple, he makes the
case as to why.
2. While watching , take hand written notes about the topics discussed in the video.
3. Read the Text below.
4. Watch:
a. Design Thinking Process Overview
Questions:
Questions 2-5 Source: What Is Design Thinking? | Week 1: Introduction to Design Thinking |
Design Thinking Fundamentals | edX. (2021, August 26). Retrieved from https://learning.edx.org
1. What is one thing that Tom Kelley said that will effect the way you do creative work.
One thing that Tom Kelley said that will affect the way you do creative work is when
you’re too worried about what others will say about your work. When being creative
you have to not care about what others say and you must also not be afraid to have it
turn into a disaster. Tom Kelley recommended that it was best not to make a
presentation about your ideas and that it was better to keep it confidential and let the
audience try to understand what it is from an unbiased perspective. That unbiased
perspective from the audience is the key in helping you understand what to improve
on.
2. Describe something that you have experienced that didn't take into account one or more
of the characteristics of a good solution.
A lot of products in modern society today seek to make our lives easier. However,
many of these products fail to account for sustainability. For instance, plastic water
bottles are made to be compact, portable, and easily disposed of. However, their
ultimate environmental impact is negative, as the material it is composed of is
unsustainable, harmful for the environment, and poses a threat to the animals in the
environment.
3. How did this thing or service affect you?
Plastic existing makes our lives easier because if you think about it we can transport
water with us at all times, it is also used as plastic containers and many things that we
come across in our day to day lives.
4. What characteristic(s) of a good solution seemed to be missing?
A characteristic that is missing is the brand of water. A lot of people drink Dasani water
but a lot of people end up drinking Kirkland water because it is cheap and it is fresh
water.
5. How would you have changed the object or service for the better?
Minimize the use of plastic, plastic is something that can’t be decomposed so it is best
that we minimize the use of it.
Text:
Source: What Is Design Thinking? | Week 1: Introduction to Design Thinking | Design Thinking
Fundamentals | edX. (2021, August 26). Retrieved from https://learning.edx.org/
What Is Design Thinking?
Design thinking is a user-centered, creative, and collaborative problem-solving methodology.
Design thinking also describes a set of attitudes and a way of thinking about one's own
participation in the problem-solving process. This course will help you learn and practice both
aspects.
While individuals can perform design thinking, it is best done in cross-functional teams that
represent key areas of expertise, as illustrated by the 3-circle Venn diagram shown below.
The key areas of expertise are:
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Technology - Knowing what is feasible. The systems, mechanisms, or science that
makes something work. The tools and materials available to work with.
Business - Knowing what is viable. The goals of the organization, or alignment to
organization mission or strategic direction. The financial and human resource
requirements.
User - Knowing the particular needs and wants of a population of users. Also knowing
about their context and how that context affects any potential solution.
If you are working on a team, you will want to have at least one person from each area
represented. We will talk more about team formation in Week 2. If you are working on your
own, as some designers do, you may find that you need to play different roles throughout the
process. You will still need to gather pertinent information at the beginning of the process,
visualize ideas to properly evaluate them, and come up with a solution that fits the problem or
need.
A problem might require many different types of expertise to solve, and many iterations to
target the best solution. The teams that practice design thinking are more powerful when
members have a diverse set of perspectives and areas of expertise. Design thinking requires
that all members of the team understand user research to uncover the real needs and desires
of the target market. In fact, more than simply understanding user research, design thinking
requires that you place the needs of the user and your understanding of their problem at the
center of your work. Then, grounded in research and fueled by creativity, teams come up with
ideas, create models of those ideas, and critique those ideas in a cycle of iteration that moves
toward a solution.
Design thinking produces solutions with the user and their context always in mind, increasing
the likelihood that your user will be happy with your solution. Design thinking is a proven and
repeatable problem-solving methodology that anyone can employ to achieve successful
results.
What Design Thinking Is Not
Let's talk about the word design. A "design" is a plan or drawing that reveals how something
works. Design can also be the series of choices one makes when deciding on the look or
function of an object or a space, but the purpose of design thinking is not simply to make
something attractive. In design thinking we pay attention to how something looks, but we are
just as concerned with other aspects—the materials, whether it accomplishes the desired
task, how it works within the user's personal or work life, how much it costs to create, and so
on.
Design thinking is called "design thinking" because it represents how designers go about
solving problems.
While you do not need to be an artist or a designer to do design thinking, design thinking can
benefit from visual techniques such as sketching and storyboarding. Visualization techniques
like these are used to communicate and explore ideas. We will talk about this more in Week 4.
Let's keep dissecting this phrase "design thinking." Design thinking is not just design. In
addition, design thinking is not just thinking. While you can perform some aspects of design
thinking on your own, design thinking is best done with a group of people, each one bringing
special talents and areas of expertise. To activate the best thinking from your group, you need
to get active. You need to get something to write on and take notes and sketch and diagram.
You need to hear from experts who can tell you more about the problem you're working on.
You should go out and see the problem in context and meet your users. You should go out
and see how people use your products or see the service in action.
Design Thinking Process Overview
Recap of the Main Stages
Research
The research stage begins with a problem. This problem can come directly from the user, it
can be in a newspaper story that you read, it can come from your manager, etc. The research
that you conduct helps you to understand more about the problem and more about the people
affected by this problem.
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User and target market research: provides an understanding of user environments
(where the end products or services are intended to be used), practical and aesthetic
aspects of potential solutions, and can even predict marketplace trends
Business research: consists of data and statistics related to the organization's
interests or focus area such as a product portfolio plan, revenue/profit requirements,
establishing geographic interests for product distributions, etc.
Technology research: focuses on assessment to determine strengths, weaknesses,
and availability of particular materials or what resources might be relevant for a
specific problem area
Ideation
When people talk about design thinking, it's usually the activities associated with ideation that
come to mind. This is the stage in which all ideas, no matter how wild, are welcome. All ideas
are then assessed against the research done in the preceding stage. Some common tasks
are:
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Visualization / storytelling
Strategic mapping of solution ideas by theme, such as product categories or timelines
Prototyping
Prototypes are an opportunity to make your ideas real, or at least real in model form.
Prototypes are a useful way of testing out strong ideas or products with users. Do your
solutions really work like you thought they might? What do your users think of them?
Prototypes can be used during any stage of the design thinking process and can help with:
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Iterative development, user validation, and refinement
Demonstration to stakeholders
Ongoing Iteration
While we talk about design thinking as a series of stages, it's important to know that there are
many cycles of design thinking within a single project. As you proceed along the stages, you
always want to check back with your understanding of the problem description, the research
you've done, the ideas you came up with, and so on. You may find when you're ideating that
you have a gap in your understanding of your users or the definition of the problem, and that's
exactly why design thinking is so powerful. Design thinking is built on iteration, or successive
cycles of a process, each cycle getting closer to a solution. Iteration can feel like a lack of
progress, that's why the "thinking" part of design thinking is so important. We'll talk about this
next.
The "Thinking" Part of Design Thinking
The different stages in the design thinking process require different ways of thinking. During
one stage you may be open to all ideas. In the next stage you will think more critically about
the ideas you generated, grouping them, refining them, and selecting ideas that seem to best
address the problem. Design thinkers approach problems with a flexible, positive, and critical
thought process that helps them synthesize information from a variety of sources. This ability
to apply many ways of thinking to solve a problem is what helps design thinkers identify new
ideas, innovations, or improvements from the insights they gather during this stage.
Once a problem description has been finalized, design thinking in the early stages of the
process can feel very vague, especially when first considering design problems or
opportunities. During this early stage you will brainstorm, create mind maps, and use other
strategies to get everything you think of that is associated with this problem out in the open
and onto paper or a whiteboard. This early stage takes time. In later stages of the design
process, thinking can be lightning fast. These "a-ha!" moments that may occur later in the
process are fueled by the work that is done in early on. The thinking you do during prototyping
can be very linear as you consider issues associated with evaluating and implementing your
solution.
Through the entire process, the most important question you can ask is Why? Asking "why"
keeps your thinking fresh and prevents you and your team members from settling for a
solution that isn't as good as it could be. "Why" helps you test out the problem description in
the early stages and evaluate new ideas that emerge.
The key skill in design thinking is to be aware of your thinking throughout the design process,
making sure that you're not being limited by your own misconceptions.
There's a story about a truck that illustrates how hard it is to identify the influence of old
understandings of a problem.
"Rumpf truck gets stuck..." by Wystan.
Used under CC by 2.0
The parable of the truck stuck under a bridge
A truck driver thought she had enough room to drive her delivery truck under a train
trestle. Unfortunately, the road was newly paved. There was less space to pass
under the trestle than the sign indicated, and her truck became lodged. She got out
of the truck, and along with a crowd of onlookers, tried to solve her problem. As she
was about to ask for a chainsaw to cut the top of her truck off, a young girl in the
crowd asked if she couldn't simply let some of the air out of her truck's tires.
Identifying and correcting misunderstandings is incredibly difficult. Design thinking can
help—it is a positive, highly conscious type of thinking that will open up solutions at the
beginning stages of the process.
Applying Design Thinking to Your Context
It is likely that if you are solving problems where you work, you are already using some aspect
of design thinking. This course will help you identify those aspects of design thinking that
you're already doing and provide suggestions for how to implement design thinking more
intentionally where you work. In Week 2 we will talk more on this topic.
Organizations around the world use design thinking to:
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Identify what is distinctive about a company's products and services
Identify new products or services
Plan improvements to underperforming products or services
Implement a procedural change or identify a new strategic direction for the
organization
Design thinking can be used in many more contexts such as healthcare, education,
government, in fact, in any place with complex user-focused problems.
Characteristics of Good Solutions
Before you begin any process, it is helpful to know what your goals are. In design thinking,
these characteristics of a good solution apply, no matter what your particular situation or set of
users. A good solution:
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Has a purpose: You always start with a problem that needs solving and you arrive at
the solution using the design thinking process. You are not using design thinking to
figure out who may benefit from solution you already have. In other words, design
thinking isn't meant to work backward from solution to problem.
Is useful: The solution fulfills its intended purpose.
Is understandable: A good solution should be easy to understand or learn. Or, the
work to learn the solution should be worth the effort.
Is honest: A good solution does not promise more than it provides.
Is sustainable: A good solution does not adversely affect the environment, nor does it
require resources (whether material or personnel) in a way that can't be maintained
over time.
Is long-lasting: Make sure the work you put into the design thinking process is worth
it. Provide a solution that does not break often or deteriorate quickly.
Fits to the context: A good solution makes sense for the location it is used in, the
people who use it, and the function it was meant to perform.
Is compelling: It should resonate with the user by making them feel confident when
they use it. They should want to use your solution.
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Is simple: The solution should include only those elements necessary for fulfilling the
rest of the criteria in this list.
A good solution must take into account the complexity of humans and their practical and
emotional responses (their needs and their wants). Both aspects must be considered during
all stages of the design thinking process.