What is "Design Thinking"?

Design is a pursuit that requires you to be very methodical, logical and smart. You must be able to spot patterns that are not obvious, see things from many different perspectives and bring together seemingly disparate ideas. There is a need for great attention to detail as well as having the ability to abstract something down to its raw components, and being able to sense how it fits into a wider ecosystem.

That beautiful object, interface, gadget, or tool is highly practical as well. You enjoy touching it, you enjoy using it, you enjoy looking at it and having it in your life. It enhances your day, and makes you react emotionally. You love it. It solves a problem, and delights you at the same time. In fact, thinking about it now, it just seems like an obvious solution and you really can't imagine life without it. Someone however did have to sweat the details and work on many many prototypes before you even knew it existed. Why didn't you think of it?

This is where "Design Thinking" fits in. It is a method that allows you to deconstruct a problem, view it from all possible angles, and then craft a solution for it. It is a highly potent recipe for innovation, bringing together people from varied areas of expertise an intellectual and cultural persuasions, to solve a wicked hard problem together. Design Thinking can be applied to any sort of problem from running a hospital to evolving a product and anything beyond and in between. It applies the way that designers  think about problems to just about anything.

Design is not a beauty parlour. It is not where you go to pretty things up. It's where you go when you have problems to solve.

The backstory 

Design Thinking is a user-centered process for innovation based essentially around observation, collaboration between individuals from different disciplines and user group, rapid learning, focus on visualising ideas through prototypes, business analysis and strategy. When I mention "innovation" I don't mean having a lot of ideas, I mean actually making good ideas a reality. Innovation requires action or else they're just ideas. Design Thinking in my mind should be applied to all software development pursuits and can easily integrated with Agile and Lean methodologies. To some extent there's quite a bit of overlap. Using Design Thinking in your software teams will help you get the results you're looking for from a product perspective.

User-centered design is not design by committee

You must develop a deep understanding of your user-base. You must develop empathy for your users, and determine what the best way is to gain insights into unarticulated needs. You need to gain the experience, knowledge and ability to frame the real problem.

Many people mention Henry Ford who reportedly said that "If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses". There's no evidence that he actually said that, but it is clear that he believed it. Ford made the T-model in black only, and dominated the market for nearly 20 years. Ford's mistake was to stop innovating, and to refuse to understand what the market wanted. Harley Earl was GM motors head of Colour and Trim from 1927 to 1959. He not only introduced the idea of the clay prototype (still used to this day), but carried out user centered design by understanding what Americans wanted from their cars. This led to the strategy "A car for every purse and purpose". GM made 5 distinct brands from the Chevy to the Cadillac, and dominated the market. Ford was forced to shut down and re-tool his factories. (You can read more about Henry Ford and the "faster horse" thing on HBR)

This story is sadly still repeated in many industries and companies today, from Kodak to sony and beyond. If you fail to balance your portfolio, failure is a high likelihood.

Companies like Patagonia for example, have continuously innovated and listened to their customers to ensure they were responding to their needs and growing in the right direction as a company. Listening to users does not mean that you should act on every demand, but rather that you get good at sorting the wheat from the chaff, and making well balanced design, business and technical decisions. This is not easy to do, and there are a lot of great tools and techniques to help you get it right. This is the discipline of user-centered design, and it sits at the heart of Design Thinking. It overlaps a great deal with sociology and anthropology. We use ethnographic methods where we seek to understand people by observing, listening, discussing and through open-minded collaboration. If you think you already know what your end-user wants...you're starting to sound a lot like Henry Ford.

Take the time to do it properly and you will be leagues ahead of where you hoped you;d be. Do it wrong and it will cost you dearly as Target found out. They asked consumers in a survey whether they would prefer the aisles to be less cluttered. That was a 1.85 billion dollar mistake. Surveys have their place and this was not one of them. Asking leading questions will also never get you good results. User-centered design is a science, and if you want to do this yourself, then you need to learn how it's done. Learn from the mistakes of others first. Here's a quick overview on surveying to get you started.

The Method in a nutshell: Think - Make - Check

This very same cycle is being seen all over the "Lean" software methodology at the moment. It has been around for at least 50 years, and is finally being popularised and applied to all sorts of different industries by companies like IDEO, who drive large scale innovation in almost every industry that touches our lives.

Think:

During the "Think" stage you should be ideating, encouraging a lot of blue sky thinking, introducing yourself to the box so that you can think outside of it, and imagining all of the possibilities. It is a time to think big and broad. Invite specialists from different areas of expertise and give them a voice. Invite end-users to your workshops and brainstorms. Get all of the ideas on the table and then converge towards a few key directions that work from a business, design, and technical perspective for you and your market.

Tip: Include users by interviewing them, observing them using your current product or a competitor's product, visiting them in their environment.

Make:

It's time to think with your hands. Make some rapid prototypes of the directions that have emerged from your "Think" phase and try them on for size. A prototype can be anything from a role-play (like the Google checkout one for example), to sketches, 3D models made out of cardboard and tape or a user journey draw on post-it notes. Made sure that you only do enough to learn what you ned to. Once you have learned that, it's time to move along and throw this prototype away. You'll be iterating on it many times before you get to your end product. When I say this I don't mean that it is going to take a long time, I mean that in a week or even a day you can make many iterations on a single prototype. Don't get attached to anything, stay open-minded.

Tip: Include users by getting them to participate in collaborative design sessions. Invite them to show you what they are thinking by drawing, role-playing, acting out and modelling.

Check:

Check that your ideas so far are actually in line with what end-users need and want from your product. You can test with humans (anyone who is human) to test if basic interactions and flows are going to work. You should test with end-users and gradually more and more specific user groups, the more you have evolved your prototype. This is a time for stopping a direction dad in its tracks, adapting it to be something else more useful, or giving it the OK. Remember that you may still decide to not go ahead in future, so keep it as rough as you need,and don't waste time on cosmetics and documentation. The documentation is the learning. It is the prototype.

Tip: Include users by getting them to evaluate your prototype, but also by inviting them to tell you what they would change if they were in your shoes, and why.

Rinse and repeat:

You will go back through Think-Make-Check many more times, however many times you need to be comfortable with the result. The early Think-Make-Check cycles are gross and the later ones subtle. The key here is learn quickly whether an idea has legs and what is needed to make it a reality if it does. Learn by making it. Don't waste your time on long meetings where you endlessly discuss the same small details or where groups disagree and theorise over things. Put every to the test. Get people making rather than talking. Call out facts and assumptions. Check the assumptions. Make informed decisions.

A few tips to put it in place:

You don't need a lot of time or effort up-front to get Design Thinking working for you. You just need to do it.

• Start by getting the people you need together, being mindful to include people who view things from different perspectives
• Timeboxing all of your workshops together and keeping the focus and momentum rolling will help you greatly
• Make sure everyone is heard by using different facilitation techniques
• Don't shut down ideas,  build on them. Encourage groups to say "Yes, and..." rather than "No, but..."
• Don't allow any "Devils advocates" to exist in your groups, encourage people to speak for themselves. As Tom Kelley says "Devil's advocates can go to hell". It's too easy to shut ideas down and hide behind the devil.
• Having direct responsibility for your thoughts and ideas in a safe environment where failure is ok, will speed things up
• Prototype all the time. Every time we fail, we learn something important. When we make a paper prototype that fails, we didn't put a lot of time and money into making it, so we are less attached to it. If you have ever spent months working on something and polishing it only to find it isn't what users want anyway...you will know how painful and costly a lesson that is. You can learn those things in a matter of days at little cost. Focus on learning quickly through rapid prototyping
• Don't try to avoid the mess, the failure and the chaos that can sometimes ensue - keep moving towards a solution do not lose momentum. Those spaces of high emotion are where creativity lives.

Different environments will have their own challenges that you will need to deal with of course, and I am confident that it can be done. This is a really short intro to Design Thinking, I encourage you to delve deeper starting with the resources below and to experiment. If you are in a software environment you can work to iterations and soundly incorporate Design Thinking practices within the Agile or Lean framework you are using. More on that soon.

Some useful resources:

"Change by Design" - Tim Brown (book)

"Design Thinking" - Thomas Lockwood (book)

"The art of Innovation" - Tom Peters (book)

"The 10 faces of innovation" - Tom Kelley (book)

D-School Standford - Stanford school of design (website / course)

Tim Brown on Design Thinking - HBR (pdf)

Design Thinking - The movie

My creative technology toolkit

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="...and so this is how someone might use my spaceship to get to work."][/caption] photo credit: pasukaru76

You don't really need anything at all to come up with an innovative or interesting idea, but if you're going to make a habit of it, then it's probably a good idea to get comfortable. I make sure that I'm exposed to a large number of different types of ideas by reading news ranging from electronics industry breakthroughs to new health fads to software releases right through to newly published research papers. I want to know what's new, what's cool, what works, what doesn't and how to do new things.  Once I've consumed and digested all this new stuff, I go for a walk, meditate, practice Pranayama...whatever I need to do to let it go. It might seem counter productive, but I want to retain the knowledge and not the detail. I don't want to copy something by mistake or get too focused on one thing. Once I'm ready to go, I like some quiet time to work on whatever my problem is today, and having access to my "toolkit" helps this somewhat unpredictable process. If it were predictable, my output probably wouldn't be very innovative.

You might find something I use below to be useful to you too. I wonder what tools others in the business of innovation like to use.

Inspiration & Reference:

For me this section is about books, because the web is too distracting at this stage in the process. Sometimes if I'm stuck or just I need of a little lift, I'll read a few paragraphs from one of these. I also refer back to practical book for reference quite a bit too.

Amazon kindle - it was a birthday present and I really cannot part with it, it's awesome and gives me access to all the following books anywhere I go. The eInk is far better for your eyes that the backlight of the iPad. I prefer it for reading.

Materiology - This book is for creatives who "rely on materials and technologies architects, designers, stylists, artists and the like, from students to experienced practitioners."

Sketching user experience - Probably my favourite UX book by one of my favourite UX people.

Processing for visual artists - A good book on Processing with an emphasis on being creative with it.

Making it: manufacturing techniques for product design - It's good to know how stuff is produced and this book covers over 90 different processes.

Gamestorming: A playbook for innovators - A little bok full of brainstorming ideas for when you feel stuck.

Resonate: present visual stories that transform audiences - A book about how to present your ideas. Never underestimate this part of your project.

The 10 faces of innovation - IDEO labs gives us a nice little book on innovation and how to encourage it in your organisation.

The lego minstorms NXT 2.0 discovery book - A "How to book" for making cool little robots from Lego

We are the real experiment: 20 years of FACT - The book from the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, beautiful.

The art of innovation - The story of IDEO labs, I'll write a summary for you on of these days.

Getting started with Arduino - This one is new for me, but I think it's important to make things beyond software so this is a good place to start.

Work materials:

These things are absolutely indispensable for me. I need to be able to get my thoughts out and into the world in a quick and simple way. I try to stay away from the computer or any technology until I sort of know where I'm heading. The following have been really useful during my PhD research especially.

Index cards - one card per idea

Marker pens -lots of different colours

Blutack, glue and sticky tape - to put index cards up on my walls

Post-it notes - the more colours the better. I use them to write caveats on idea cards or warnings

Whiteboard - good for diagrams

Lego - nice way to bring to life a user path. Check out Lego's Serious Play.

Hardware:

Basically you'll want to be able to get your hands on and play with anything that's relevant to your current project, business area or idea. It's nice to be able to have access to anything that's new and interesting, so that you get to learn how to use the technology, how to program for it, and can start to imagine new uses for it. A current hardware list might look something like this:

Laptop, iPad2, iPhone 4, Android phone, Kinect (+ FAAST and the SDK), Camera, Projector, Earphones / Headphones

Other stuff:

Samples (RFID tags, circuit board, LED, bottle caps...) - it's good to have bits and pieces to play with to hand, but you should spend time contacting hardware manufacturers asking for samples when you have pinpointed something you'd like to use. There's nothing quite like making a proof of concept to find out of your idea is feasible.

Software Development Kits (all sorts) - these are like gifts for geeks.

My yoga mat - It's good to move around and get some breath in my body, and it's important to just stop what I'm doing sometimes and give myself a break. Yoga allows me to rest my mind quite effectively, and then the ideas come flooding in afterwards. It just works, what can I say!

What I aim for each time:

1 - To design an innovative and effective solution for a problem

2 - To make a proof of concept

3 - To communicate the solution clearly

I'm hugely passionate about Human Factors, so (almost) all my solutions have the user at the center. The technology I choose to work with s not incidental, but rather one that I think my user will appreciate. That doesn't necessarily mean that I only pick things that they already use, but I do make sure it's going to be an easy transition for them. If the current technology is a bit too geeky but still very cool, I'll work on improving the layman's experience with that. Sometimes really innovative things come exactly at that juncture.

Happy making.

TGIF - It is about living

Welcome to another edition of TGIF here on i-thought! Here's hoping you've all had a really cool week and that you're working on some fun projects too. I'm preparing to guest post in a few places in the coming months, so I'll keep up to date on that. For now, I'll get out of the way this post :) Without further ado...

Stuff I liked this week:

Samsung solar powered LCD TV - It looks pretty awesome

True Female Game Characters - The Escapist show us what it takes to create a good female gaming character

The Tire iron and the Tamale - Originally a Redit posting that made it to the NYT

Bamboo iPad cases - Grove strikes again and makes something useful and beautiful

Ideo Labs Bone Marrow Challenge - Brilliant project by Ideo labs on many many levels

Facts:

Jeff Bezos coined the term Amazon.com from the earlier name Cadabra.com

J.C.R. Licklider came up with the idea of the "Galactic Network" in the 1960's, which planted the seeds for the internet.

Leonard Kleinrock came up with the idea of "Packet switching" the basic form of Internet connections in the 1960's.

The "Ethernet" is a protocol for by many local networks, originally coined in Bob Metcalf's thesis on "packet networks"

Nam June Paik coined the phrase “information superhighway” in 1974.

Quotes:

Computing is not about computers any more.  It is about living.  ~Nicholas Negroponte

After growing wildly for years, the field of computing appears to be reaching its infancy.  ~John Pierce

If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a Unix user to show you how it's done.  ~Scott Adams

Don't explain computers to laymen.  Simpler to explain sex to a virgin.  ~Robert A. Heinlein

The question of whether computers can think is just like the question of whether submarines can swim.  ~Edsger W. Dijkstra

App of the week:

Alchemy - it's an app that you can find in the Google app store. I love the way it gets you to think creatively by letting you create new elements and mixing them with others. It's a lot of fun!

Video footage of the week:

Pretty clever...

What is a creative technologist?

photo credit: RDECOM

There are a lot new roles and job titles emerging from our changing times, especially in this technological landscape. The one I have seen around most of all these last few months in particular is "creative technologist". There's a good few advertising agencies, digital shops, start ups and other organisations all requesting this new breed of technologist. Everyone seems to have their idea of what it is which is fine, but I'm also seeing marked inconsistencies. We're getting to the point slowly, where companies are saying "I want one of those!" but will they really know what to do with a creative technologist when they get one? Would you?

Creative technology

First of all we should cover off what we mean by "creative technology" to begin with. It sits at the intersection of science, technology, humanities and arts. The entire goal of this discipline is the pursuit of innovation. It may well feature a collection of difference technologies that work to achieve something useful, artistic or fun for example. Innovation comes from addressing a need, or from getting a wide range of different ideas from a highly multidisciplinary team. This isn't a new idea, creative technology has been around as a concept for many years. Some of the areas we commonly work in are social innovation, Eculture, digital arts, computing, robotics, psychology, basically anything that can contribute to a new invention (be it social or technological). "Creative technology" doesn't exist as an academic discipline in its own right. It's not really in our interest to make it one, because we need experts from different fields to come together to work on different projects, some completely out of their usual remit. Collaboration is probably the most important keyword in creative technology. In fact, we talk of "extreme collaboration".

Claudia Eckert uses the department of trade and industry's definitions of "creativity as a thought process, design as an articulation of creativity and innovation as an output of the process" to explore the wisdom of separating technical design domains from artistic ones. She says in this article:

"Artistic design domains, such as graphic design, furniture or fashion design, have a very strong artistic component in the training designers receive and sell their products largely on their aesthetic appeal, rather than a functional distinction to other products. Technical domains, such as engineering or software development, have scientific and mathematical foundations. Products are usually distinguished by their functions or features. Many design domains and projects combine both aspects. For example architecture and construction span everything from the purely artistic to the functional and good buildings need to excel in both".

Creativity

I define creativity as " having ideas and solutions that are completely novel", so in this I include discovery of new knowledge (in science, medicine, law and so on), technical innovation, insightful analysis (in any field), composition of art and music in new ways. My experience is that few people tend to think about lawyers or scientists when they think about creativity. To properly understand "creative technology", these associations are fundamental.

Sternberg's Theory of Creativity shows us that the most creative people have a particular type of intelligence and abilities:

- Synthetic intelligence (the ability to combine existing information in novel ways)

- Analytic intelligence (the ability to evaluate ideas and recognise truly novel ones and the ones that need a whole lot more work, and also the ones that aren't worth pursuing)

- Practical intelligence (the ability to communicate the ideas, make things, test things and so forth)

They also have knowledge, in that they have enough context and history around something to be able to avoid reinventing the wheel. They also know when to stop taking in knowledge, to avoid blocking their creativity. They also question everything. This style of thinking can put them into situations of conflict, which is something they need to be resilient to. They're not afraid to take risks, be it looking silly or trying something very hard. Creativity is a full-time job, it's not something you turn on and off depending on what you're working on. We've just looked at some important skills and attributes that make a person creative, regardless of what field they work in.

In this paper, Sternberg says that if you're really creative you "Buy low, sell high" in the realm of ideas. He means that you pursue ideas that are unknown or out of favour, but that have high potential. This is another area where he mentions that the truly innovative encounter resistance.  A quote that I always remember when I think I've hit the jackpot on an idea and nobody else thinks so:

"Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats." (Howard Aiken - computer scientist)

Creative technologists

The creative technologist has a strong technological background (read computing, engineering, or whatever is appropriate for the organisation). They have a very logical, rational, analytical, scientific and objective outlook and are highly left-brain active. They are however also very right-brain active and are intuitive, subjective, holistic, and synthesizing. This sort of combination is partly learned but I believe you are also naturally pre-disposed to it. Interestingly Prof. Ronald Standler says that highly intelligent and creative people often get average grades. I think that a certain amount of distraction is natural, because you are able to look at something in such a large number of ways.

In many agency environments, the creative technologist bridges the gap between "creative" and "technology". Personally, I don't think this is the best use of these excellent skills, and this unique viewpoint. I think that bringing together people who are capable of having lots of ideas at many different levels, and who can also be very practical about them necessitates a certain kind of freedom from a set recipe. IDEO and Jump Associates are the prime example of innovative companies that bring together multidisciplinary teams in an ideal way. I would argue that everyone from the psychologist to the engineer is a creative technologist there (to some degree). The briefs are around pure innovation and everyone's ideas are taken into consideration. Often the outcome of a project is a good mix of everyone's ideas from what I can tell.

Creative technologist Mark Avnet has a nice definition of creative technologist:

"CTs understand the business of advertising, marketing, and branding, take a creative, strategic and people-centric view of how to connect people and brands, and understand the kinds of mediating technologies that can best be used to make those engaging experiences where the connection happens. They sketch with technology, just like a visual creative can sketch with a pencil. They’re steeped in strategy, so the things they come up with make sense – it’s not about technology just for the sake of technology. The experiences they design address real needs of people and brands".

On the iAB blog, Randall Rothenburg interviews RG/A chairman Bob Greenberg:

"There are critical creative needs that didn't exist in the old advertising," says Mr. Greenberg, who counts 130 technologists in his New York office. "Advertising is no longer just about the display ad or the TV commercial or the banner; it's about creating meaningful tools and architecting user experiences. Our technology group, they can keep up to speed technically with the top people at HP or IBM. But they also understand how to work with others to create an application that will lead to community."

It's good that agencies across the board are recognizing the advantage of hiring creative technologists, and their importance in a fast changing ecosystem. We're in a place where innovation is key to the equation and where technology is the main driver. Start ups and idea incubators are popping up all over the place, putting pressure on the older, more established creative agencies worldwide. The focus however needs to remain on innovation and extreme collaboration rather than an industrial race.

None of these things are new for the field of computer science in particular, and also physics for example. The best scientists are all right-brain + left-brain dwellers. Einstein played violin, Richard Feynman the bongos, and Leonardo da Vinci was probably an early example of a master creative technologist. Science is only about discovery and innovation.

Looking after your creative technologist

Here are 5 things you should do to ensure you get the best out of your CT.

Once you get a CT in your team, ideally you'll be looking to find him/her a fellow creative technologist to hang out with and bounce ideas off. The danger of having a sole person responsible for creative technology in your team, is that they are likely to get overloaded with projects that need to be done, and:

- Do not get them involved in production and operations (you'll burn them out on tasks not requiring idea generation, which is what you want)

- Let them read, research, and ponder to their hearts content (Good ideas come from having knowledge, remember?)

- Don't try and measure their output (4 bad ideas can combine to produce one awesome idea)

- Don't rush them (well, not all the time. A little pressure can be beneficial, but requesting things by yesterday is just going to shut down their creativity)

- Do send them to conferences (the more exposure they get to different people, ideas and technologies, the better)

And lastly, if you can create a positive, interesting, fun environment to work in, you'll keep them.

Here is the team at IDEO re-inventing the shopping cart