CHANGE BY DESIGN — My little summary and evaluation of Tim Brown’s book

The writer of the book, Tim Brown was trained as an industrial designer. He has earned many design awards, he had exhibitions in many prestigious museums such as Design Museum in London and MoMA in New York; and his writings has been published by Harvard Business review and the Economist. He is the CEO of one of the best-known design and innovation firm IDEO, which is also one of the earliest practitioner of design thinking.

The book, Change by Design is about design’s role in creating and developing organisations, companies, communities and governments. Tim Brown proposes that design methods are not only useful for design agencies and other creative industry but could be used in all the other industries. Design thinking can be applied in organisations and can be used to solve problems by creating ideas, organising information etc.

Tim Brown quotes Tom Peter that “the MFA is the new MBA” adding that we need both MFAs and MBAs. Business requires the analytic thinking together with the creative thinking that could come from the design practice. If done right, the author says, design thinking can lead to valuable explorations and discoveries. For Brown, a design thinker should be able to work as part of an interdisciplinary team. To do so, a design thinker should be knowledgeable in other fields along with a deep understanding of their own field.

The book mostly consists of cases from IDEO. The author shows what conclusions IDEO reached with these cases in which they applied design thinking. Throughout these cases, he throws out many concept and ideas supporting his offer. There are conclusions from IDEO’s experiences in practicing design thinking for many years. He makes the introduction by clarifying the difference between design thinking and what design popularly became, giving the example of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s invention of the railway which was a world changing innovation whereas popular design’s concern are less important things like aesthetics, image, fashion. Throughout the book he simply stresses the fact that design thinking is human centred practice. Even though design integrates technology and economics, it starts with human. In the case of Brunel’s invention, he imagined first an experience of floating across the countryside and later, a journey from London to New York focusing on human and human experience. In almost all cases Brown mentions in the book, he stresses this showing how they always started by understanding the culture and context around human. One example is the case of “Coasting bikes for Shimano” from IDEO where they achieved a great success with the concept that was started by understanding the lost link the American users had to do with their childhood habits of using bicycle.

Brown also talks about the importance of prototypes in the process of design thinking in order to progress. When they build a prototype, they think through the prototype in the process of building it. He says as we prototype, we put our ideas into reality and better and faster understand their strengths and weaknesses. He exemplify this with the case of Aravind Eye Institute which used early prototyping to innovate; and succeeded to become the number one lens producer in the developing world bringing down the cost of production dramatically, partly as a result of prototyping methods they used.

Another focus in the book is how design thinking is bringing out the potential of active participation of the consumers, shifting the primary purpose from consumption to meaningful engagement of consumers and producers. As this idea suggests that today, the intangible things are more valuable than the tangible things; the conclusion from this is the shift from products to experiences. He connects this theory to design thinking by stating that “The intrinsically human-centred nature of design thinking points to the next step: we can use our empathy and understanding of people to design experiences that create opportunities for active engagement and participation.” To show the importance of experience design, Brown gives many examples. Among them is Whole Foods, one of the most successful retailers in the United States, which has embraced the potential of experiences as it is designed to invite participation and engagement. With this and many other examples Browns gives in his book, on one hand, he shows how designers shifted from crafting objects to creating services and experiences; on the other hand, he illustrates how the consumers became active participants in the services, experiences, and eventually even in design. By showing this merging of producers, service providers, designers and consumers, he suggests and concludes that design thinking could and should be practiced by everyone, and be infused in all aspects of life as it will bring great benefits to all.

The book consists of some facts and Tim Brown’s opinions about these facts that are supported by his first hand experiences with the IDEO design firm. IDEO’s being one of the leading innovation and design firm in the world and the Author’s being the CEO of the firm makes the source of the book already reputable. Moreover, one can observe that the idea of design thinking has gained popularity since the book was written in 2009. The methodologies given in the book, which have been developed in IDEO, became a source for professionals as well as academicians. This somehow proves the reliability of the opinions in the book.

Talking about visual thinking, Brown suggests thinking through the process of building prototypes rather than solely thinking of what to build as it engages designers more in the reality and its context. And in the case of designing services and experiences, he suggests role-play and acting out in order to prototype and realise the problem. Such prototypes help us to build empathy with the consumer/user and create more engaging, human-centred services and experiences. He also talks about the active participants of the users in the design process and he mentions some design tools and methods they use in IDEO such as a workshop where the end user participates together with the designers. I believe that these concepts about human centred experience design are very crucial especially in the today’s service based economy.

I always believed that educating professionals from other industries about design is very important because I think it could be possible for designers and others to work in an integrated way only if they can understand each other well. While working at FourByNorth Studio and in my freelance works, I also experienced that the clients’ lack of knowledge about design sometimes was a big challenge to create a more meaningful work. Tim Brown, with his book, educates people from other disciplines about design very well but also takes it to another level. Behind the book cover, it’s written that it is not a book by designers for designers but for creative leaders working in every level of an organisation. It’s not just about educating others about design so that designers can communicate better with them but it’s about everyone’s practicing design thinking methods and everyone’s working in an interdisciplinary way within all units of an organisation as described with the concept of T-Shaped person.

You can get Tim Brown’s book “Change By Design” here.

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