Integrating Innovation, Customer Experience, and Brand Value
As seen in the title, the book chosen for analysis here is “Design Thinking: Integrating Innovation, Customer Experience, and Brand Value.” Thomas Lockwood authored and edited this book, also published in 2010 by Allworth Press. This book is inspirational and thought-provoking, to say the least. It is especially valuable to designers. This reflection paper uses a multivariate approach to address various study points related to this book. First, this reflection essay highlights the three main ideas I took from this book. In the second section, I will explain why I liked this book. The last section will explain how this book has transformed my perspective on creativity and how it might influence me.
Main Ideas Taken from this Book
Reading this book was beneficial to me in many ways. The benefits of reading this book are interlinked with the ideas I derived from it. Even though I got many ideas from reading this book, I can narrow them down to three fundamental ideas. One primary idea I got from this book is that design is the foundation for innovation. There is no doubt that innovation is a critical topic throughout society right now. Innovation drives growth. Many unicorn businesses, such as Apple, Google, and NVIDIA, thrive because of innovation. As such, many businesses have increasingly recognized the importance of innovation.
However, many fail to understand the critical link between design and innovation. I could classify myself under this category before reading this book. This book helped me understand the essential relationship between design and innovation. It is quite easy to overlook the role design plays in innovation, but this book reaffirms this relationship. Indeed, looking back and reflecting on this book, I recognized that design triggers innovation. Good design enables innovators to plan, understand consumers’ needs, and subsequently design products that symbolize innovation.
Conversely, another idea I derived from this book is that design has a close and substantive relationship with a brand. From a business perspective, having an established brand is critical. A brand can help a business to be more trustworthy, thus attracting many customers. Furthermore, a good brand is marketable in the sense that it attracts consumers who trust the brand. This book helped me to understand that a brand largely shapes design, whereas design contributes to a brand’s image. In this sense, a brand shapes the focus of a design. At the same time, a good brand must embrace good design to be marketable.
Another valuable idea I derived from this book is that creativity drives design. This is something I have known since I stepped into my first design class. Irrespective of this, Lockwood’s Design Thinking: Integrating Innovation, Customer Experience, and Brand Value reinforces the need for creativity in design. This book encourages designers to embrace creativity because creativity forms the foundation of success in design. I will explain more about my creativity lessons from this book in this paper’s last section.
What I Liked
There is much to like about this book. One of the main things I liked about this book is that it is an anthology. Being an anthology, this book integrates ideas from different experts and puts them into a single book. This means that any reader reading this book is getting substantial knowledge and input from experts with different ideas and backgrounds. I liked this book since I understood that I could get diverse knowledge from it. Similarly, I loved this book because it encompasses intriguing case studies that help readers grasp its concepts more efficiently and effectively. In other words, the case studies incorporated into this book make it easier to understand its complex concepts.
Transforming My Perspective on Creativity
To this end, I must also say that this book transformed my perspective on creativity. As explained in a previous section, this book spotlights the role of creativity in design. This book transformed my perspective on creativity because it helped me to understand that creativity connects ideas. This book demonstrates that ideas are typically left disconnected without creativity. Creativity enables designers to connect their ideas, thus resulting in more aesthetically pleasing and utilitarian design works.
This book also changed my perspective on creativity by helping me understand that creativity has no singular formula. There are many unique ways to be creative; it all depends on the designer and the purpose of their design. Designers must understand this. When they do, they can be brave enough to try new and unique ways to be creative. This is something that will greatly influence my approach to design going forward. I intend to be braver when approaching my design work. I believe this will bring out more creativity from me.
