Reflection 3 — Change by Design
Tim Brown, the author of this book is also the CEO of IDEO — a design company known for its human-centered, interdisciplinary approach. The book begins with a great example of Mr. Brunel the creator of the excellent Great Western Railway underlining the importance of design and technology and its relevance throughout history. It clarifies the approach to innovation and the extent to which it is effective, powerful, and influential in all aspects of business and society. It not only gives tips on how to focus on generating game-changing ideas but also shows how to do so using real-life examples of successful enterprises and a few failures that try to integrate design thinking in their businesses and daily lives.
Mr. Brown has divided his book into two parts. The first part highlights the key system of design thinking, which is overlapping spaces that consist of (1) inspiration; the problem, (2) ideation; generate & develop, and finally (3) implementation; the path of the project to market, and introduces a set of design thinking principles that can be applied by almost anyone in any organization, regardless of size or nature. ‘Where do we go from here?’ is the topic of the second half of the book, which works to solve massive challenges. He demonstrates how the design community solved various case studies, tools, and concepts. He uses a variety of real-life examples to depict and make readers conceive of design thinking as a problem-solving technique. For example, he highlights Procter & Gamble’s capacity to assist housewives in cleaning their bathrooms more effectively.
One of the reasons I chose this book was because I had heard a lot about IDEO in my Design Thinking class, and this was the perfect opportunity to learn more about Tim Brown and his journey in his own words. I loved reading this book for a variety of reasons. For starters, it is written in a very simple and easily understandable manner, with no heavy syntax or technical jargon. The book’s synopsis, given in the form of a mind map to assist readers in connecting and interconnecting the many chapters and instances that are mentioned. Secondly, the book focuses on “Human-Centred Exploration” which has been the theme of our class from the beginning. While working on our project we learned the power of observation in understanding the requirements of our customers and keeping this element in mind, Tim Brown emphasized the distinction between being a designer and thinking like a designer. Brown also requests his readers to focus on drawings and prototypes as they help you “fail early, fail often” which helps generate ideas faster and better. I was able to connect and understand this emphasis due to the activities we did in class for our project. One of my favorite features of the book is Mr. Brown’s insistence on focusing on the “Why,” “How,” and “What” of each process, which helped me widen my understanding. In my opinion, the only thing that could have improved was the scenarios presented which were a little brief, and I wish there had been a more in-depth examination shared that could have helped me grasp how to use design thinking better.
As we read forward, the Author puts weight on the notion of Observation. I was able to draw a direct insight from this concept, relating to an article that I had read about Airbnb (an online Vacation Rental Company). The article suggested that in 2009, Airbnb was failing as a startup going unnoticed and the revenue was flatlined. They began checking their search results for New York City listings, attempting to figure out the problem and reason behind their stunted growth. After spending time on the site the co-founder Joe Gebbia had a realization, the images across all 40 listings were very similar. People were using camera phones or images from classified sites, therefore people weren’t booking rooms because they couldn’t check what they were paying for. It was a keen sense of observation through which he identified the problem. As the book suggests the next step in the process was ideation wherein they came up with an unscalable solution to the problem of visiting each listing and replacing the photography with beautiful high-resolution pictures. Although there wasn’t any data to back this decision originally, they went ahead and implemented it — reiterating Tim Brown’s view of an optimistic culture. The results came forward after a week — Improving the pictures had doubled the weekly revenue.
Chapter 2 and Chapter 10 were two of my favorite chapters in the book. Chapter 2 discusses service innovation and how businesses must be more service-oriented and provide a stronger customer experience, along with an interesting example of how a hospital changed its service for a patient by feigning an injury and then undergoing the ER experience with a hidden camera. Chapter 10 is titled “Redesigning Tomorrow — Today,” and it is authored by Tim Brown and Barry Katz, who discuss the projects they undertook together over the last 5 years. In this chapter, they also discuss the six “redesigning” subjects, which I found to be quite useful and informative.
This book continues to fascinate me with IDEO’s ability to blur the line between products and services, as well as how their methods have fundamentally altered the industry. I couldn’t have picked a better book to stimulate my interest in Business Development and Design Thinking. I personally recommend all design students to read this crucial book, written by our industry’s most relevant designer. I was able to conveniently connect it to my class as we tried to figure out the concept of ideation and cohesion early this semester. In addition to our course, this book is an outline of the conceptualization and goal of this ground-breaking problem-generating and problem-solving strategy.
