Tim Brown: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation

Summary: Brown walks us through the creation and implementation of design thinking rather than Design through his company, IDEO. One of his main return-to-points was the idea that “Design” needed to be re-thought and applied to people that would never consider themselves “designers”, and that really everyone should be involved in design thinking because it’s all about matching human needs with technical resources across a wide range of ideas, businesses, products, etc. This is kind of were he continued into saying that there’s a difference between being a deisgner by title and thinking like a designer. The article goes on to talk about the “stages” of design thinking (even though there is not set path to gurantee a perfect result time after time) and an overall challenge to think bigger than we do. One of his main points that stuck with me with the balance between desirability, feasibility and viability. Often, I think that viability and feasibility seem to hold a heavier hand than desirability.

Key Points:

• Argues that design thinking offers an effective appraoch to innovations within all aspects of business and society
• Design thinking is about matching human needs with available technical resources, but even more about then putting those tools in the hands of people who never thought of themselves as designers in order to solve a grreater range of issues
• Design thinking is about initiation, patterns, emotionality as well as functionality
• Difference between being a deisnger and thinking like a designer
• Need for human-centered world view rather than technology-centered
• Change by Design: first about is about the stages of design thinking, second part is intended as “a challenge for all of us to Think Big” (p. 8)
• “Fail early to succeed sooner” (p. 17)
• Overlapping spaces: inspiration, boundaries
• Desirability (human-centered), viability (economically-centered) and feasibility (tech-centered)
• The brief, teams, a culture for innovation, embodied thinking
• Looking for what people don’t do and what they don’t say
• Empathy — standing in their shoes, thinking like users
• As hope drops you find insight and confidence rises
• Convergent, divergent thinking
• “Feature creep”
• A culture of experimentation as part of the process, and a culture of optimism
• Building to think: Prototyping