Seven Ways Human-Centered Design Can Disrupt How We Make Change
Book Review: Change by Design by Tim Brown
I found it by accident. I was perusing the shelves of the Union Square Barnes & Noble when it appeared right under my nose. A colleague had recommended The Purpose Economy, and there, just beside it, was the book I didn’t know I was looking for: Change by Design.
Tim Brown first wrote this book in 2009, which in innovation terms, feels like eons ago. Smartphone market penetration in the United States was just under 25 percent. Universal wifi was still a figment of someone’s imagination. The App Store was less than a year old. Stanford’s d.school was five years into its infancy and had not yet become the modern Mecca of design thinking. So many of the things 21st century leaders associate with “innovative business” were not yet mainstream, and yet, so much of the truth that Brown captures in this seminal work is powerfully evergreen. He expertly uses stories and case studies of IDEO’s work to bring to life the design process for readers who may be unfamiliar with the topic, and offers some key insights to guide veteran designers.
I first became interested in design thinking in 2012, when I encountered IDEO’s Design Kit: The Human-Centered Design Toolkit, first launched in 2009. At that time, it was a large multi-page PDF, which was unwieldy and not yet directly relevant to my work. I downloaded it and squirreled it away for another day. It wasn’t until 2015, when a friend invited me to attend the LUMA Institute’s two-day (highly recommended) Intro to HCD course that I got hands-on with the power of Looking, Understanding, and Making, LUMA’s version of the design cycle. Since then, I’ve advocated for HCD as a substitute for standard meeting protocol almost everywhere I can think of, but I’ve often struggled with how to explain the benefits of HCD to those unfamiliar with the practice. Change by Design offered up seven big ideas that do just that.
1) Empathize First, Ask Questions Later
Some things can’t be taught, only learned. Modern education has trained us as students to believe that the most important thing is to arrive at the correct answer as quickly as possible. As such, much of our interaction with the outside world is shaped by our desire to “be right.”
But HCD cultivates an entirely different mindset. Instead of seeking to arrive at the right answer, Brown encourages us to first find the human connection. “Empathy is the mental habit that moves us beyond thinking of people as laboratory rats or standard deviations,” says Brown. Practicing the mental habit of empathy allows us to understand the human experience, to feel people’s challenges alongside them, and seek sustainable solutions to their problems, the foundation of modern innovation.
“If we are to ‘borrow’ the lives of other people to inspire new ideas,” he asserts, “we need to begin by recognizing that their seemingly inexplicable behaviors represent different strategies for coping with the confusing, complex, and contradictory world in which they live.” In this way, empathy subverts our quest to find the “right” answer with a deeper understanding that each of us finds the best way to do things, within the constraints imposed by our lives.
Empathy, like anything, is a habit to be cultivated and practices. For most of us, it emerges most easily when we keep our mouths shut, and instead focus on looking and listening at the context in which we find ourselves. Brown is hopeful about the capacity for professionals to leverage empathy, not just in the design of products, but in the creation of experiences. “We can use our empathy and understanding of people to design experiences,” Brown suggest, “that create opportunities for active engagement and participation.” What’s more, by crafting experiences grounded in empathy, we enable participants in these experiences to begin to cultivate their own empathy practice, too.
2) Cultivate Unwavering Optimism
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my advocacy on behalf of human-centered design, it’s the deeply embedded pessimism within American culture. Perhaps it’s the pernicious power of rising inequality tearing the fabric of society apart, but a surprising number of people spend a lot of their time managing anxiety that things just won’t work out.
Very often, a fear-based mindset constrains people’s thinking and limits success before it even has the chance to emerge. “To harvest the power of design thinking,” says Brown, “individuals, teams, and whole organizations have to cultivate optimism.” Sanguine confidence can feel like an abrupt deviation from the status quo. But an emphatic believe that things will work out well goes a long way to ensuring that result.
Of course, optimism should not be confused with certainty. “Every design process,” Brown claims, “cycles through foggy periods of seemingly unstructured experimentation and bursts of intense clarity.” Successful designers simultaneously trust the inevitability of a positive outcome while also learning to feel comfortable having almost no idea exactly what that outcome will be.
3) Practice Uncertainty and Imperfection
Most human-centered design challenges begin with a brief, which provides context and structure to guide a design team’s collaboration. “A well-constructed brief,” says Brown, “will allow for serendipity, unpredictability, and the capricious whims of fate, for that is the creative realm from which breakthrough ideas emerge.” Brown points to Roger Martin, author of The Opposable Mind, who emphasizes the importance of integrative thinking to arrive at new ideas. According to Martin, “Thinkers who exploit opposing ideas to construct a new solution enjoy a built-in advantage over thinkers who can consider only one model at a time.”
What LUMA calls Looking, Understanding, and Making, IDEO calls Inspiration, Ideation, and Implementation. In the inspiration and ideation phase, designers are seeking to create choices by finding them in unlikely places, or as Martin suggests, by finding ways to combine multiple possibilities. This approach demands that designers maintain an effervescent optimism, while still making space for not yet having the right answer.
Once a team has created a sufficient number of choices, those can then be narrowed down to one. A team will then move to implementation, or making, to create a prototype of their concept. Brown promotes the idea of “just-enough prototyping,” which prevents the perfect from getting in the way of the good. According to Brown, by prototyping just enough, designers can determine what they are trying to understand about the user they are trying to reach and their interaction with the product or service in question, “achieving just enough resolution to make that the focus.”
Balancing the uncertainty of outcomes and surrendering the assumption of one right answer, designers may find themselves in extended bouts of “grappling with the Big Idea and long stretches during which all attention focuses on the details,” still unsure of exactly how both will work out. “Design thinking,” Brown says, “is rarely a graceful leap from height to height; it tests our emotional constitution and challenges our collaborative skills, but it can reward perseverance with spectacular results.”
4) See What You Can’t Hear
Too often, business decisions depend on how well people hear. A group of five to 20 people sits around a conference room table, taking turns voicing ideas and corresponding criticisms. This depends both on each person’s ability to convey their ideas through words, and on the ability of everyone else to hear exactly what the person is trying to describe.
A trained graphic designer, Brown is a big believer in the power of pictures to convey meaning and persuade skeptics. “Words and numbers are fine,” he says, “but only drawing can simultaneously reveal both the functional characteristics of an idea and its emotional content.” While for Brown, this may be an intuitive insight, there’s a significant amount of research to back this up. The analytical left side of the brain is responsible for language process. It reads words to analyze their meaning. Pictures, conversely, are understood by the emotional right brain which processes visual imagery. Said another way, words can help us understand specifics, while pictures can help us to feel a person’s experience.
Consider your reaction to Van Gogh’s Starry Night:
Now consider this line from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina:
“He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.”
Both of these things make you feel something, but the process you have to go through to read Tolstoy’s line, comprehend it, and then feel something about it is much more drawn out than the waves of emotion that wash over you simply by looking at Van Gogh’s night sky.
Further to Brown’s point, pictures help us add a much higher level of specificity to an idea at the very beginning. Consider the content of the two Post-Its, pictured below. They both say the same thing, but the second allows for a much more detailed discussion of what exactly it is that constitutes “a nice house.”
By visualizing ideas with both words and pictures (typically on Post-It notes), human-centered design allows people to form patterns and associations among ideas, to really look at all sides of a problem and various configurations of potential ways of solving it, before arriving at a definitive answer. “The physical and psychological spaces of an organization,” says Brown, “work in tandem to define the effectiveness of the people within it.” Whereas standard meeting protocol typically empowers who speaks first or most persuasively to define the outcome right at the start, an emphasis on visual understanding creates space for ideas to emerge more slowly and for teams to thoughtfully see their way through a design process, rather than depending on the fleeting impression of auditory comprehension, or even our shared understanding of the words we use.
5) Collaborate Relentlessly
Since the early 1980s, management consulting has gained ground as a premier problem-solving tool. Top consultancies depend on a black-box methodology — you give us your data, we go away, and we bring you back a solution.
Human-centered design turns the black box on its head. Rather than hiding the process of problem solving from executives and users alike, the most effective design teams embrace the ways that collaboration makes the ideation process stronger. “The designer must not be imagined as an intrepid anthropologist venturing into an alien culture to observe the natives with the utmost objectivity,” Brown warns. “Instead, we need to invent a new and radical form of collaboration that blurs the boundaries between creators and consumers.”
During bouts of uncertainty, it can be easy to blame the slow pace of progress on the dynamics of the group. Wouldn’t it just be easier to do it myself? you might think. But it is in fact from the direct participation of so many people that a uniquely viable end result can emerge. “It’s not about ‘us versus them’ or even ‘us on behalf of them’,” Brown advises. “For the design thinker,” he says, “it has to be ‘us with them.’” Joining forces with the people facing the problem takes empathy to the next level: tapping the power of co-creative genius to identify the best possible solution. Brown reminds the reader of an adage he finds himself coming back to repeatedly, wise words we would do well not to forget.
“All of us are smarter than any of us.”
6) Learn to Expect the Unexpected
While design thinking has successfully embedded itself in the startup/tech culture of Silicon Valley, many established companies are struggling with how exactly to incorporate human-centered design into their culture and business. Some, like IBM, have rushed headfirst into HCD, hiring more than a thousand designers, retraining upwards of 100,000 employees, and shifting its long-standing remote work culture to co-location. But such changes are not guaranteed to bear fruit. “The transformation of a business-as-usual culture into one focused on innovation and driven by design,” says Brown, “involves activities, decisions, and attitudes.”
Activities can include the use of Post-Its, or various empathy-building exercises. Leaders can make decisions about how teams will be formed and how performance will be measured to reward innovative thinking. But ultimately, an organization’s ability to foster innovation rides most squarely on the attitude of its employees. According to Brown, “Design thinking is neither art nor science nor religion,” but instead, “the capacity, ultimately, for integrative thinking,” something else that’s much more easily learned than taught.
Traditional educational environments reward speed, reliability, and right answers. Fostering an organizational attitude that gives way to innovation means retraining employees not just to visualize ideas, or ruthlessly innovate, but to hopefully expect an unexpected result. Such a culture shift also offers a secret silver lining.
“It takes a systematic approach to achieve organization-wide change,” Brown says, but once a systematic approach is underway, the results can be surprising. “It can elicit new levels of engagement from people who may have spent so much time fighting the system that they could barely imagine having a role in redesigning it.”
7) Embrace the Power of a New Paradigm
For Brown, human-centered design isn’t simply the next business trick designed to take your share price to the next level. It’s a new modality of engagement for society as a whole. “Design thinking needs to be turned toward the formulation of a new participatory social contract,” Brown says. Three factors are conspiring to force organizations of all kinds to embrace a more transparent and collaborative attitude. A renewed focus on consumer experience, the rise of complex systems, and the emergence of limits on natural resources place unique constraints on how goods and services can and should be developed and delivered. “It is no longer possible to think in adversarial terms of a ‘buyer’s market’ or a ‘seller’s market’,” Brown says. “We’re all in this together.”
The Design Index, which measures the stock performance of publicly traded design-centric companies against others, shows the power of a design culture to also feed profitability.
“We are in the midst of an epochal shift in the balance of power as economies evolve from a focus on manufactured products to one that favors services and experiences,” Brown says. “Companies are ceding control and coming to see their customers not as ‘end users’ but rather as participants in a two-way process.” In a construct guided by empathy, optimism, uncertainty, and collaboration, such a shift is not just logical, but obvious. “What is emerging is nothing less than a new social contract,” Brown says, but he warns that every contract “has two parties.” it’s not enough to wait for large corporations and governments to come around to the benefits of human-centered design. “The public, too,” he says, “must commit to the principles of design thinking.”
For centuries, designers of all stripes have pushed for innovative new ways of doing things. Brown calls these pioneers “creative innovators who could bridge the chasm between thinking and doing because they were passionately committed to the goal of a better life and a better world around them.” Brown calls on all of us to carry the torch set forth by Isambard Brunel, William Morris, Frank Lloyd Wright, Raymond Loewy, and others.
“Today,” says Brown, “we have the opportunity to take their example and unleash the power of design thinking as a means of exploring new possibilities, creating new choices, and bringing new solutions to the world.”
Do these ideas resonate with your experience of HCD? I would love to hear your ideas and insights below.
