Design Thinking in a Culture of Innovation
A quick summary of Design Thinking and how Zebra Technologies is encouraging out-of-the-box thinking through Design Challenges.
With great power comes great responsibility. What duty do we have to apply our talents beyond the usual constraints of the 9–5?
Spider-man quotes aside, every individual on this planet is uniquely talented — both inherently and through learnt skill. With each beautiful mind comes fresh perspectives, different cultural backgrounds, and a different set of experiences and opinions. All of which are equally valuable when it comes to practising Design Thinking to solve real-world problems. It is vital that all employees are valued and empowered to feel as though their talents can have a real influence.
What is Design Thinking?
“an iterative process in which we seek to understand the user, challenge assumptions, and redefine problems”
— Interaction Design Foundation
Rethinking and redefining a problem statement will help to reveal pain-points and needs of users that may not have been initially apparent. Once you are able to truly empathise with the people at the heart of the problem, you can begin designing to improve an experience and evoke delight.
In employing divergent thinking in diverse teams, many possible solutions can be explored before they are narrowed down through convergent thinking. They can then be tested and iterated into a final solution. The process is non-linear with unfixed stages, which can be revisited at any point — opposing traditional linear problem-solving methods.
To be cliché, Design Thinking facilitates thinking outside of the box — especially if the user isn’t in the box.
Is Design Thinking just for designers?
Contrary to common belief, this problem-solving mindset is not exclusive to designers and can be adopted into the work practice of any part of an organisation. Wherever there is a human-centred problem, Design Thinking can be explored. In exploring and redefining how the user fits into the problem statement and asking ‘why?’ the outcome is often innovative rather than simply inventive.
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
Society has far progressed since the arrogance of Henry Ford’s supposed ‘faster horses’ statement, so why do we still ignore the needs of the user(s) when attempting to solve their problems?
Wicked Problems
Through networking at monthly UX events in London, a colleague and I came across the concept of ‘Design Challenges’. The challenges in question being to tackle a different ‘wicked problem’ each month.
“A wicked problem is a social or cultural problem that’s difficult or impossible to solve — normally because of its complex and interconnected nature”
— Interaction Design Foundation
Participants do not have to be politicians or humanitarian aid workers, just a diverse range of design thinkers from a variety of disciplines.
Zebra’s Design Challenge
Emulating these events internally within Zebra Technologies during the Covid-19 pandemic has had its own inevitable challenges: from Wi-Fi connectivity issues to generally busy households.
However, the constraints of remote working have allowed us to remodel our own virtual version and include colleagues from 4 different Zebra offices across the world. The disciplines of the participants have spanned User Experience Design, Software Engineering, Industrial Design, Human Factors Research, Human Resources and Sales Engineering. Such diversity is something that we would naturally miss out on in normal office brainstorm sessions.
Utilising Zoom for video calling and Miro — an online whiteboard for virtual collaboration — we have been running each Design Challenge over 3 sessions. In an attempt to mitigate Zoom-fatigue these are short, self-contained 1-hour sessions which span across the space of a week.
We split the main group into 3 teams with a facilitator to guide each team and take advantage of Zoom’s breakout room feature which allows for the creation of separate video ‘rooms’ within the same meeting.
Each session is rapid and focuses on 3 compact sections of the Design Thinking process: Discover, Ideate and Define.
Discover
· Digest and explore the problem statement
· Read through the provided research
· Begin forming a proto-persona(s) of a user(s) who could be targeted
Ideate
· Divergent thinking — individual rapid ideation using the ‘Crazy 8s’ technique of sketching/writing 8 ideas with just 2 minutes per design
· Convergent thinking — presenting and critiquing ideas amongst the team
· Individually voting for the ideas with the most potential to address the user’s pain points
Define
· Solution definition
· Team presentations to the main group
· Collaboratively thinking about the next steps for these ideas
But what’s the actual point?
To encourage Design Thinking both in and out of work and put our talents to use without the day-to-day constraints of our job titles. Through a culture of innovation, hopefully we can create meaningful solutions to alleviate these ‘wicked problems’ and make a real difference in the world.
These Design Challenges have been beneficial to us while remote working to maintain the connection and team spirit which is usually upheld by in-office teamwork and brainstorming.
Also… we have a lot of fun.
Our first challenge: How can we use technology to empower and champion diversity and inclusion within the tech industry?
With Zebra being a technology-focussed company, we chose our first Design Challenge topic based on a relatable wicked problem.
Diversity and Inclusion should be at the forefront of every company’s priorities and yet there is still so much work that can be done. The overwhelming power of a diverse team is indisputable and yet the tech industry still falls behind in comparison to other sectors.
“Just 8.5% of senior leaders in technology are from a minority background (…) while almost two-thirds of boards in technology have no female representation at all.“
— Inclusive Boards, 2018
The outcome?
In the final session, the 3 teams returned from the breakout rooms and presented their ideas back to each other. Each idea was incredibly user-centred and innovative. This sparked a brilliant conversation over the next steps that we can take as individuals and as a company to tackle the lack of diversity in tech.
This Design Challenge has become a conversational tool for us to reach out to those across the company who can help facilitate us to move forward with these ideas and begin implementing them. The rapid nature of the Design Challenge meant that the outcomes were pretty ‘rough and ready’. Presenting with such primitive and unpolished ideas allows people to feel like they can help them grow into something really special.
Next steps…
For now, it’s brilliant that more employees are adopting Design Thinking into their problem-solving toolkit. Hopefully, this will become increasingly apparent in all departments — not just design.
Eventually we hope to run these Design Challenges beyond Zebra Technologies — perhaps through outreach workshops with students.
Our overarching goal is to encourage a ‘Culture of Innovation’ amongst the future generation who are inevitably burdened with the inheritance of the wicked problems we fail to solve.
