Summary from Tim Brown Commodity in the Harvard Business Review from the june 2008.

03/ten/2015  by Serge Van Oudenhove

Tim Brown wrote an interesting commodity in the June 2008 Harvard Buisness Review on "Pattern Thinking". Design thinking is a method of coming together people's needs and desires in a technologically feasible and strategically viable style.

Thomas Edison created the electric lightbulb and then wrapped an unabridged industry effectually information technology. Edison'south genius lay in his ability to excogitate of a fully developed marketplace, not but a discrete device. He was able to envision how people would want to use what he made, and he engineered toward that insight. He wasn't always prescient, but he invariably gave great consideration to users' needs and preferences.

Edison'southward approach was an early case of what is now called "blueprint thinking"—a methodology that imbues the full spectrum of innovation activities with a human-centered design ethos. By this I mean that innovation is powered by a thorough understanding, through directly observation, of what people want and need in their lives and what they like or dislike virtually the mode detail products are fabricated, packaged, marketed, sold, and supported. His arroyo was intended non to validate preconceived hypotheses but to help experimenters acquire something new from each iterative stab. Innovation is difficult work; Edison made it a profession that composite art, craft, science, business savvy, and an astute understanding of customers and markets.

Design thinking is a lineal descendant of that tradition. Put just:

« it is a discipline that uses the designer's sensibility and methods to match people's needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can catechumen into customer value and market opportunity ».

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Like Edison'south painstaking innovation process, it oftentimes entails a great deal of perspiration.

Getting Below the Surface

Historically, design has been treated as a downstream footstep in the evolution procedure—the point where designers, who accept played no before role in the noun work of innovation, come along and put a cute wrapper around the idea. To be sure, this approach has stimulated market growth in many areas by making new products and technologies aesthetically attractive and therefore more desirable to consumers or past enhancing brand perception through smart, evocative advertizing and communication strategies. During the latter one-half of the twentieth century design became an increasingly valuable competitive asset in, for example, the consumer electronics, automotive, and consumer packaged goods industries. But in most others it remained a late-phase add-on.

At present, however, companies are asking them to create ideas that better run into consumers' needs and desires. The erstwhile role is tactical, and results in limited value creation; the latter is strategic, and leads to dramatic new forms of value.

How Pattern Thinking Happens

The myth of artistic genius is resilient. We believe that smashing ideas popular fully formed out of bright minds, in feats of imagination well beyond the abilities of mere mortals. Inventiveness is the the result of hard work augmented by a creative human-centered discovery procedure and followed by iterative cycles of prototyping, testing, and refinement.

Design projects must ultimately pass through three spaces (see the showroom "Inspiration, Ideation, Implementation"). We label these "inspiration," for the circumstances (be they a problem, an opportunity, or both) that motivate the search for solutions; "ideation," for the process of generating, developing, and testing ideas that may pb to solutions; and "implementation," for the charting of a path to market place. The application of design thinking in the earliest stages of innovation is what led to this consummate solution.

Taking a Systems View

Many of the globe'south nigh successful brands create breakthrough ideas that are inspired by a deep understanding of consumers' lives and apply the principles of design to innovate and build value. Sometimes innovation has to business relationship for vast differences in cultural and socioeconomic weather condition. In such cases blueprint thinking can advise creative alternatives to the assumptions made in developed societies.

Getting Back to the Surface

I argued before that blueprint thinking tin can pb to innovation that goes beyond aesthetics, but that doesn't mean that form and aesthetics are unimportant. Magazines like to publish photographs of the newest, coolest products for a reason: They are sexy and appeal to our emotions. Groovy pattern satisfies both our needs and our desires. Oft the emotional connexion to a product or an paradigm is what engages us in the commencement identify. Time and again nosotros run into successful products that were not necessarily the first to market merely were the starting time to appeal to u.s.a. emotionally and functionally. In other words, they exercise the task and we dear them. The iPod was not the showtime MP3 player, but it was the first to be delightful. Target's products appeal emotionally through design and functionally through price—simultaneously.

 This idea will grow always more important in the time to come.  As Daniel Pinkish writes in his book A Whole New Mind, "Abundance has satisfied, and even over-satisfied, the material needs of millions—boosting the significance of dazzler and emotion and accelerating individuals' search for meaning." Every bit more than of our basic needs are met, we increasingly expect sophisticated experiences that are emotionally satisfying and meaningful. These experiences will not be simple products. They will be circuitous combinations of products, services, spaces, and information. They will be the ways nosotros get educated, the ways we are entertained, the ways we stay healthy, the ways nosotros share and communicate. Design thinking is a tool for imagining these experiences equally well as giving them a desirable course.

The need for transformation is, if annihilation, greater now than ever earlier. No thing where we look, we meet problems that tin exist solved only through innovation: unaffordable or unavailable health care, billions of people trying to live on simply a few dollars a 24-hour interval, free energy usage that outpaces the planet'southward ability to support it, educational activity systems that fail many students, companies whose traditional markets are disrupted by new technologies or demographic shifts. These problems all have people at their heart. They require a human-centered, creative, iterative, and practical approach to finding the all-time ideas and ultimate solutions. Blueprint thinking is just such an approach to innovation.

Tim Brown, @tceb62 is the CEO and president of IDEO, a global blueprint and innovation and blueprint firm.  His book on how blueprint thinking transforms organizations, Alter By Design, was released in 2008.  His designs have won numerous awards and been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Fine art in New York, the  Axis Gallery in Tokyo, and the Design Museum in London.

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