TIM BROWN, the boss of IDEO, a consultancy that helped shape Apple’s first mouse, does not have solutions to daunting global problems such as climate change, epidemics and persistent poverty. But he believes he knows how to find them: with “design thinking”.
By design thinking, Mr Brown means the open-minded, no-holds-barred approach that designers bring to their work, rather than the narrow, technical view of innovation traditionally taught at many business and engineering schools. Firms that think like designers, he claims in a new book, “Change by Design”, stand to win huge new markets and profits. The concept may sound pat and woolly, encompassing everything from savvier marketing to radical technological leaps. Yet design thinking is winning many converts in both industry and philanthropy.
The chair that saved the worldMr Brown argues that a holistic approach to tackling problems produces more breakthroughs than the MBA’s traditional urge to make incremental improvements to existing products or processes. He says the uncompromising focus on predictability and quality-control exemplified by Six Sigma (see article), a form of statistical analysis popular with manufacturers, can lead to “analysis paralysis” by discouraging sweeping changes that may cause disruptions in the short term but yield big benefits in the long run.
In contrast, design is often a “Trojan horse” for momentous ideas, maintains John Kao, a former academic, since it marries rigorous methods with more empathetic and intuitive ones, from lengthy anthropological studies of consumers to the production of experimental prototypes. With funding from Deloitte, a consultancy, he has set up the Institute for Large Scale Innovation, an outfit dedicated to “building the new innovation agenda necessary for tackling wicked global problems”.
Roger Martin, head of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and a pioneer in this field, says that true “design thinking” involves a deep understanding of people’s habits and preferences. As evidence, he points to the expensive Aeron chair (pictured), which Herman Miller designed based on lengthy observation, not just answers given in focus groups. The firm mimicked some elements of the lawn chairs that consumers seemed to find particularly comfortable, and the result was a blockbuster. IDEO applied a similar approach in a campaign it devised for Bank of America. Its researchers noted that consumers feel empowered by saving even trivial sums of money, such a collections of pennies in a jar. So they came up with a scheme called “Keep the Change”, in which the bank automatically rounds up deposits to the nearest dollar—a huge hit with customers.
Philanthropists are beginning to bring similar methods to bear on big social problems. The Gates Foundation has worked with IDEO to develop a “human-centred design toolkit” to help charities develop new programmes in collaboration with locals. VisionSpring, an American charity that sells inexpensive reading glasses to the poor, used the toolkit to make its vision tests less intimidating to children, and thus reach more of those in need.
Focusing on people need not mean losing sight of the big picture, design thinkers argue.
Read more: The Economist
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