Good design improves a company’s stock performance, according to research from the U.K. Design Council and the Corporate Design Foundation. It also improves earnings, net income and cash flow, as analyzed by business professor Julie Hertenstein and others. Reports of these studies, along with stories of the many companies that have succeeded at least in part due to good design— think Apple, Starbucks and Google—are leading more and more companies to consider the possibility of investing in design to gain competitive advantage. But what is design? Or, perhaps more to the point, what does a firm need to do to develop good design skills?
At the Stanford University Product Design Program and in the Berkeley Institute of Design at the University of California, we teach and do research on “design thinking,” using a model that we find resonates well with our industry colleagues. Our model connects two bodies of prior academic work—a design model first proposed by Charles Owen at the Illinois Institute of Design and David Kolb’s experiential learning theory (see Resources at the end of this article)—to provide an integrated view of the process and organization underlying design thinking.
ELEMENTS OF DESIGN THINKING
The core elements of design thinking (see figure 1) require designers to toggle back and forth between analysis and synthesis, and to operate in both the concrete and abstract worlds. Thus, there are four types of work in which designers engage: observations, frameworks, imperatives and solutions. We’ll examine each of these individually.
Fig. 1
OBSERVATIONS
Design thinking is grounded in the concrete analytical work done in the observation phase. Deeply understanding stakeholder needs—the needs of customers, users, value chain partners, as well as internal corporate requirements—through observation or ethnographic research methods lays the groundwork for the design thinking cycle. Effective observation takes in not only use- and usability-based needs, but meaning-based needs as well.
Consider the Darfur Stoves Project. To gather sufficient fuel to cook their daily meals, refugee women in the Darfur region of Sudan must venture miles from their camp, endangering both themselves and their children in the process. At some level, the solutions seem obvious: Provide food to these women so they won’t need to cook, provide fuel to them so they don’t need to search for it, or re-engineer their cook stoves to require less fuel. All of these solutions might well solve the problem; indeed, there are now vendors who sell fuel to the women, and the project has undertaken a well-considered redesign of the women’s stoves.
But the broader context—the meaning-based needs—for these solutions must be considered as well. For these displaced women and children, being able to eat the foods they are most familiar with and preparing them in the usual way is critical—it may be the only tie that remains from their lives before displacement. And many want the opportunity to provide for themselves, not rely on handouts for their ongoing well-being. The Darfur Stoves Project took this context into account as it sought to find places in Darfur to build the new stoves and designed a system whereby the women might be able to buy the stoves for a minimal sum, thus retaining their independence. Understanding not only the basic use and usability requirements, but also the meaning of potential solutions to the women, has been critical to the program’s success.
FRAMEWORKS
To truly get at those meaning-based needs, and to ensure the design team is solving the right problem, design thinking requires sitting back, looking at the data gathered through observation and, in short, asking why. Through the abstract, analytical task of framing, designers process a vast amount of observation data, seek interesting patterns in the data, and identify and question assumptions about how the problem is presently being addressed.
Consider the redesign of Acela, the Amtrak service that runs between major cities on the East Coast. In this project, the design team reframed the context in two important ways. First, it recognized a customer’s experience with riding the train starts well before boarding—with finding a schedule, planning the trip, getting to the station—and ends not upon leaving the train, but upon reaching a final destination. This broader view of the entire customer experience allowed the design team to identify critical gaps that had to be filled in to make the study complete.
Second, the design team drew upon the old-time romance passengers had with riding a train, the pleasure they took in being able to sit back and relax while watching the scenery fly by outside the window. The team realized that while the system couldn’t give people speed—at least compared to an airplane covering the same miles—it could give people time. Thus the team concluded that “it’s not the time it takes you to get somewhere, it’s all about how you use your time,” and from that generated the advertising taglines “depart from your inhibitions” and “inner children travel free.”
The ultimate purpose of framing is to reframe, to target the user’s problem in a different way and ultimately come up with a new story to tell about how the solution might fix the problem.
IMPERATIVES
From the analytical exercise of framing and reframing customer- and user-needs data, design thinking moves to synthesize a set of imperatives or—as marketing often refers to them—the value proposition that must be met by the new concept. The value proposition describes the tangible benefits customers will derive from the ultimate solution, not the features or capabilities the solution will employ to deliver those benefits. Distinguishing needs from solutions is core to solid design thinking.
Consider the work that Stanford students in a “needfinding” class did for the Clorox Corporation around environmentally sound cleaning products. After spending a few weeks in the field understanding why people do and don’t buy “green” solutions, the students identified the following design principles:
● A sustainable solution works as an integrated system and tells a convincing story about its life cycle.
● A sustainable solution symbolizes being “in” while still allowing for individuality and personal expression.
● A sustainable solution conveys the sense of being part of a larger movement.
● A sustainable solution competes favorably with mainstream solutions by being elegant and of high quality.
These design principles boiled down the critical insights gained through observation and framing to the essence of what the design team had to achieve with its solutions. The effort to converge on a set of imperatives requires distinctly different skills than those required to do the divergent activities of observation and framing; often, getting to a set of imperatives is an extremely painful process for a design team that has been in exploration mode up to that point.
Fig. 2
SOLUTIONS
Finally, the design process returns to the concrete realm to create a set of artifacts that embody the frameworks or imperatives so they can be tested with users in real-use situations. There are many well-documented approaches to concept generation (logical and intuitive), to concept selection (analytical and more judgment-based) and to concept testing. Solutions development and testing may lead the design team to revisit the frameworks and imperatives it has developed, creating an iterative loop through the design thinking cycle.
Consider the fast-food company engaged in redesigning its packaging to be more user-friendly, particularly for drive-through customers, and to update the company’s image. Company management agreed that it wished to communicate its “hospitality” focus through its packaging (as it already does through its customer service), but how to embody “hospitality” in the packaging was unclear. Management rejected “down home” imagery drawing on checkered-tablecloth graphics as too “mom-and-pop,” and edgier cut-out designs on the packaging as too stark. Tests with end users proved management right about the tablecloth imagery, but not on the cut-out designs. Embodying hospitality in prototype designs helped the management team clarify what it and its customers meant by “hospitality” in its frameworks and imperatives.
LEARNING STYLES
So design thinking requires four distinct sets of activities based around observation, framing, imperatives and solutions. For design teams to move among these quadrants, they must master different ways of thinking, or as experiential learning theory suggests, they have to adopt different learning styles (fig. 2). Observation requires that the team become absorbed in the concrete reality of its stakeholders. Individuals with a preference for diverging are well suited to the probing questioning that is required at this stage. Framing requires more reflective and abstract thinking, which is best done by individuals with a preference for assimilation; these people are able to make sense of large quantities of information. Imperatives require conceptualization of clear future directions, best done by those with a convergent learning style who will drive to a conclusion. Solutions require active experimentation with customers in the concrete world, which is best done by those with an accommodating style who love to tinker and engage in action-oriented learning.
Fig. 3
What are the implications of linking the design thinking cycle with the experiential learning model? Many organizations construct cross-disciplinary design teams by selecting members from different functions in the organization—design, engineering, marketing and operations, for example. While there is no doubt that functional representation on a team is crucial, successful teams also represent all four learning styles. This in turn implies that successful teams be composed of individuals who are polar opposites in how they take in and transform information. Some take in information through symbolic representation or abstract conceptualization, others through direct sensation. Some will process information by watching others and reflecting on what they see; others by jumping in and participating themselves.
These inherent conflicts not only require close managing to resolve issues as they arise throughout the design process, they more importantly require skillful management of the transitions among the design activities. Those best at divergent thinking might lead the observation efforts, while those who prefer assimilation might lead the framing efforts. Managing a team to best leverage the strengths of its members at appropriate times requires leaders who understand both the design thinking cycle, as well as the underlying skills required and the resulting interpersonal dynamics that having those skills on the team implies.
On successful design teams, leadership goes not to the person whose “turn” is next, but to the person most skilled in the current phase of the design thinking cycle. Like bicycle racing teams, good design teams assign positions in the “race” based on individual strengths, rather than seniority or other factors. Good design teams emulate a flock of birds, which skillfully flies in formation behind an ever-changing lead bird. In these teams, everyone “has the pen” for a spell, and is respected as a leader for that point in time when his or her skills are most needed.
SUMMARIZING
The design thinking cycle involves observation, framing, identifying imperatives and generating and testing solutions—or in other words, problem finding, problem selecting, solution finding and solution selecting (fig. 3). Engaging in design thinking requires diverging, assimilating, converging and accommodating thinking styles. Firms that wish to achieve the performance gains associated with “good design” must understand the activities involved in design thinking, and will have to develop the required diversity of learning styles in their organizations.
RESOURCES
IN PRINT
● For further discussion of these issues: “Innovation as a Learning Process: Embedding Design Thinking” by Sara Beckman and Michael Barry, California Management Review, Fall 2007.
● “The Impact of Industrial Design Effectiveness on Corporate Financial Performance” by Julie Hertenstein et al, The Journal of Product Innovation Management, January 2005
● “Design Research: Building the Knowledge Base” by Charles Owen, Design Processes Newsletter, 5/6 (1993); “Design, Advanced Planning and Product Development” by Charles Owen, 3o Congresso Brasileiro de Pesquisa e Desenvolvimento em Design; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (October 1998); and International Symposium: Nuevos Metodos y Tecnologias para el Diseño de Productos; Santiago, Chile (November 1998)
● Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development by David A. Kolb, published by FT Press
ONLINE
● Berkeley Institute of Design, http://bid.berkeley.edu/
● Stanford Product Design Program, http://design.stanford.edu/pd/
● Darfur Stoves Project, www.darfurstoves.org
● U.K. Design Council, www.designcouncil.org.uk
● Corporate Design Foundation, www.cdf.org
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