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  The other half of the obesity equation has to do with fitness and exercise—what both economists and nutritionists might agree to call an “input-output” model. While we consume more calories than ever, ours may be the least active generation in history. Here, too, lie opportunities for design thinking to contribute to what has typically been considered either a medical or a public policy issue. Nike, for instance, has mobilized its internal design teams to help them not just to provide equipment to athletes but to learn about their behaviors. This has in turn led to some significant product innovations. Since 2006 Nike’s customers have tracked more than 100 million miles using a simple device that sits inside their running shoes and communicates data about their pace and distance to their iPods. On arriving home, they download the data to a Web site where they can review their progress over time or against that of fellow runners. Nike’s innovation is to close the information loop by allowing people to evaluate the effects of their behavior. The Wii Fit from Nintendo similarly taps into people’s need to see results but—alas—without having to leave the comfort of their living rooms.

  These first small steps toward encouraging healthier behaviors will have to be repeated countless times before significant societal benefit is realized, but they do indicate that there is hope. Design thinkers have become adept at approaching important social issues from the angle of individual motivations and the behaviors that follow, but there is also a level of analysis that needs to be directed at the social forces that constrain the choices we are able to make in the first place. Healthy bodies are a necessary but not sufficient condition of a healthy society, but the reverse is also true. Around the world, design thinkers have become activists and are applying their skills to sources of social dysfunction.

  from global to local

  The British Council for Industrial Design was formed at the end of World War II to assist in postwar economic recovery, but since that time it has broadened its mission to the application of design to a diverse range of contemporary social issues. In recent years the Design Council, as it is now known, has collaborated with national and local authorities to bring creative problem solving to bear on questions that could scarcely have been imagined a decade ago. In “Dott 07 (Designs of the Times),” the Council sponsored a year of community-based projects, competitions, exhibitions, conferences, symposia, and festivals throughout northeast England to explore such questions as “Can design help in the fight against crime?” “Are our food production systems ripe for a redesign?” “How can design make schools more sustainable?” One particularly successful program, Design and Sexual Health (DASH) set out to balance the requirements of publicity and discretion in encouraging people to take advantage of a social service that typically carries a stigma. The project team first surveyed 1,200 residents, community leaders, and health professionals and then went on to create an integrated program of communication, education, and clinic and service design that focused not on diseases but on the experience of visitors to the clinics.

  Hilary Cottam, herself a onetime director of the Design Council, has taken this approach to local design thinking one step further. Teaming up with the innovation expert Charles Leadbeater and the digital entrepreneur Hugo Manassei, she created Participle, an organization dedicated to creating new social solutions through the collaboration of local communities and leading experts from around the world. Taking a design-led approach and basing its work on the philosophies of the British welfare state first established by Sir William Beveridge, the team at Participle has tackled issues ranging from loneliness in old age to improving the integration of youth into society. One project, called Southwark Circle, resulted in a new membership organization that helps the aged take care of household tasks. Ideas were refined and prototyped in collaboration with older people and their families before the service was launched in Southwark, South London, in early 2009. Cottam believes that locally created solutions can ultimately lead to national models for community-based social services.

  designing future design thinkers

  Perhaps the most important opportunity for long-term impact is through education. Designers have learned some powerful methods for arriving at innovative solutions. How might we use those methods not just to educate the next generation of designers but to think about how education as such might be reinvented to unlock the vast reservoir of human creative potential?

  In 2008 I spoke to students at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena about “Serious Play,” the connection between the activities we all participated in as children and the characteristics of innovation and creativity. I argued that exploring the world with our hands, testing out ideas by building them, role playing, and countless other activities are all natural characteristics of children at play. By the time we enter the adult world, however, we have lost most of these precious talents. The first place this begins to happen is at school. The focus on analytical and convergent thinking in education is so dominant that most students leave school with the belief either that creativity is unimportant or that it is the privilege of a few talented oddballs.

  Our objective, when it comes to the application of design thinking in schools, must be to develop an educational experience that does not eradicate children’s natural inclination to experiment and create but rather encourages and amplifies it. As a society our future capacity for innovation depends on having many more people literate in the holistic principles of design thinking, just as our technological prowess depends on having high levels of literacy in math and science. Surprisingly, perhaps, for a firm that won its reputation doing industrial design for the likes of Apple, Samsung, and Hewlett-Packard, engagements with public and private schools, with the educational initiatives of groups such as the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, and with colleges and universities has become a growing part of IDEO’s work.

  Ormondale is a public elementary school in the affluent Bay Area community of Portola Valley. The school’s staff had become convinced that “in order to produce 21st century learners, we could not use 18th century methods.” In contrast to the expectations of our corporate clients, Ormondale asked us not to deliver a finished design but rather to facilitate a process in which those designing the program—the teachers themselves—would be responsible for implementing it. The team brainstormed, led workshops, developed curricular prototypes, and conducted observations of analogous institutions ranging from a wildlife conservation network to a Mormon food distribution network. The Ormondale teachers have now developed a set of tools based on a shared philosophy of “investigative learning” that engages students as seekers of knowledge rather than receivers of information. The process—participatory design—mirrored the end product: a participatory teaching and learning environment.

  Opportunities to rethink the structure of education exist all the way up the chain. Within the structure of a traditional art school, the California College of the Arts in San Francisco has applied the principles of design thinking—user-centered research, brainstorming, analogous observations, prototyping—to crafting its strategic plan for the future of arts education. The Royal College of Art in London is collaborating with its neighbor, the Imperial College, to leverage the different but mutually reinforcing types of creative problem solving found in art and engineering. In Toronto students at the Ontario College of Art & Design have the opportunity to team up with their counterparts at UT’s Rotman School of Management in a shared pursuit of creativity and innovation.

  One of the newest experiments can be found at Stanford University in the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design—the so-called d-School. The d-School does not seek to educate traditional designers and does not, in fact, offer any “design” courses at all. Rather, it serves as a unique environment where graduate students in fields as far flung as medicine, business, law, and engineering can come together to work on collaborative design projects in the public interest. The d-School encourages human-centered research, brainstorming, and prototyping in every student projec
t, but it also applies these core principles of design thinking to itself. Spaces are fungible, academic ranks are irrelevant, the curriculum is in permanent flux—it is, in short, an ongoing prototype of the educational process itself.

  Finding ways to apply the principles of design thinking to the problems of society—on the outskirts of Kampala, in the offices of a social venture fund in New York, or in the classrooms of an elementary school in California—is the sort of problem that is attracting the most ambitious designers, entrepreneurs, and students today. They are motivated not by an altruistic desire to “give something back” for a few months after graduation or upon retirement but by the fact that the greatest challenges are always the source of the greatest opportunities.

  The projects and personalities highlighted in this chapter are about not charity, philanthropy, or self-sacrifice but a genuine reciprocity of interests. There is nothing wrong with “stopping out” for a year or two to help the Peace Corps build a playground in Nepal or El Salvador. The initiatives examined here, however, do not call for highly trained specialists to interrupt their careers but for them to redirect them in ways that serve those in extreme need.

  If we are to build on one another’s good ideas—one of the key tenets of design thinking—we will, at least for the time being, have to focus on a finite set of problems so that our successes can be cumulative over time and place. This begins with nurturing the natural creativity of all children and keeping it alive as they advance through the educational system and into professional life. There is no better way to fill the pipeline with tomorrow’s design thinkers.

  CHAPTER TEN

  designing tomorrow—today

  It would be tempting to end this book on the inspiring theme of how design thinking can not only contribute to the success of companies but also promote the general welfare of humanity. The people and projects described in the previous pages are at the leading edge of design thinking. They show what is possible when people tackle the right problems and are committed to seeing them through to their logical conclusions. But, to steal a phrase from Stanford professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Bob Sutton, design thinking requires bridging the “knowing-doing gap.” The tools of the design thinker—getting out into the world to be inspired by people, using prototyping to learn with our hands, creating stories to share our ideas, joining forces with people from other disciplines—are ways of deepening what we know and widening the impact of what we do.

  Throughout this book, I have tried to show not only how the designer’s skills can indeed be applied to a wide range of problems but also that these skills are not innate and are accessible to a far greater range of people than may be commonly supposed. These two threads come together when we apply them to one of the most challenging problems of them all: designing a life.

  getting started

  Design thinking evolved from humble beginnings: craftsmen such as William Morris, architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, industrial designers such as Henry Dreyfuss and Ray and Charles Eames aspired to make the world around us more accessible, more beautiful, and more meaningful. The complexity and sophistication of the discipline grew over time as designers sought to systematize and generalize what they did.

  It is difficult to classify the design thinkers we have met throughout this book according to a simple formula. Although we tend to see people as either thinkers or doers, analyzers or synthesizers, right-brain artists or left-brain engineers, we are whole people, and characteristics emerge when we are put into the right situation. When I left art school, I saw design as a deeply personal art. I certainly did not worry about its connection with business, engineering, or marketing. Once I entered the real world of professional practice, however, I found myself immersed in projects whose interdisciplinary complexity reflected the world around me and began to discover aptitudes I’d never known I had. I’m convinced that given the opportunity—and the challenge—most people will have the same experience and will be able to apply the integrative, holistic skills of the design thinker to business, society, and life.

  DESIGN THINKING AND YOUR ORGANIZATION

  begin at the beginning

  Design thinking starts with divergence, the deliberate attempt to expand the range of options rather than narrow them. The designer’s inclination to explore new directions is of little value if it comes at the end of the innovation process, by which time the arc of the story has begun to close. Companies should have design thinkers sitting on their corporate boards, participating in their strategic marketing decisions, and taking part in the early stages of their R&D efforts. They will bring the capacity to create new unexpected ideas and will use the tools of design thinking as a means of exploring strategy. Design thinkers will connect the upstream with the downstream.

  take a human-centered approach

  Because design thinking balances the perspectives of users, technology, and business, it is by its nature integrative. As a starting point, however, it privileges the intended user, which is why I have consistently referred to it as a “human-centered” approach to innovation. Design thinkers observe how people behave, how the context of their experience affects their reaction to products and services. They take into account the emotional meaning of things as well as their functional performance. From this try to identify people’s unstated, or latent, needs and translate them into opportunities. The human-centered approach of the design thinker can inform new offerings and increase the likelihood of their acceptance by connecting them to existing behaviors. Asking the right kinds of questions often determines the success of a new product or service: Does it meet the needs of its target population? Does it create meaning as well as value? Does it inspire a new behavior that will be forever associated with it? Does it create a tipping point?

  The typical default approach is to start with prevailing business constraints—marketing budgets, supply-chain networks, and the like—and extrapolate from there, but this tactic leads to incremental ideas that are easily copied. Starting with technology is the second most common approach but is risky and best left to agile start-ups that are in a position to bet on something new and untested. Starting with humans increases the likelihood of developing a breakthrough idea and finding a receptive market—whether managers of fancy resort hotels or subsistence farmers in Cambodia. At both extremes, the first step is to ensure that those involved in your innovation efforts get as close as they can to their intended customers. Reams of market data are no substitute for getting out into the world.

  fail early, fail often

  Time to first prototype is a good measure of the vitality of an innovation culture. How rapidly are ideas made tangible so that they can be tested and improved? Leaders should encourage experimentation and accept that there is nothing wrong with failure as long as it happens early and becomes a source of learning. A vibrant design-thinking culture will encourage prototyping—quick, cheap, and dirty—as part of the creative process and not just as a way of validating finished ideas. A promising prototype will generate a buzz among members of the design team, who will become enthusiastic advocates as it becomes a candidate for funding and support. The real test of a prototype, however, is not internal but out in the world, where it can be experienced by the farmers, schoolchildren, business travelers, or surgeons who are its intended users. Prototypes need to be testable, but they do not need to be physical. Storyboards, scenarios, movies, and even improvised acting can produce highly successful prototypes—the more the better.

  get professional help

  I do not cut my own hair or change the oil in my car, even though I probably could. There are times when it makes more sense to go outside your organization and look for opportunities to expand the innovation ecosystem. Sometimes this will take the form of cocreation with customers or new partners. Sometimes it will mean hiring experts, who may be technology specialists, software geeks, design consultants, or fourteen-year-old video gamers. We have seen how, with the help of the Internet, products and servic
es are moving beyond passive consumption. The active participation of customers and partners is not only likely to yield more ideas but will create a web of loyalty that will be hard for your competitors to erode. Innovators will exploit Web 2.0 networks to expand the effective scale of their teams, and hyperinnovators will be ready for 3.0 whenever it comes.

  Extreme users are often the key to inspirational insights. These are the specialists, the aficionados, and the outright fanatics who experience the world in unexpected ways. They force us to project our thinking to the edges of our existing customer base and expose issues that would otherwise be disguised. Seek out extreme users and think of them as a creative asset. Remember that they may be found on the other side of town or the other side of the world.

  share the inspiration

  Don’t forget your internal network. Much of the effort concerning knowledge sharing over the past decade has been focused on efficiency. It may be time to think about how your knowledge networks support inspiration—not just streamlining the progress of existing programs but stimulating the emergence of new ideas. How can you connect like-minded folks to leverage their common passions? What is the typical fate of new ideas within your organization? How can you leverage insights about consumers to inspire multiple projects? Are you using digital tools to document your project outcomes in a way that deepens the knowledge base of your organization and allows individuals to learn from it and to grow?