[Last updated 2 Oct 09.]
The “design thinking” theme from yesterday was accidental. I ended up finding and sharing a bunch of stuff that relates very closely so it’s a good opportunity to cover it a little.
From Twitter:
- » Going from social media around the edges to designing ‘social business’ from the inside-out http://bit.ly/ZP2CM
- » “Every corporation needs a design-thinking type,” Roger Martin http://bit.ly/bBV9W
- » “The best ideas have something missing,” Matthew E. May on The Pursuit of Elegance http://bit.ly/2ONHXF
- » “The first step is to start asking the right questions,” IDEO’s Tim Brown at TED http://j.mp/2NgSDE
If you go by conventions (or by this description at designthinkers.com) you might assume “design thinking” has a lot to do with drawing. It doesn’t have to be visual — though the groups that practice it tend to include people with that background so the visual element is usually involved.
It refers broadly to solving problems with methodologies that are human-centered, integrative, iterative, participatory, etc. Anybody who makes complex decisions can (and should?) be a design thinker. The BusinessWeek article on “Nurturing Future Leaders” is a good place to start (the tweet with the Roger Martin quote).
Further reading:
Tim Brown is the boss at IDEO. He blogs here. His book, Change By Design, came out this week (just in the US, I suspect); here is the NYTimes review, with a BusinessWeek article [correction: it's an excerpt, a good one on design-for-healthcare] here, a podcast interview here; and here is that TED talk again. If you want to know about design thinking just spend some time browsing around IDEO’s website (for a start), getting a sense of how they work; you can also download a lot of the methodological tools they use.
Matthew E. May had an advisory role at Toyota, the company his first book was based on. He blogs here. His newest book is In Pursuit of Elegance; a summary is here. That podcast interview impressed me; it’s definitely worth the listen at least. He said he didn’t intend his business book to be read by designers but they’ve picked it up.
[Update: Take a look at May's own design thinker's reading list.]
Roger Martin runs the show at U of T’s Rotman School of Management. He doesn’t have a blog but posts about design thinking at Creative Class occasionally. His last book, The Opposable Mind, is excellent. [Update: via May here's an older article on "Design of Business."] He uses the word “heuristic” (the topic of my last post) and cites one of the all-time greatest & under-known philosophers, Charles S. Peirce.
David Armano, the interviewee in the first podcast I tweeted, was a VP at Critical Mass until he became a senior partner at the startup Dachis Group, which “was created to unlock the value of social technologies for large corporate enterprises through… Social Business Design.” He blogs here. I love the notion of “social business design” and I’m watching that closely.
My Take:
I’ve been following and promoting this constellation of thought & practice for a couple of years. I’m more convinced it’s the way things are going — but I’m thinking even the previously-linked discussion is too limited in scope. These guys aren’t thinking big enough. The platform just seems really germinal so far — in a good way. It has so much potential.
Since I love meta so much I’m going to close by suggesting there’s no better challenge for design thinkers than to universalize the practice of design thinking.
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