Strategic design as described by Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO
This is certainly insightful. I don’t think creativity or innovation is something only a crazy genius can do. No ideas are purely new. Ideas become meaningful when people make an effort to materialize them relevant to needs. An approach to understanding the “creative process” would help us apply “design thinking” to actual practice. And maybe it’s time for designers to take more serious roles.
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/95/design-strategy.html
Strategic design as described by Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO
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Unfortunately, many people continue to think of design in very narrow terms. Industrial products and graphics are outcomes of the design process, but they do not begin to describe the boundaries of design’s playing field. Software is engineered, but it is also designed — someone must come up with the concept of what it is going to do. Logistics systems, the Internet, organizations, and yes, even strategy — all of these are tangible outcomes of design thinking. In fact, many people in many organizations are engaged in design thinking without being aware of it. The result is that we don’t focus very much on making it better.
If you dig into business history, you see that the same thing occurred with the quality movement. As business strategist Gary Hamel has pointed out, there was a time when people didn’t know what quality manufacturing was and therefore didn’t think about it. Nevertheless, they were engaged with quality — they created products of good or bad durability and reliability. Then thinkers such as W. Edwards Deming deconstructed quality — they figured out what it was and how to improve it. As soon as people became conscious of it, manufactured goods improved dramatically.
The same thing needs to happen with design. Organizations need to take design thinking seriously. We need to spend more time making people conscious of design thinking — not because design is wondrous or magical, but simply because by focusing on it, we’ll make it better. And that’s an imperative for any business, because design thinking is indisputably a catalyst for innovation productivity. That is, it can increase the rate at which you generate good ideas and bring them to market. Where you innovate, how you innovate, and what you innovate are design problems. When you bring design thinking into that strategic discussion, you join a powerful tool with the purpose of the entire endeavor, which is to grow. Here is Ideo’s five-point model for strategizing by design.
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