CHAPTER 1
thinking like a designer
How Design Keeps the Dutch Dry
Delft is a quaint Dutch city located about halfway between Rotterdam and The Hague. Sometimes called "little Amsterdam," its canals, churches, and narrow streets have a way of transporting you back in time (Figure 1.1a). If you didn't look too closely, you could be forgiven for thinking it unchanged since Johannes Vermeer immortalized it in his painting View of Delft in the 1600s (Figure 1.1b).
From time to time, the city's charms are less obvious. Winter storms batter the North Sea coast, bringing gale-force winds and driving rain, testing the patience of its residents – and the durability of their umbrellas, which tend to flip inside out in the high winds.
In a single week in March 2004, Gerwin Hoogendoorn lost three umbrellas to the elements. Frustrated by the experience, the industrial design student at the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) set out to improve a product that had been essentially unchanged for 3,400 years. The ultimate result was Senz, a stormproof umbrella designed to withstand whatever nature could throw at the hapless Dutch pedestrian.
Hoogendoorn explored everything about umbrellas: their tendency to flip inside out, to block visibility, to poke people in the eye. Umbrellas were a boring utilitarian product that didn't fulfil their function well – so boring, in fact, that Hoogendoorn had to endure the ridicule of his fellow design students, Gerard Kool and Philip Hess, for even working on such a product.
His early ideas included a magnetic field to repel the rain and a helicopter-like device attached to the user's head. Eventually, however, he focused on the aerodynamics of umbrellas. With no background in aerodynamics, he sought out the help of university contacts with expertise in the field. To build prototypes, he bought a couple of umbrellas, tore them apart, and rebuilt them (Figure 1.2). He tested his ideas through computer simulation, wind tunnels, and "in-use" tests (i.e., taking them out in the Dutch rain).
With Kool and Hess – who, by now, had begun to come around to the idea – Hoogendoorn founded Senz in 2005. The first Senz umbrella was launched in November 2006; its original, quirky design (Figure 1.3) captured the public imagination, and the initial stock of 10,000 units sold out in nine days. In its first year, Senz won almost every major design award and went global in 2007.
Hoogendoorn's design school, TU Delft, is a venerated institution in the design world. A few years ago, I spent a sabbatical there, during which I experienced the Dutch rain on more than one occasion. As a former marketing executive and a professor of marketing at the Rotman School of Management in Toronto, I had been on a journey to explore "design thinking" for some years. I wanted to know everything I could about design and design thinking. What was design thinking anyway, and how was it different from any other kind of thinking? How was it practised in business and the public sector, and what happened when it was?
I felt the best way to conduct this exploration was to immerse myself in the world of design. I hung out with designers. I read deeply about design and design theory. I worked with designers on projects. I talked with designers, design educators, and design thinkers in organizations. I taught business strategy to designers and design thinking to executives. My design journey led me not only to Delft but also to many more places around the world.
I found that designers look at the world in a distinct and interesting way. I found not just creativity but also curiosity, rigour, and discipline. I found some answers – and many more questions.
To a designer like Hoogendoorn, what was design thinking? On the face of it, his idea of design sounds fairly simple: "I think good design is an object or a service that exceeds the user's expectation," he says in a promotional video.
But even if we had a good way of understanding what the user expects, how would we know which problem to work on? Flimsy umbrellas are just one of those everyday problems that seem to plague us. We take such problems for granted and don't think much about them, much less about solving them. Hoogendoorn's genius seemed to be in selecting the problem as much as in solving it.
Once he had decided to work on the problem, he went back and forth, drawing things, building rough models, testing them, redefining the problem, moving on from ridiculous ideas to more practical ones, and learning as he went along. His approach was exploratory, driven by curiosity.
For companies that make consumer products, the ability of designers like Hoogendoorn to find genius in the everyday is inspiring – and perhaps a little disconcerting. Hoogendoorn approached Impliva, a major umbrella distributor, and was turned down before embarking on his own project. It seems to suggest that designers see possibilities that companies don't see.
Many organizations have taken this to heart, wondering what the "secret sauce" of design might be, and whether it could be applied to their own problems. Design thinking has been touted as an answer to this question and has grown from a fringe activity to a central weapon in the problem-solver's arsenal. An army of consultants and management gurus now promote it as the long-awaited answer to the problem of innovation in organizations.
If only it were that simple.
Most of my career to date has been spent in large organizations. Exciting as design thinking is – and I still find myself passionate about it – it is not easy to apply. As I have explored design thinking, I have encountered many with a similar passion who struggle to make it work in a large organization. It is such a different way of looking at problems that it can pose a challenge to the prevailing culture and approach.
I've found that organizational design thinkers face common problems, tensions that they have to manage in order to survive.
Fortunately, some are not merely surviving but are thriving. How they do so is the subject of this book.
The book is divided into three parts, and you'll find a roadmap in figure 1.4. In part 1, framing Design thinking in organizations, I will discuss what design thinking actually means (chapter 1) and how it fits into large organizations in the private, public, and not-for-profit sectors. I've found that design thinkers in organizations face three tensions: the tension of Inclusion, the tension of Disruption, and the Tension of Perspective (chapter 2). If you're new to the notion of design thinking or would like to know more about it, read chapter 1; if you're already familiar with it and your primary interest is in how it works in organizations, go to chapter 2.
Part 2, The Three Tensions, explores each of the three tensions in turn, looking at how organizations manage their way through them and how the best design-thinking programs have learned to reframe their work to deal with them (chapters 3, 4, and 5). This is the part you want if you're interested in exploring in depth the world of design thinking in organizations.
The final part, Reframing Design Thinking for Your Organization, draws the insights from the research together (chapter 6) and provides a roadmap for starting and managing a design-thinking program in your organization (chapter 7). If your main question is "What do I do next?" this is the part for you.
I'll begin with an overview of the idea of design thinking.
Design ... and Design Thinking
As an idea, design thinking is tough to pin down. That's because design itself is both ubiquitous and multifaceted.
Whether consciously or not, human beings are always designing something. Only nature in its purest form has not been designed and in the modern world, even nature is affected by design, through environmental damage or, more hopefully, measures to protect the environment. Design is everywhere: in the hat we wear, the flowerbed in our front garden, the paper cup we drink from.
Typically, though, we don't think of design this way. We have design schools, where students learn a set of techniques and methods; we have "star" designers like Rem Koolhaas, Dieter Rams, or Karl Lagerfeld; we have their classic designs, like the Eames chair (Figure 1.5a) or Philippe Starck's Alessi citrus squeezer (Figure 1.5b).
Design has become a conscious, self-aware activity, rooted in science – the science of making things work – but has also been elevated to an art form.
Some of this refinement of design carries with it more than a hint of arrogance. The architect Denys Lasdun argued that "our job is to give the client ... not what he wants, but what he never dreamed he wanted." Star designers seem to define what is "cool," and we follow.
Many practising designers are uncomfortable with this elitist notion of design and argue for a concept of design that puts users, not designers, first. This is called user-centred, or human-centred, design.
"Design thinking" extends from this concept of user-centred design into a comprehensive innovation process that considers the full range of contextual factors. Tim Brown, CEO of design firm IDEO, argues that design thinking integrates business strategy and technology with the needs of the user:
[Design Thinking is] a discipline that uses the designer's sensibility and methods to match people's needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity?
Many business problems are hard to define, and design thinking offers a kind of toolkit to help you work through the ambiguity. In this way of thinking, design thinking is a process: a collection of things that you do to innovate. Through methods like ethnographic research, you explore users' lives and underlying needs; you use frameworks to define problems and analyse the data; you study competitive offerings and strategies; you develop an intimate understanding of technology and the company's resources. You build prototypes as you go.
But where do you begin? Some versions give the starting point as user desirability, but it isn't that simple. Design thinking is not a linear exercise in which one step neatly follows another; nor is it really circular. Research with expert designers shows that they go back-and-forth in an iterative process, going from analysis to prototype, back to analysis, to data collection, and so on. To an outsider, it can look chaotic and unpredictable. To a designer, where you start doesn't matter.
Design can be seen as a reflective process, in which the "situation talks back" – that is, responds to the designer's efforts and thereby provides feedback for the next iteration. Like Hoogendoorn's back-and-forth development of the Senz umbrella, design is about exploration.
Yet for many designers, something is lost in this way of thinking. They see design thinking as much more than a set of tools; rather, it is a distinct way of being, an attitude, or an orientation in the world. Design researcher Kees Dorst suggests that "design is a way of looking, of being more actively involved in the world than most people. You are never content with how things appear. It is impossible to be bored when you are a designer."
Management professors Richard Boland and Fred Collopy compare a design attitude with a decision attitude:
A decision attitude ... assumes it is easy to come up with alternatives to consider, but difficult to choose among them ... the design attitude towards problem solving, in contrast, assumes that it is difficult to design a good alternative, but once you have developed a good one, the decision about which alternative to select becomes trivial.
What Boland and Collopy, as well as others, argue is that design is about how you inherently respond, emotionally and attitudinally, to problems. It's an attitude of curiosity, openness, and a willingness to play.
This way of approaching problems is very different from the standard managerial mindset. One designer I interviewed some years ago put it this way:
[Design thinking is] a way of approaching problems in the world that begins from a point of optimism, that there is a solution, and it's a matter of us reaching it. It builds on that with this idea of "mind of a child," [the] ability to be open to whatever the world is going to tell you, and coupling that with an attitude of wisdom.
While design thinking has a toolkit, a toolkit alone won't make you a design thinker. In its essence it is about iteration, experimentation, and reflection. More than that, it is a mindset: playful, tolerant of ambiguity, and open to learning. These qualities have captured the notice of organizations.
Before we discuss design thinking's impact on organizations, let's take look more closely at its components.
A Deeper Look at Design Thinking
Design is often associated with creativity: for many people, the image that comes to mind is a group of hipsters, sitting on beanbag chairs and papering the wall with Post-Its. Creativity is very much an element – but it enters the process in many ways, and it's a mistake to think of design thinking as just a form of brainstorming. It's better thought of as an integrated and disciplined innovation process that builds creative insight from deep knowledge.
A good deal has been written about design thinking, and there are many versions of how it works. Although their features, labelling, and emphasis differ, they tend to have three important things in common: experimentation, deep understanding, and creative reframing.
The first of the three is experimentation. Looking back at Hoogendoorn's approach to the umbrella problem, it's interesting to think about what he did not do.
He did not – at least initially – analyse the market. He did not identify a market segment, analyse competitive strategy, do pro forma financials. Nor did he develop a General Theory of Umbrellas. Instead, he tinkered: he bought two umbrellas, pulled them apart and rebuilt them; he drew mock designs; he tested his models in wind tunnels and with users on the street. As he did so, his ideas became more refined and focused.
Hoogendoorn's trial-and-error approach allowed him to learn more about the problem and the issues involved in solving it as he went along. Compared with a "linear" process that moves systematically from problem to solution, a designer tries things out, moving from problem straight to solution and back again. This is also the spirit of brainstorming, in which a team suspends criticism while exploring solutions – but it goes much further.
Designers experiment constantly, jumping from early conceptions of the problem straight to sketches, back to the problem, to rough mockups, back to the problem, and so on. Through rapid prototyping, the designer makes rough physical models of a solution, without taking too much time for refinement, making them just finished enough to see if they are worth pursuing further. These prototypes are critical vehicles for thinking.
By representing the problem in tangible form, prototypes play a role in clarifying the choices available. As designers Marion Buchenau and Jane Fulton Suri point out, making can either narrow the options or broaden them: "The tools we use to design, such as prototypes, influence the way we think. Solutions, and probably even imagination, are inspired and limited by the prototyping tools we have at our disposal." In his classic 1983 book, The Reflective Practitioner, Donald Schön explored the interplay between doing and thinking. Schön set out to discover how professionals thought about their work. Starting from the idea that professionals use "reflection-in-action" – more than improvisation, a seamless flow between thinking and doing – and he explored how this approach is used in design and other fields.
Schön described how this flow occurred in an interaction between an architecture student, Petra, and her instructor, Quist, as he commented on, and wrote and drew over, Petra's initial design. Thought and action were closely interwoven:
The verbal and non-verbal dimensions are closely connected. Quist's lines are unclear in their reference except insofar as he says what they mean. His words are obscure except insofar as Petra can connect them with the lines of the drawing. His talk is full of dychtic utterances – "here," "this," "that" – which Petra can interpret only by observing his movements.
Kees Dorst and Nigel Cross also described this back-and-forth interplay between thought and action, describing it as "co-evolution of problem-space and solution-space." By studying the thoughts of designers as they worked through a problem of designing a waste receptacle for Dutch Railways, they found that the designers worked by trying a solution, reflecting on the result, and trying again. Each time the designers tried something, they learned a little more about the problem.
