Reading the Harvard Business review on design thinking by Tim Brown was more than interesting and worth the time spent analyzing. Other than including really captivating examples, it shows how the design thinking process is collaborated with real life situations. Let me start by saying that one of ideas that stood out the most to me was the metaphor Brown used over the whole review of the innovation drill and how he lead us through the reading getting through the surface and and all the way back to it.

Brown successfully  grabbed the reader’s attention by pointing out Thomas Edison’s early methodology of design thinking. He described how Edison was not only a specialized scientist known for his invention but also a business sensed generalist. I did know that Edison’s process featured cycles of trail and error; however, Brown visualized the team-based way Edison used to help experimenters “learn something new from each iterative stab”. Edison’s ‘painstaking innovation process‘ as described in the review is in fact a very competitive advantage that Edison implanted in the early technology of design thinking and I therefore believe this was the first step in the innovation drill.’

As I went through the reading, I noticed how amazing “getting beneath the surface is”. Brown explains a problem solved example developed to meet the consumer’s needs and desires. I, here, recalled the importance of observing the client in order to get the best feedback. In the Kaiser study, Brown elaborates on strategies used that include how they manipulated both nurses and patients responses to just ‘identify’ the problem. Patient’s feedback that they felt ‘like a hole in their care’ was never going to be included by a nurse’s response, for instance.Grasping how empathy inspires innovation, I would like to highlight how important it is not just to observe but observe from different perspectives. 

Later,  as the team started prototyping, I stopped where Brown phrased this part as ‘rapid prototyping’ ; this is similar to what students-like us- do in the phase of throwing in wild and crazy ideas just to solve simple problems. As a new design thinker, I always thought of prototyping as the first step to implement; on the other hand I  love how Brown reframed that the goal of prototyping is not to finish but to collect strength and weaknesses that would drill in the way and start to ‘make connections’.

Another point I agree with is that the design process is best described as a system of spaces rather than a series of orderly steps. As IDEO collaborated in the bike project by Shimano, I was attracted to their first analyzing step which is ‘identifying constraints for the project’  which is the best way to make the solution actually real! Yes, the market can be unpredictable, but by experiencing the full cycle ,projects are blended together with alternatives put to the given constraints. 

Last but not least, Brown explains how observing impact is a really significant phase and this is where the drill basically gets back to the surface and the cycle repeats itself all over again…

 

 

Published by faridaharouni