I somehow have a hard time recently to catch up with all the stuff that happens around me on and off-line.
Beside the reasonable business travelling I’ve done recently to NL, CH, then back to NL and CH next month again (after all not too many complaints here since I also always meet good friends and make new ones!) this semester I’m currently starting a new course on Business Model Visualization at the local Design faculty I’m currently working for as a Professor for Design Management. It’s a virtual collaboration with my (virtual) friend and Business Modell (Guru ;-) Alex Osterwalder from Switzerland. More news on that soon …
Anyway, two weeks ago I’ve held a lecture at the TU Delft for the MA in Strategic Product Design. My friend and business partner Erik is a part-time faculty member there. Erik knows my work and thinking on Strategy and Strategic Management for quite a while (also because he used to be one of my post-graduate Master of Design Management students at Inholland University, Rotterdam [the programme has been terminated in case you’ve planned to ask for further details ;-(] and for the purpose of my guest lecture he proposed to combine my knowledge on Strategy with my recent ideas on Design Thinking (explaining the different modes of thinking between Designers & Managers amongst others). So from the feedback it seemed that I’ve been able to create some good linkages between the two and I plan to continue ruminating about ‘Strategic Design Thinking’.
Sooo, coming back to the first sentence of this posting I was happy to see that my blog colleague Martin Koser over from ‘businessmodel innovation_design’ posted a comprehensive blog post on Design Thinking where he’s listed and covered all the blogs and sites I’ve recently visited as well and considered posting about (but after all isn’t it all about execution, stupid?! ;-) His posting is also worth a visit since he’s provided links to loads of videos on the topic worth checking.
However one or two side notes on the quote by Thomas Vander Wal that Martin has highlighted in response to a video interview question: “What does Design mean to you?”:
“It’s the layer on top of things that are used, that makes them comfortable and gives them more ease of use. It’s adding experience but taking away the hard edges, and allow people to embrace the tool or service in a closer interaction.”
For sure this is an answer that stems from Vander Wal’s background as an interaction designer. However this makes it also clear that the community of Design Thinkers and Design Managers needs to take care that the term does not get washed away by being everybody’s darling! For sure Design Thinking and especially ‘Strategic Design Thinking’ in its heart is ‘Process’ that is needed as the foundation of every ‘Design’ that wants to ’serve’ people, users, customers, clients, human beings or even animals.
And yes, Tim Brown from IDEO now also has a blog on Design Thinking as well; heavily featured by his buddy Bruce Nussbaum who is also a professor on Design and Innovation management now … I can’t help myself, but yes, I’m a little bit cynical about that all. For me it seems that these types of blogs are more meant as another hub for exposition rather than really engaging in a ‘conversation’ (you know Cluetrain Manifesto and the likes ;-) And yes I admit I’ve also left my comments there in the hope to get a ’sort of’ response … but hey, I’m naive … or so ;-). However my grief will go away soon and beside this: Not all of us can become the Browns and Nussbaums on Design (Thinking). I think the blogosphere has its niche for all of us … in the long tail :-)
Martin Koser Says:
October 2nd, 2008 at 9:44Visit Martin Koser
Ralf, thanks for adding your thoughts. I side with you here and feel a little cynical myself too. Yet I refrained from voicing my real opinions about too many moves of late in my post. I guess it’s one of the advantages if you’re only doing some kind of quick compilation post - you don’t need to pull each piece of shoddy thinking into the light.
So thanks again for voicing these concerns, sure helps the idea: Even when design thinking can mean something different to each of us, we should prevent from getting it washed away or cluttered with stuff.
Jim Rait Says:
October 2nd, 2008 at 11:40Visit Jim Rait
I really struggle with ‘Design Thinking’ as a topic of discussion/exposition. Most of my career in ‘Designing’, we watched people going about their business; thought “aha! we could do something about that”; schemed and made things -ideas, concepts - tangible; let people play with the idea/concept; made sense of their responses- enthusiasm, criticism; rework the original scheme and iterate. In my first design office job (designing the fan on the first of big fan aero engines) we used to say that the development office should be called the design validation office. The change in emphasis coming from us resisting their call to give them something quickly so they can test and modify till it works; whilst we wanting to put the best experience into the design before releasing it to development to confirm out assumptions, or not! The key to fast action is getting the knowledge building process to operate quickly… sort of Design Fast Action.. I find Major Boyd’s OODA loops is a basis for musing on this…. I always think the story of the creation of the Palm pda is a good example of design behaviour that changes design thinking… (better get off my soapbox!)
Jim Rait Says:
October 2nd, 2008 at 12:26Visit Jim Rait
Bill Buxton, with whom I’ve had many excellent conversations, writes at the start of ‘The Question of Design’ chapter in his book ‘Sketching User Experiences’: “If Design is so important yet negelected, and if we should be taking steps to remedy that situation, then perhaps it maked sense to clarify waht we mean by “design.”
Here is where the trouble starts. Take any room of professionals and ask them what design is, or what a designer is. Almost everyone will answer in the affirmative and yet practically everyone’s definition will be different. That is to say, people’s definition’s are so broad that almost every act of creation , from writing code,…. making a business plan… can be considered design.
The problem is, when a word means almost anything or everything, it actually means nothing. … If everybody trying to develop and sell a new product are all doing ‘design’ then how can I be arguing that we need to incorporate design into the process? By that definition of design, it is already there at every level of the organisation and every stage of the process.”
In the rest of the chapter he distinguishes between designers and other people in the innovation team by showing that whilst all people on the team need to be more creative only designers do it by drawing… which is very thought provoking…
businessmodel innovation _ design » Business thinking plus design thinking ends up being far more powerful Says:
October 6th, 2008 at 9:11Visit businessmodel innovation _ design » Business thinking plus design thinking ends up being far more powerful
[…] Yes, no point in making a management fad out of this. Whatever, Stanford’s d.school gets mentioned (btw, there’s one at d.school at Potsdam too), as is Tim Brown and IDEO. Well, we can’t do anything about that, yet marvel when people like Jim Rait weigh in and put down pieces of wisdom in the comments (and btw, explaining my fascination with both design-thinking and enterprise social software for innovation and knowledge management processes) : The key to fast action is getting the knowledge building process to operate quickly … sort of Design Fast Action. tagged with design, design-thinking, innovation, knowledge-work, social-software […]