I’ve been to Lucerne (BA Design Management International) for the whole of last week in order to deliver a class on ‘Design in the Context of Strategy and Brand Driven Innovation’. While I’ve covered the ’strategic’ part my friend and business partner Erik Roscam Abbing from ZilverInnovation.com has been the host of the ‘brand’ part.
While I don’t want to go too much into the details of our course in this post, I’d like to shortly discuss the topic of ‘Design Thinking‘ that framed the very first day of the course. The purpose of giving ‘Design Thinking’ a prominent place in the 5 day course has been to make students aware of two things:
a) Understand that human beings have different perceptions and understandings of the character of a ‘problem’ and b) That human beings (in this case managers and designers) are being educated with different approaches to solving problems.
While we’ve framed a) into the 4 categories developed by de Wit and Meyer part b) largely made references to Roger Martin’s reflections on ‘Abductive Reasoning‘. The purpose of this combination was aiming to achieve a better understanding that Managers tend to perceive problems far more often as a kind of puzzle, dilemma, or trade-off set-up while Designers accept their assignments more like ways to resolve ‘paradoxes’ (more on this at this link). Secondly the ‘mental tools’ (aka theories) Designers are applying embrace far more elements of ‘abductive reasoning‘ as opposed to ‘inductive/deductive’ thinking that managers are still being taught at universities these days.Accordingly our view on ‘Design Thinking’ is not so much related to a profession itself, but rather a question of mindset. In this sense ‘Design Thinking’ is rather an attitude than exclusive to a profession. Therefore I was happy to read Ellen di Resta’s blog post on exactly that distinction.
In line with this notion Erik and I wanted to make students aware of the fact that ‘D(d)esign’ both as a process (d) as well as an object (D) need to be seen in a context rather than as an isolated ‘function’ in an organisation. This chart might give you an idea what we’ve been heading for!?
As a matter of fact ‘Design Thinkers’ will develop similar frameworks that approach a problem or issue from different angles and free themselves to stick to traditional definitions and models. Again it’s not about ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, but rather about yes/and!
Therefore I’ve had a blast learning in more detail on how Erik is currently helping ‘fatboy‘ the hip, loungy, urban, lifestyle, hangout bags (1.40×1.80 mtrs.) manufacturer on not only innovating from a ‘functional layer’, but far more holistically incorporating the other layers as well.
While Erik might decribe the process far better than I (sometimes having a memory like a sieve ;-) for me such an approach also gives the ‘Brand’ as a carrier of cultural values (and not only as a means for creating an ‘Image’) a quite different (yet 
‘abductive’) twist. In that sense I’ve been glad to discover Richard Anderson’s blog posting titled ‘Crummy Innovation’ just a couple of minutes ago where he nicely describes some of Roger Martin’s ideas that he’s grabbed at a recent forum in S.F.: “Hence, Roger argues that companies need to ban the use of two words when it comes to innovation: “prove it.” If you can prove something in advance, it is not an innovation.” Some equally smart observations can be found in a recent comment Chris Flanagan has left on my previous blog posting (Thanks Chris!).
So as I’m reviewing this posting I’m reasoning what the original idea of this blog post has been (well, I started writing it last night)? Well, originally I wanted to approach Design Thinking from a heuristic perspective commenting on the discussion Tim Brown started over at his much hyped IDEO Design Thinking blog. And in a sense I have to admit that I originally wanted to start moaning about bloggers who start a conversation, but then feel to busy to comment and engage accordingly (yes, Jens, I do owe you a reply ;-). Anyway I find this blog posting more constructive than my first approach … and maybe you’d like to share your comments on it as well? - Conversation guaranteed! ;-)
