Design Thinking and Innovation.

3I Model of DTI by Tim Brown:

 Inspiration
 Ideation
 Implementation

Real life example: Isambard Kingdom Brunel was one of the earliest examples of a design
thinker.

Reformation in Tihar Jail by Kiran Bedi. ( https://www.femina.in/trending/achievers/dr-kiran-

Design Thinkers’ Personality traits:

 Empathy
 Integrative thinking
 Optimism
 Experimentation
 Curiosity

How with these 4 questions DTI solves problems.

What is: This is usually the client statement or the work problem identifying stage.

What if? : Scope identification.

What wows? Thinking beyond human centered problem approach.

What works? Ideation of a solution as product.

Three Spaces of Innovation:

Project concept:

Designers, then, have learned to excel at resolving one or another or even all three of these
constraints. Design thinkers, by contrast, are learning to navigate between and among them in
creative ways. They do so because they have shifted their thinking from problem to project. The
project is the vehicle that carries an idea from concept to reality. Unlike many other processes we are
used to—from playing the piano to paying our bills—a design project is not openended and ongoing.
It has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it is precisely these restrictions that anchor it to the real
world. That design thinking is expressed within the context of a project forces us to articulate a clear
goal at the outset.

The “Innovate or Die Pedal-Powered Machine Contest” competition is a good example. Google
teamed up with the bike company Specialized to create a design competition whose modest
challenge was to use bicycle technology to change the world. The winning team—five committed
designers and an extended family of enthusiastic supporters—was a late starter. In a few frenzied
weeks of brainstorming and prototyping, the team was able to identify a pressing issue (1.1 billion
people in developing countries do not have access to clean drinking water), explore a variety of
alternative solutions (mobile or stationary? trailer or luggage rack?) and build a working prototype:
The Aquaduct, a human-powered tricycle designed to filter drinking water while transporting it, is
now traveling the world to help promote clean water innovation. It succeeded because of the
inflexible constraints of technology (pedal power), budget ($0.00), and inflexible deadline.

Brief: The brief is a set of mental constraints that gives the project team a framework from which to
begin, benchmarks by which they can measure progress, and a set of objectives to be realized: price
point, available technology, market segment, and so on. The analogy goes even further. Just as a
hypothesis is not the same as an algorithm, the project brief is not a set of instructions or an attempt
to answer a question before it has been posed. Rather, a well-constructed brief will allow for
serendipity, unpredictability, and the capricious whims of fate, for that is the creative realm from
which breakthrough ideas emerge.

Smart Teams : There is a popular saying around IDEO that “all of us are smarter than any of us,” and
this is the key to unlocking the creative power of any organization. We ask people not simply to offer
expert advice on materials, behaviours, or software but to be active in each of the spaces of
innovation: inspiration, ideation, and implementation. Staffing a project with people from diverse
backgrounds and a multiplicity of disciplines takes some patience, however. It requires us to identify
individuals who are confident enough of their expertise that they are willing to go beyond it.

To operate within an interdisciplinary environment, an individual needs to have strengths in two

Teams of Teams : Design thinking is the opposite of group thinking, but paradoxically, it takes place in
groups. The usual effect of “groupthink,” as William H. Whyte explained to the readers of Fortune
back in 1952, is to suppress people’s creativity. Design thinking, by contrast, seeks to liberate it.
When a team of talented, optimistic, and collaborative design thinkers comes together, a chemical
change occurs that can lead to unpredictable actions and reactions. To reach this point, however, we
have learned that we must channel this energy productively, and one way to achieve this is to do
away with one large team in favor of many small ones.

Faced with more complex problems, we may be tempted to increase the size of the core team early
on, but more often than not this leads to a dramatic reduction in speed and efficiency as
communications within the team begin to take up more time than the creative process itself.

our goal should be to create interdependent networks of small teams as has been done by the
online innovation exchange Innocentive.

how using real space helps the process :

Design thinking is embodied thinking—embodied in teams and projects, to be sure, but embodied in
the physical spaces of innovation as well.

The project spaces are large enough that the accumulated research materials, photos, storyboards,
concepts, and prototypes can be out and available all of the time. The simultaneous visibility of these
project materials helps us identify patterns and encourages creative synthesis to occur much more
readily than when these resources are hidden away in file folders, notebooks, or PowerPoint decks. A
well-curated project space, augmented by a project Web site or wiki to help keep team members in
touch when they are out in the field, can significantly improve the productivity of a team by
supporting better collaboration among its members and better communication with outside partners
and clients. So integral are these project spaces to our creative process that we have exported them,
whenever possible, to our clients.
Chapter 2:
In a design paradigm, however, the solution is not locked away somewhere waiting to be discovered
but lies in the creative work of the team. The creative process generates ideas and concepts that
have not existed before. These are more likely to be triggered by observing the odd practices of an
amateur carpenter or the incongruous detail in a mechanic’s shop than by hiring expert consultants
or asking “statistically average” people to respond to a survey or fill out a questionnaire. The insight
phase that helps to launch a project is therefore every bit as critical as the engineering that comes
later, and we must take it from wherever we can find it. The evolution from design to design thinking
is the story of the evolution from the creation of products to the analysis of the relationship between
people and products, and from there to the relationship between people and people.

observation: watching what people don’t do, listening to what they don’t say:

Observation relies on quality, not quantity. The decisions one makes can dramatically affect the
results one gets. It makes sense for a company to familiarize itself with the buying habits of people
who inhabit the center of its current market, for they are the ones who will verify that an idea is valid
on a large scale.

A few years ago, when the Swiss company Zyliss engaged IDEO to design a new line of kitchen tools,
the team started out by studying children and professional chefs—neither of whom were the
intended market for these mainstream products. For that very reason, however, both groups yielded
valuable insights. A seven-year-old girl struggling with a can opener highlighted issues of physical
control that adults have learned to disguise. The shortcuts used by a restaurant chef yielded
unexpected insights into cleaning because of the exceptional demands he placed on his kitchen
tools. The exaggerated concerns of people at the margins led the team to abandon the orthodoxy of
the “matched set” and to create a line of products united by a common design language but with the
right handle for each tool. As a result, Zyliss whisks, spatulas, and pizza cutters continue to fly off the
shelves.

Empathy:

Empathy is the most important distinction between academic thinking and design thinking.

Empathy is the mental habit that moves us beyond thinking of people as laboratory rats or standard
deviations. If we are to “borrow” the lives of other people to inspire new ideas, we need to begin by
recognizing that their seemingly inexplicable behaviors represent different strategies for coping with
the confusing, complex, and contradictory world in which they live.

Beyond the individual:

With the growth of the Internet, it has become clear that we must extend our understanding to the
social interactions of people within groups and to the interactions among groups themselves. Almost
any Web-based service—from social networking sites to mobile phone offerings to the vast world of
online gaming—requires an understanding of the dynamic interactions within and between larger
groups. What are people trying to achieve as individuals? What group effects, such as “smart mobs”
or “virtual economies,” are taking shape? And how does membership in an online community affect
the behavior of individuals once they return to the prosaic world of atoms, proteins, and bricks? It is
hard to imagine creating anything today without trying to gain an understanding of group effects.

A second set of considerations is forcing us to rethink our notions of how to connect to consumers,
and that is the pervasive fact of cultural differences—a theme that has moved from bad jokes about
“political correctness” to the center of our concerns as we confront the realities of a media-
saturated, globally interconnected society.

In the past, the consumer was viewed as the object of analysis or, worse, as the hapless target of
predatory marketing strategies. Now we must migrate toward ever-deeper collaboration not just
among members of a design team but between the team and the audience it is trying to reach. As
Howard Rheingold has shown in his studies of “smart mobs” and Jeff Howe has demonstrated
through “crowdsourcing” (more formally known as “distributed participatory design”), new
technologies are suggesting promising ways of forging this link.