Design Thinking
Dec 22nd, 2007 by Linda Naiman
Shilajeet (Banny) Banerjee, who runs the Joint Program in Design at Stanford, says complexity requires a new way of thinking and design thinking is the answer. This includes:
Collaborative Thinking
Process Mindedness
Holistic Multi-Disciplinary Approach
Human-centered
Tech/Business focus
Systems thinking
Synthesis
Rapid Concept Generation
Envisioning
Rapid Prototyping
Visualizing
Catalyzing decision-making
Storytelling
Realizing
Roadmapping
Managing transformation
Source: Nussbaum on Design
I would add empathy, aesthetics, creativity, and customer-focus to the list.
Stanford’s D school believes great innovators and leaders need to be great design thinkers:
We want the d.school to be a place for Stanford students and faculty in engineering, medicine, business, the humanities, and education to learn design thinking and work together to solve big problems in a human centered way.
We want it to be a place where people from big companies, start-ups, schools, nonprofits, government, and anyone else who realizes the power of design thinking, can join our multidisciplinary teaching, prototyping, and research.
Having worked with hundreds of organizations to design products, services, and environments, we believe true innovation happens when strong multidisciplinary groups come together, build a collaborative culture, and explore the intersection of their different points of view.
Many talk about multi-disciplinary collaboration, but few are actually successful at sustaining attempts to see what will happen. Even strong partners often lose interest because they cannot get along well enough or long enough to see the fruits of the collaboration.
We believe having designers in the mix is key to success in multidisciplinary collaboration and critical to uncovering unexplored areas of innovation. Designers provide a methodology that all parties can embrace and a design environment conducive to innovation. In our experience, design thinking is the glue that holds these kinds of communities together and makes them successful.
Design projects last year included producing solar battery-powered LED lamps to replace kerosene models as a for-profit product in India, products for collecting water used by farmers in developing countries.
Design Thinking, and collaboration amongst multi-disciplinary teams are the key to successful innovation, and a model slowly being adopted by business. I believe the future of training is in creating collaborative learning labs, in which people from different backgrounds and disciplines can draw from business, art and science, to learn, exchange ideas, cross-pollinate and innovate.
