How do we bridge the chasm between Design Thinking and Design Doing?
I recently came across this diagram created by Sarah Gibbons to explain the design thinking process. As she explains in her article Design Thinking 101, “the design-thinking framework follows an overall flow of 1) understand, 2) explore, and 3) materialise. Within these larger buckets fall the 6 phases: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test, and implement.”
I really like this visual as it contains a major insight as to how organisations structure their customer-centric innovation teams/ departments/ labs etc. The question of where to locate design thinking expertise is absolutely critical for any organisation as there are generally three ways in which design thinking fails to achieve its full potential:
i) Design thinking takes place in an organisation’s research and design department without any involvement from either business development or product marketing representatives. In these instances, no matter how good the quality of the research is, it will fail to find a commercial sponsor.
ii) Design thinking does take place either with involvement from commercial and product teams, but then fails to achieve a proper handover to those responsible for the product lifecycle management. In these instances, the insights may not be communicated properly, and of course there are always more political issues such as the not-invented-here syndrome.
iii) A final issue is that design thinking does take place, but it is not managed by someone who is fully qualified in design. In these instances, often certain members of an organisation may take part in a three-day design thinking workshop, the workshop generates a lot of energy and excitement, but then back in the real world because of the level of superficiality of the workshop, no actual real design learning took place which could be effectively integrated into the organisational culture.
These three problem areas loosely correlate with the three different main dimension in Gibbons’ diagram. There are two main ways in which an organisation can overcome them. One option is to create a central design resource who ideate, design and then handover at some point to product management. An alternative is to locate certain design professionals inside commercial and product management teams, and to ensure that these people also have product lifecycle and profit and loss responsibilities.
There is no right or wrong answer, and much depends on the context, but getting this question right means that design thinking, the philosophy of the importance of design, permeates more deeply and widely into the culture of the organisation and that it has more profound an impact on the core activities.
I really like Gibbon’s three-fold distinction within Design Thinking as it helps us to think about both the methodological aspects as well as the conceptual/ theoretical dimensions. The term design thinking was not coined as the result of a new discipline, but rather as a way to describe the various approaches to user-centered design that were being developed in various research centres around the world and which of course were very much part of the continuum of the evolution of decades of design practice.
I was a part of this movement, and in the mid-90s, along with a number of my colleagues at BT Laboratories, we developed a process were termed ‘designing the customer experience’ which was created to reposition Human Factors and user-centred design at the very heart of the product life-cycle within organisations, thus helping to lay the groundwork for the development of design thinking, service design, customer journey mapping and concepts such as customer success.
In 1995 I published the paper Delivering Competitive Edge along with Mike Atyeo in which we described succinctly the benefits that come from the more profound approach to exploring problem spaces that designers follow:
In response to rapid technological change and increased global competition, service industries have undergone radical change. These were initially focused on reducing cost and time to market, but more recently have concentrated on ways of understanding and anticipating customer needs. We have adopted an approach we call ‘designing the customer experience’. At its heart was a programme of research into human needs. By bringing together Marketing and Human Factors with more radical perspectives such as semiotics and anthropology, creative and visualisation skills, and rapid technological advances, we have generated an environment for user-centred innovation.
Here we reach the very heart of design thinking, which is the use of radically different ways knowing the world which comes from years of design practice informed by philosophies which are based on different ways of seeing, observing and comprehending that which is being investigated. Concepts such as lived experience and embodied cognition are not merely ideas, they are very real phenomena which if fully understood become integrated into the design process.
This, I would like to posit, is the biggest chasm preventing organisations truly bridging the gap between design thinking and design doing. Designers are able to achieve qualitatively different forms of creativity due to their ability to understand that there is no actual dichotomy between theory and practice. Organisations that only take on board the methodologies of design thinking more often than not do not manage to evolve their cultures to ones in which design is genuinely integrated into organisation’s practices, rituals and values.
One situation that I do experience every so often is to hear a senior executive explain to me that they don’t have the ability to think about customer experience because they are someone who is focused on results. This is astonishing but what we need is a large amount of empathy to understand how some who has reached the upper echelons of their organisations can not comprehend any causal link between the experiences that customers have with that organisation and the results the organisation is able to achieve.
This type of person has followed a career path entirely disconnected from customers, the actual lived experience of the products and services that organisation is offering, preferring to live by consultancy reports and financial spreadsheets. When costs are seen as primary, and customers only understood as abstract demographical data, then there are going to be an untold number of issues causing that organisation’s results to be far from optimal.
I have worked with these types of executives and in some instances, even when user centred design research was carried out, they refused to believe the results of studies highlighting issues in the design of their products. More often than not, the only real solution was to actually invite these executives to our focus groups, where they could experience first hand the customers’ reactions and frustrations.
It is only by facilitating this type of experience that we can take non-design focused executives from the intellectual to the embodied, bridging the distance between their decisions and the impact of them, thereby allowing them to embody their understanding of user design and comprehending the very real nature of the experience of their customers, which from a design perspective is the most primary phenomena it is possible to work with.
You can download a hi-res, printable version of Sarah Gibbons’ diagram at the bottom of her original article: Design Thinking 101
