DESIGN THINKING’S VALUE IN SOLVING EXTREMELY COMPLEX CHALLENGES in disruptive technology

DESIGN THINKING’S VALUE IN SOLVING EXTREMELY COMPLEX CHALLENGES.

INTRODUCTION

In?user experience (UX) design, it’s crucial to develop and refine skills to understand and address rapid changes in users’ environments and behaviors. The world has become increasingly interconnected and complex since cognitive scientist and Nobel Prize laureate Herbert A. Simon first mentioned design thinking in his 1969 book,?The Sciences of the Artificial, and then contributed many ideas to its principles. Professionals from a variety of fields, including architecture and engineering, subsequently advanced this highly creative process to address human needs in the modern age. Twenty-first-century organizations from a wide range of industries find design thinking a valuable means to problem-solve for the users of their products and services.?Design teams use design thinking to tackle ill-defined/unknown problems (aka?wicked problems) because they can reframe these in?human-centric?ways and focus on what’s most important for users. Of all?design processes, design thinking is almost certainly the best for “thinking outside the box”. With it, teams can do better?UX research,?prototyping,?and?usability testing?to uncover new ways to meet users’ needs. Design thinking’s value as a world-improving, driving force in business (global heavyweights such as Google, Apple, and Airbnb have wielded it to notable effect) matches its status as a popular subject at leading international universities.?With design thinking,?teams have the freedom to generate ground-breaking solutions. Using it, your team can get behind hard-to-access insights and apply a collection of hands-on methods to help find innovative answers. The solutions, systems, experiences, and relationships reflect how we’re?designing responsibly.

IDEO is a global design company. At IDEO, the company has been practicing?human-centered design?since?our beginning in 1978 and took up the phrase “design thinking” to describe the elements of the practice they found most learnable and teachable—empathy, optimism, iteration, creative confidence, experimentation, and an embrace of ambiguity and failure. Clients valued these skills like they valued the designs we created for them. That moved us to share the mindsets, approaches, and skills of design thinking. Give someone a fish, and they’ll have food for a day; teach someone to fish, and they’ll have food for life. That applies to design thinking. So, many companies have started teaching workers how to use design thinking in their lives, communities, businesses, and organizations. Design thinking has seen just 15 or so years of widespread adoption. For the most part, it’s still largely a set of heuristics for guiding team-based collaboration. Leading up to the advent of design thinking, there were numerous approaches, practitioners, writers, and books that paved the way. We believe a better future is for all of us to design. From 2008-2018, designthinking.ideo.com was the home of IDEO's design thinking blog, written by our former CEO and current Executive Chair of IDEO, Tim Brown. This is an archive of his thoughts. However, the company IDEO is often credited with inventing the term “design thinking” and its practice. Factually, design thinking has very deep roots in a global conversation that has been unfolding for decades

The essence of the practice was a response to the question of what design had to contribute to the modern world. Designer and scholar Richard Buchanan framed this ongoing challenge for design thinking in 1992 through the notion of “wicked problems,” though?scholars?trace the term farther back, to 1935, with John Dewey and the melding of aesthetics and engineering principles for a new age. Buchanan built on theorist Horst Rittel’s challenge to designers in the early 1970s to move from solving simple problems to “wicked problems”—problems that are complex, open-ended, and ambiguous. These are problems that do not lend themselves to easy judgments of “right” or “wrong.” As a mindset and methodology, design thinking is relatively young. In comparison, the scientific method has stood centuries of rigorous investigation; and modern management practices such as Six Sigma and lean manufacturing have benefited from decades of practice and examination. Today, design thinking has become common parlance in many industries and disciplines. The approach is fresh and effective, and newcomers can easily learn and engage productively with it. But it's also easy to get stuck in the basic motions of design thinking while missing opportunities for fuller integration. As the concept has spread, it hasn't always retained a consistent meaning or a uniform depth. The term "design thinking" can be used as a currency without a true commitment to understanding and applying the practice. At IDEO, we believe that applying design thinking with integrity means continuing to deepen and refine—to be lifelong learners and practitioners at the same time. All of these writings set the stage and expressed a zeitgeist around a certain mode of thought that IDEO was also sinking deeper into during that time.

And in the decades before IDEO's founding, two important and continuing works signaled a vital important direction in design: Ken Garland's?First Things First Manifesto?called out the advertising industry's perversion of design principles and called for the application of design skills in service of social good. Victor Papanek's?Design for the Real World?spoke to the need for design to address real-world problems in ways that consider the state of humanity and the planet. And just as many individual thinkers preceded the articulation of design thinking as a mode unto itself, so a whole new set of individuals have become leaders and influencers in more recent decades, shepherding the ideas of design thinking into many new arenas and industries, where its potential has been proven again and again. Across several fields, advanced practitioners are nurturing design thinking by inspiring its use and adapting it to specific domains and applications. Increasingly, developers are using design thinking alongside other design and development methods (e.g., agile and lean). One of the wonderful aspects of human cognition - is design thinking.??Norbert Roozenburg and Tim Brown in the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at the Delft University of Technology in 1990. For the first time in design research, a common data set was provided to researchers around the world, for their own analyses, and presented at the workshop. The content and format of that meeting were felt by the participants to be so good as to warrant more of the same. Specifically, during the closing discussions, it was ?mer Akin who proposed to organize another meeting. And so, a third meeting on 'Research in Design Thinking' was held at the Istanbul Technical University, Turkey, in 1996, on the topic of descriptive models of design. Following the same informal process, a fourth, considerably larger, meeting was held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA, in 1999, focusing on the role of representations in design thinking. It was there that the organizers, Gabriela Goldschmidt and William Porter, introduced the term ‘Design Thinking Research Symposium’ as the generic title for the series.

The fifth meeting, organized by Peter Lloyd and Henri Christiaans, was again in Delft, in 2001, approaching the study of designing a set within its broad social context. It helped to develop a multidisciplinary approach to studying not just the activity inside a design process, but also the ramifications and implications that occur outside of it. in both design cognition and computational modeling of design processes - i.e., studies of the natural and the artificial intelligence of design. In?user experience (UX) design, it’s crucial to develop and refine skills to understand and address rapid changes in users’ environments and behaviors. The world has become increasingly interconnected and complex since cognitive scientist and Nobel Prize laureate Herbert A. Simon first mentioned design thinking in his 1969 book,?The Sciences of the Artificial, and then contributed many ideas to its principles. Professionals from a variety of fields, including architecture and engineering, subsequently advanced this highly creative process to address human needs in the modern age. Twenty-first-century organizations from a wide range of industries find design thinking a valuable means to problem-solve for the users of their products and services.?Design teams use design thinking to tackle ill-defined/unknown problems (aka?wicked problems) because they can reframe these in?human-centric?ways and focus on what’s most important for users. Of all?design processes, design thinking is almost certainly the best for “thinking outside the box”. With it, teams can do better?UX research,?prototyping,?and?usability testing?to uncover new ways to meet users’ needs. Design thinking’s value as a world-improving, driving force in business (global heavyweights such as Google, Apple, and Airbnb have wielded it to notable effect) matches its status as a popular subject at leading international universities.?With design thinking,?teams have the freedom to generate ground-breaking solutions. Using it, your team can get behind hard-to-access insights and apply a collection of hands-on methods to help find innovative answers.

Design thinking might inform both education and practice in design.?May 1991. Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering gave financial support, and Xerox PARC provided the facilities; For the first time in design research, a common data set was provided to researchers around the world, for their own analyses, presented at the workshop. The content and format of that meeting were felt by the participants to be so good as to warrant more of the same. ?The fifth meeting, organized by Peter Lloyd and Henri Christiaans, was again in Delft, in 2001, approaching the study of designing a set within its broad social context. It helped to develop a multidisciplinary approach to studying not just the activity inside a design process, but also the ramifications and implications that occur outside of it.

THE FIVE STAGES OF DESIGN THINKING

The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (aka the d. school) describes design thinking as a five-stage process. But these stages are?not?always sequential, and teams often run them in parallel, out of order, and repeat them in an iterative fashion. Einstein was certainly right — we can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. Top of Form

It is a systemic, intuitive, customer-focused problem-solving approach that organizations can use to respond to rapidly changing environments and to create maximum impact with 149,273 graduates, the Interaction Design Foundation is the biggest online design school globally.

It is an iterative and non-linear process that contains five phases: 1. Empathize, 2. Define, 3. Ideate, 4. Prototype and 5. Test.

1.??Stage 1:?Empathize with researchers

The first stage of the design thinking process focuses on?user-centric research. We want to gain an empathic understanding of the problem we are trying to solve. Consult experts to find out more about the area of concern and conduct observations to engage and empathize with our users. We may also want to immerse ourselves in our users’ physical environment to gain a deeper, personal understanding of the issues involved—as well as their experiences and motivations.?Empathy?is crucial to problem-solving and a human-centered?design process?as it allows design thinkers to set aside their own?assumptions?about the world and gain real insight into users and their needs. Hinging on time constraints, we will gather a substantial amount of information to use during the next stage. The main aim of the Empathize stage is to develop the best possible understanding of our users, their needs, and the problems that underlie the development of the product or service we want to create We should gain an empathetic understanding of the problem we are making effort to solve, typically through user research.

?2.??Stage 2: Define—State Your Users' Needs and Problems

Define the second phase of design thinking, where we define the problem statement in a human-centered manner. In the Define stage, we will organize the information we have gathered during the Empathize stage. We will analyze our observations to define the core problems of we and our team have identified up to this point.?Defining the problem?and problem statement must be done in a human-centered manner. For example, we should not define the problem as our own wish or need of the company: “We need to increase our food-product market share among young teenage girls by 5%.” We should pitch the problem statement from our?perception?of the users’ needs: “Teenage girls need to eat nutritious food in order to thrive, be healthy, and grow.” The Define stage will help the design team collect great ideas to establish features, functions, and other elements to solve the problem at hand—or, at the very least, allow real users to resolve issues themselves with minimal difficulty. In this stage, we will start to progress to the third stage, the?ideation?phase, where we ask questions to help us look for solutions: “How might we?encourage teenage girls to perform an action that benefits them and also involves our company’s food-related product or service?” for instance.

?3.??Stage 3: Ideate—Challenge Assumptions and Create Ideas

Ideate: the third phase of design thinking, where we identify innovative solutions to the problem statement we have created. During the third stage of the design thinking process, designers are ready to generate ideas. We have grown to understand our users and their needs in the Empathize stage, and we have analyzed our observations in the Define stage to create a user-centric problem statement. With this solid background, we and our team members can start to?look at the problem from different perspectives and ideate innovative solutions to your problem statement. There are hundreds of ideation techniques you can use—such as Brainstorm, Brain writes,?Worst Possible Idea,?and?SCAMPER. Brainstorm and Worst Possible Idea techniques are typically used at the start of the ideation stage to stimulate free thinking and expand the problem space. This allows us to generate as many ideas as possible at the start of ideation. We should pick other ideation techniques towards the end of this stage to help us investigate and test our ideas, and choose the best ones to move forward with—either because they seem to solve the problem or provide the elements required to circumvent it.

4.??Stage 4: Prototype—Start to Create Solutions

This is an experimental phase. The aim is to identify the best possible solution for each problem found. Prototype: the fourth phase of design thinking, where we identify the best possible solution. The design team will now produce a number of inexpensive, scaled-down versions of the product (or specific features found within the product) to investigate the key solutions generated in the ideation phase. These prototypes can be shared and tested within the team itself, in other departments, or on a small group of people outside the design team. This is an experimental phase, and the aim is to?identify the best possible solution for each of the problems identified during the first three stages. The solutions are implemented within the prototypes and, one by one, they are investigated and then accepted, improved, or rejected based on the users’ experiences. By the end of the Prototype stage, the design team will have a better idea of the product’s limitations and the problems it faces. They’ll also have a clearer view of how real users would behave, think and feel when they interact with the end product.

?5.??Stage 5: Test—Try Your Solutions Out

Evaluators rigorously test the prototypes. Although this is the final phase, design thinking is iterative. Test: the fifth and final phase of the design thinking process, where we test solutions to derive a deep understanding of the product and its users. Designers or evaluators rigorously test the complete product using the best solutions identified in the Prototype stage. This is the final stage of the five-stage model; however, in an iterative process such as design thinking, the results generated are often used to redefine one or more further problems. This increased level of understanding may help us investigate the conditions of use and how people think, behave, and feel towards the product, and even lead us to loop back to a previous stage in the design thinking process. We can then proceed with further iterations and make alterations and refinements to rule out alternative solutions.?The ultimate goal is to get as deep an understanding of the product and its users as possible.

?Overall, we should understand that?these stages are different?modes?that contribute to the entire design project, rather than sequential steps. Our goal throughout is to gain the deepest understanding of the users and what their ideal solution/product would be.

?LITERATURE ON DESIGN THINKING

Here’s the entire UX literature on?Design Thinking?by the Interaction Design Foundation, collated in one place:

The Design Thinking Process

Design thinking?is a methodology that offers a solution-based method for solving problems. It’s tremendously useful when used to handle complex problems that are ill-defined or unknown—because it serves to comprehend the?human needs?involved, rearrange the problem in human-centric ways, make various ideas in?brainstorming?sessions, and adopt a hands-on approach to?prototyping?and testing. Learning about the five stages of design thinking will empower you and allow you to apply the methodology to your work and solve complex problems that occur in our companies, our countries, and across the world. Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative process?that can have anywhere from three to seven phases, depending on whom we address. We focus on the five-stage design thinking model proposed by the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford because they are world-renowned for the way they teach and apply design thinking.

?Design Thinking is a Non-Linear Process

We’ve outlined a direct and linear design thinking process here, in which one stage seemingly leads to the next with a logical conclusion at?user testing. However,?practically, the process is carried out in a more flexible and non-linear fashion. For example, different groups within the design team may conduct more than one stage at the same time, or designers may collect information and prototype throughout each stage of the project to bring their ideas to life and visualize the problem solutions as they go. What’s more, results from the Test stage may reveal new insights about users which lead to another brainstorming session (Ideate) or the development of new prototypes (Prototype). It is important to note the five stages of design thinking are not always sequential. They do not have to follow a specific order, and they can often occur in parallel or be repeated iteratively. The stages should be understood as different modes which contribute to the entire design project, rather than sequential steps. The design thinking process should not be seen as a concrete and inflexible approach to design; the component stages identified should serve as a guide to the activities we carry out. The stages might be switched, conducted concurrently, or repeated several times to gain the most informative insights about our users, expand the solution space and hone in on innovative solutions. This is one of the main benefits of the five-stage model.?Knowledge acquired in the latter stages of the process can inform repeats of earlier stages. Information is continually used to inform the understanding of the problem and solution spaces, and to redefine the problem itself. This creates a perpetual loop, in which the designers continue to gain new insights, develop new ways to view the product (or service) and its possible uses, and develop a far more profound understanding of their real users and the problems they face.

The Take Away

Design thinking is an iterative, non-linear process that focuses on a?collaboration?between designers and users. It brings innovative solutions to life based on how real users think, feels, and behave. This?human-centered design?process consists of five core stages Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. It’s important to note that these stages are a guide. The iterative, non-linear nature of design thinking means we and our design team can carry these stages out simultaneously, repeat them and even circle back to previous stages at any point in the design thinking process.

??DESIGN THINKING: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE.

Some of the world’s leading brands, such as Apple, Google, Samsung, and General Electric, have rapidly adopted the design thinking approach, and design thinking is being taught at leading universities around the world, including Stanford d. school, Harvard, and MIT. Design Thinking is?not exclusive to designers all great innovators in literature, art, music, science, engineering, and business have practiced it. We call it Design Thinking because that’s because design work processes help us systematically extract, teach, learn, and apply human-centered techniques to solve problems in a creative and innovative way—in our designs, businesses, countries, and lives. And that’s what makes it so special. The overall goal of this design thinking course is to help you design better products, services, processes, strategies, spaces, architecture, and experiences. Design thinking helps us and our team develop practical and innovative solutions for our problems. It is a?human-focused,?prototype-driven,?innovative design process. Through this course, we will develop a solid understanding of the fundamental phases and methods in design thinking, and we will learn how to implement our newfound knowledge in our professional work life. We will give lots of examples; we will go into case studies, videos, and other useful material, all of which will help us dive further into design thinking. In fact, this course also includes?exclusive video content?that we've produced in partnership with design leaders like?Alan Dix, William Hudson,?and?Frank Spillers. This course contains a series of practical exercises that build on one another to create a complete design thinking project. The exercises are optional, but we will get invaluable hands-on experience with the methods we encounter in this course if we complete them, because they will teach us to take our first steps as a design-thinking practitioner. What’s equally important is we can use our work as a case study for our portfolio to showcase our abilities to future employers. A portfolio is essential if we want to step into or move ahead in a career in the world of human-centered design.

Design thinking methods and strategies belong at?every level of the design process. However, design thinking is not an exclusive property of designers—all great innovators in literature, art, music, science, engineering, and business have practiced it. What’s special about design thinking is that designers and designers’ work processes can help us systematically extract, teach, learn, and apply these human-centered techniques in solving problems in a creative and innovative way—in our designs, in our businesses, in our countries, and in our lives. That means that design thinking is not only for designers but also for?creative employees,?freelancers, and?business leaders. It’s for anyone who seeks to infuse an approach to innovation that is powerful, effective, and broadly accessible, one that can be integrated into every level of an organization, product, or service so as to drive new alternatives for businesses and society. T

Design and conquer:?in years past, the word “design” might have conjured images of expensive handbags or glossy coffee table books. Now, our minds might go straight to business. Design and design thinking are buzzing in the business community more than ever. Until now, design has focused largely on how something looks; these days, it’s a dynamic idea used to describe how organizations can adjust their problem-solving approaches to respond to rapidly changing environments—and create maximum impact and shareholder value. Design is a journey?and?a destination. Design thinking is a core way of starting the journey and arriving at the right destination at the right time. Simply put, “design thinking is a methodology that we use to?solve complex problems, and it’s a way of using systemic reasoning and intuition to explore ideal future states,” says McKinsey partner Jennifer Kilian. Design thinking, she continues, is “the single biggest competitive advantage that we ?can have if our customers are loyal to us because if we ?solve for their needs first, we will ?always win.”

How do companies build a design-driven company culture?

There’s more to succeeding in business than developing a great product or service that generates a financial return. Empathy and purpose are core business needs. Design thinking means putting customers, employees, and the planet at the center of problem-solving.

D4VG VERSUS DTV

For more than a decade, manufacturers have used a?design-to-value (DTV) model?to design and release products that have the features needed to be competitive at a low cost. During this time, DTV efforts were?groundbreaking?because they were based on data rather than experience. They also reached across functions, in contrast to the typical value-engineering approach. The principles of DTV have evolved into the design for value and growth (D4VG), a new way of creating products that provide exceptional customer experiences while driving both value and growth. Done right, D4VG efforts generate products with the features, form, and functionality that?turn users into loyal fans.D4VG products can cost more to build, but they can ultimately raise margins by delivering a clear understanding of a product’s core brand attributes, insights into people’s motivations, and design thinking.

To design for sustainability

As consumers, companies, and regulators shift toward increased sustainability, design processes are coming under even more scrutiny. The challenge is that carbon-efficient production processes tend to be more complex and can require more carbon-intensive materials. The good news is that an increased focus on design for sustainability (DFS), especially at the?research and development stage, can help mitigate some of these inefficiencies and ultimately create even more sustainable products.

In this case, the transition from internal-combustion engines to?electric-propulsion vehicles?has highlighted emissions-intensive automobile production processes. One study found that around?20% of the carbon generated by a diesel vehicle comes from its production. If the vehicle ran on only renewable energy, production emissions would account for 85 percent of the total. With the more sustainable design, electric-vehicle (EV) manufacturers stand to reduce the lifetime emissions of their products significantly. To achieve design for sustainability at scale, companies can address three interrelated elements at the R&D stage: rethinking the way their products use resources, adapting them to changing regulations, adopting principles of circularity, and making use of customer insights, understanding and tracking emissions and cost impact of design decisions in support of sustainability goals and fostering the right mindsets and capabilities to integrate sustainability into every product and design decision

What is ‘skinny design’?

Skinny design is a less theoretical aspect of design thinking. It’s a method whereby consumer goods companies reassess the overall box size of products by reducing the total cubic volume of the package. This can improve overall business performance in the following ways: Top-line growth of 4 to 5%?through improvements in shelf and warehouse holding power. The ability to fit more stock into warehouses ultimately translates to growth. Bottom-line growth of more than 10 percent. Packing more product into containers and trucks creates the largest savings. Other cost reductions can come from designing packaging to minimize the labor required and facilitate automation. Sustainability improvements are associated with reductions?in carbon emissions through less diesel fuel burned per unit. Material choices can also confer improvements to the overall footprint.

?Designing out of difficult times

?Design matters and not just in good times. CEOs who embrace design can enhance strategy and better navigate this age of volatility. Imagine facing a wildfire?during an earthquake with a cyclone on the way. Even if CEOs were facing only the specter of a looming recession and stubbornly high inflation, it would present a daunting challenge. These?new shocks, however, are in addition to existing disturbances?from the pandemic and supply chain disruptions, which came on top of—and often accelerated—enduring trends such as digitalization, sustainability, and the rising influence of the consumer.?Moreover, as?past crises have demonstrated, companies that focus too much on short-term defensive measures risk sidelining initiatives vital to keeping pace with the market, achieving longer-term goals, and even notching unexpected quick wins.

?Uniquely challenging times call for unique approaches, not the standard playbook. The design offers this fresh perspective.?landscapes and generate improved performance. From 2013 to 2018, these companies had TSRs that were 56 percentage points higher than that of their peers. In addition, companies that continued or increased their investment in innovation during the 2008–09 recession generated?three times more growth?compared with their industry peers in the three to five years that followed—in many cases leapfrogging their competitors.?These results make sense given that a recession doesn’t mean that markets and customer need suddenly stop evolving. In fact, such evolutions often speed up. For these reasons, we believe design should join topics such as finance, strategy, and talent on the CEO’s agenda. In this article, we explore specific examples where design has the potential to create significant value and boost an organization’s resilience. Executives can use the design function to unleash the power of creativity in strategy and problem-solving in at least five important areas. CEO challenge:?Substantial budget cuts are required to meet cash flow expectations. All-too-common approach:?Pause some or all product design and development. Prioritize one to two products to keep going at a full pace based on the design’s research into users and business impact.?Pause new product development but allow for new user-centric digital marketing. In the face of a downturn, executives can be tempted to “play defense” and hunker down, pausing all or most innovation initiatives to conserve resources.?Companies should resist making wholesale cuts because some initiatives may contain the seeds of an extended market advantage; indeed,?some high-growth companies were founded during economic downturns. But how can organizations separate high-potential projects from the pack and get more from these investments? Design can help in a couple of ways. Companies could prioritize one or two products to proceed at a full pace based on design research into user preferences and business impact. The resources freed by pausing other products could then be allocated to user-centric digital marketing to better connect products with consumers—a low-cost, high-ROI approach that can reap significant benefits.

For example, a consumer bank had planned to create a suite of sophisticated new investment funds for wealthy customers. But facing a recession, executives shifted course, pausing the initiative and redirecting a portion of the earmarked budget. This enabled designers to deeply understand the implications of shifting customer behaviors and implement more user-centric marketing for existing products. Research on customer needs led the bank to move from “pushing products” to educating consumers on finance and empowering them to make more confident decisions in line with their life goals. This approach increased sales by 25% by building trust with consumers, and the revenue generated equaled the initial estimates from new product development.

The maelstrom of new shocks and disruptions on top of enduring trends creates an unusual breadth and depth of uncertainty. In such times, traditional scenario planning can be too analytical and runs the risk of falling prey to a “failure of imagination.”The key, then, is for CEOs to ensure that scenario planning helps to surface insights amid uncertainty to guide strategy. By?integrating user-centric insights, design can help to consider a broader range of possibilities and bring them to life more tangibly.?Designers are innately curious, imaginative, and natural collaborators. Using a cross-disciplinary approach with other strategic functions, they can help foresee the next looming crisis, develop disruption scenarios, find ways to prepare for them, and catalyze the conviction to act. This approach enables organizations to get ahead of the game. For example, one building materials and products company formed a cross-functional team that included designers to lead strategy development. This team identified three 15-year trends with the potential to shift 10 to 15% of value—equivalent to more than 1% of global GDP—across the construction value chain. This exercise helped drive the company to work on adjusting its strategy and operating model to pursue new for most of the past year, companies have been buffeted by supply chain disruptions, and climate change will only worsen reliability. A common response has been to dispatch engineering teams to change suppliers or parts to mitigate the situation—a course of action that often requires the costly revalidation of parts. Often, a better way is to redesign products that are susceptible to supply chain risk. By accommodating and validating a wider range of parts or eliminating unnecessary components altogether, design can create more resilient products, cut costs, and limit delivery problems. For example, an industrial-equipment manufacturer was facing semiconductor shortages, including on oil-level sensors. Engineers were working late into the night to source and test alternative suppliers of sensors. The design team examined the use of the products in the field and analyzed them using data from custom software. The results showed that less than 5 percent of customers used the oil sensor because the physical inspection of oil levels was mandated in most cases. The design team recommended removing the sensor entirely and introducing a better-designed dipstick that led to more accurate readings.

?When deciding to limit ESG initiatives as a result of cost-cutting during a recession, companies can miss?opportunities to create new products or services. Business leaders can act much more boldly. By using a?skinny design approach?to reassess products and packaging, companies can simultaneously lower product and transport costs and reduce their carbon footprint. One convenient bonus is that the elements of skinny design can often be implemented quickly and with little investment while motivating a design team to fulfill the company’s mission. Products that have been redesigned to improve sustainability demonstrate the potential value of skinny design. For example, since shampoo is 90% water,?one bold redesign we’ve seen?is moving to a simple powder that lathers when mixed with water and is packaged in a much smaller box. This new version can enable a company to ship more products in the same container and reduce its carbon footprint while continuing to deliver a great—and possibly better—consumer experience. Many companies have dedicated significant resources to enhancing their customer-facing processes (for example, opening a bank account or applying for a mortgage). They have an opportunity to turn that same design lens to internal processes: speeding them up, reducing inefficiency, and delighting employees and internal “customers. “The design function can focus on internal processes, using a cross-functional, collaborative approach to discover unmet needs and develop solutions. This path can deliver multiple perspectives on problems and increase engagement across the workforce.

A newly restructured mining company that was facing financial hardship had already cut its frontline headcount by 20 percent. The remaining employees were feeling overworked, and morale was low. A design team began working with frontline employees to understand their frustrations and codesign technology-based solutions. The company introduced new digital tools that replaced inefficient paper-based procedures, yielding an extra 76 hours per year of increased productivity per worker and a $6 million return from increased tool time. The company also improved safety with new hazard diagnosis and awareness systems, leading to a 280% improvement in hazard reporting. These innovations had the additional benefit of improving employee engagement and morale by giving frontline workers a voice and allowing them to participate in the design and implementation of the new technology systems. The power of design is clear—and not just in good times. For many CEOs, the design represents an untapped opportunity that merits an elevated role in their companies and on the strategic agenda.

?How can a company become a top design performer?

The average person’s standard for design is higher than ever. Good design is no longer just a nice-to-have for a company. Customers now have extremely high expectations for design, whether it’s customer service, instant access to information, or clever products that are also aesthetically relevant in the current culture.?

Making design a business priority

There are many companies, mostly giant MNCs, over a five-year period in multiple countries. After analyzing a gigantic scale of data, the most to develop financial performance. These were then clustered into the following four themes:

1.??For the best financial performers,?design is a top management issue, and design performance is assessed with the same tightness these companies use to assess income and cost. The companies with the top financial returns have combined design and business leadership through bold, design-centric visions. These include a commitment to maintaining a baseline level of customer consideration among all executives. The CEO of one of the world’s largest banks, for example, spends one day a month with the bank’s clients and encourages all members of the company’s C-suite to do the same.

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2.???Most successful global companies make the user-centric design, not a single responsibility, not a centralized function. Companies whose designers are embedded within cross-functional teams have?better overall business performance. Further, the alignment of design metrics with functional business metrics is also connected to improved business performance.

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3.???Design trappings best, in?environments that inspire learning, testing, and iterating with users. These tactics raise the odds of creating breakthrough products and services, while at the same time reducing the risk of costly missteps.

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4.???Top-quartile companies?adopt the full user experience?by taking a broad-based view of where design can make a change. Design approaches like mapping customer journeys can lead to more inclusive and sustainable solutions.

?CONCLUSION

Realizing the theory of design thinking is one thing. Its implementation and use in actual work in practice is something else. Some examples to show how elegant design created value for customers, a company, and shareholders: Stockholm’s international airport, Arlanda, used design thinking to address its air-traffic-control problem. The goal was to create a system that would make air traffic safer and more effective. By understanding the tasks and challenges of the air-traffic controllers, then collaboratively working on prototypes and iterating based on feedback, a working group was able to?design a new departure-sequencing tool?that helped air-traffic controllers do their jobs better. The new system greatly reduced the number of time planes spent between leaving the terminal and being in the air, which in turn helped reduce fuel consumption. When Tesla creates its?electric vehicles, the company closely considers not only aesthetics but also the overall?driving experience. The consumer electronics industry has a long history of dramatic evolutions led by design thinking. Since Apple debuted the iPhone in 2007, for example, each new generation has seen additional features, new customers, and lower costs—all?driven by design-led value creation.

Design thinking is not a new innovation, its relevance is now increased and it can be must be applied in the company.