DESIGN VS DESIGN THINKING: A DEEPER UNDERSTANDING !!

When design principles are applied to strategy and innovation, the success rate for innovation improves many folds. Companies which are Design – led such as Apple, Pepsi, IBM, Nike and SAP have outperformed the S&P 500 over a 10-year period by a magnanimous 211% according to the 2015 Design Value Index created by – The Design Management Institute and Motive Strategies.

However, apart from a few of these names, many organizations still limit the concept of Design Thinking to just products. Designing is more than creating just products and services; it can and should be applied to systems, procedures, protocols, and customer experiences.

However, in both Corporate and Academic Trainings on Design Thinking that I have conducted, the biggest challenge I have faced is that of mind-set which is still concentrated on Product and Marketing rather than Innovation, Customer and User Experience.

Design Thinking is a technique of creating VALUE. A value which involves a shift in focus from being :

·        Engineering-driven to design-driven,

·        From product-centric to customer-centric,

·        From marketing-focused to user-experience-focused.

What lies at the core of Design-thinking firms is their willingness and intention to continuously redesign their business to produce the most powerful competitive edge.

Consulting firms such as McKinsey, Accenture and Deloitte have acquired design consultancies: evidence of design’s increasing impact on business. If applied properly, Design Thinking has the potential to do the same for Innovation what TQM did for Manufacturing! 

Steve Jobs famously said, “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer – that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

In order words, we can say that it is a technique to match innovation ad methods to match people’s needs with technological feasibility. You have to think like a Designer who thinks from a HUMAN POINT OF VIEW . People who aren’t born designers can be trained on creative tools to address the skill gap. To start off with, I would recommend CANVA and INVISION. 

Design thinking results in technical feasibility and economic viability from logic, imagination, intuition and systemic reasoning.

WHAT IS A DESIGN THINKING MIDSET?

A design mindset is NEVER problem-focused, it’s solution-focused and action-oriented. It involves both analysis and imagination. But INTUITION also has a great role to play.

Design thinking revolves around human-centered innovation and begins with developing an understanding of customers’ unmet or unidentified needs. The purpose of design thinking ultimately is to improve the quality of life for people and the planet and not just random or short term problem solving.

Source of the pic : Medium

Herbert Simon was an American psychologist and sociologist who, in his 1969 article Sciences of the artificial, described the word ‘design’ as the ‘changing existing circumstances into preferred ones’. Together with other scientists he laid the foundation for design thinking. He gave a 7 step process of Design Thinking ( which will be covered in the next article ).

 What are the driving forces behind design thinking?

The biggest driving force is the augmented rate of change in business and society caused by advances in technology. As companies become more bot-driven, and the rate of change increases, so does complexity. Talking about Design Thinking today is more pertinent than ever due to so many changes brought in by COVID – 19 and the subsequent lockdowns.

This Pandemic has increased the role of Creativity in Design Thinking implementation. Most brands are optimized to solve a stated and recurrent problem. In times like this, one has to find the problem worth solving FIRST as there are so many of them. That is where the role of Design Thinking comes into being. As companies strive for survival, they must find ways to inject and scale creativity across their processes for long term survival and sustainability. 

Time for CEOs to be visionary leaders rather than just growth generators. They need to establish an organizational culture that encourages ideation, creation, creativity and iteration, to building strategic partnerships. Design thinking comes across as the best tool as it provides leaders with a framework for addressing complex human-centred challenges. The various human centric decisions can be made by:

? Redefining value

? Re-framing business models

? Changing along with the shifting markets and behaviors

? Bringing an organizational culture change

? Empathy towards stakeholders and multiple systems

Why is human – centricity so important in Design Thinking?

People need to interact with technology and other complex systems to be experience pleasure in the product / service. If done well, human-centred design enhances the user experience at every touch point and fuels the creation of products and services that deeply reverberate with customers. Design Thinking is based empathy ( first step out of the 5 step process of Design Thinking ) and thus implicitly drives a more thoughtful, human approach to business.

Design Thinking helps us to achieve what we call as CUSTOMER INTIMACY that is a deep knowledge of customers and their problems .Design thinkers rely on customer insights gained from real-world experiments, not just historical data or market research.For example the Design Thinking reports of McKinsey explain the best results that come from blending user research –quantitative (such as conjoint analysis) and qualitative (such as ethnographic interviews) with market-analytics. 

P.S: I have always loved teaching IDEATION ( as step 3 in the process of Design Thinking on the Blackboard ). Ideation will be covered in the next article. A glimpse of ultra-satisfaction received when you do Ideation on Board.

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