Design thinking

Tim Brown is an award winning designer and CEO of the Palo Alto, CA design firm Ideo. He’s got a really thought provoking piece on design thinking in the June issue of the Harvard Business Review (sadly, it’ll cost you $6.50 to read more than this excerpt if you don’t have a subscription). I was pulled in on two levels — first, the process he describes is highly collaborative — it’s very coworking-centric. Second, I totally concur with his belief that design isn’t something you slap onto a product, place, or process after the fact just to make it pretty. Design is, or should be, part of the whole package. Not to say that form follows function, but rather function and form, when considered simultaneously, result in a much better overall experience for the user.

This is precisely why LaunchPad Coworking is being built the way it is. Our whole team is invited to offer input on all aspects of the process. Which is why our architect, designers, IT, general manager, and writer might all sit in on a meeting to discuss something that, on the surface, one might think should be handled by just one of the above.

As coworking has evolved, and as it continues to catch on, there sometimes arises the question of whether coworking is more about the people or the place. Those who argue that it is first and foremost about the people hold that community must be the emphasis and that these people will eventually form the space into what best suits the community. For me, it’s about both people and place. I want nothing short of inspiring when it comes to the physical space not only because I love beautiful design, but also because I believe a thoughtfully-considered environment fosters creativity and feeds productivity. I offer as example Jerome Chang’s Blankspaces in LA. Jerome is an architect and it shows.

Brown holds up Thomas Edison for examination, pointing out that he “wasn’t a narrowly specialized scientist but a broad generalist with shrewd business sense,” one who “surrounded himself with gifted tinkerers, improvisers, and experimenters.” He notes that today’s design thinking is “a lineal descendant of that tradition.”

So what is design thinking? Brown offers a number of examples of the applied process that range from a project that improved nursing shift changes in a hospital to coming up with a bicycle that appeals to non-road-warriors who prefer a fun occasional ride without all the gears and bells and whistles. In the case of the former, the team included a strategist who was once a nurse, an organizational developmental specialist, a techie, a process designer, a union rep, and members of Brown’s firm.

Together they analyzed the problem of inefficient shift changes that left nurses cranky and patients feeling neglected. In the end, they came up with a system that changed both how nurses deliver information to each other and how they record and track it. Sounds simple enough, but the change in attitude that resulted — happier nurses, more confident patients — had a tremendous impact. Now these changes are being rolled out across other hospitals run using the same system.

In the example of the bicycle Brown offers a more concrete example of what we typically think of when we think of design. To ultimately get to a well-designed, tangible result — a cool bike — designers were part of the thinking behind the process from the get-go. And rather than guess or dictate what customers might want, the team analyzed data collected from surveys. The resulting product lends itself nicely to Brown’s observation that such success is not the result of some fully formed idea that seized one genius but rather “the result of hard work augmented by a creative human-centered discovery process and followed by iterative cycles of prototyping, testing and refinement.”

Design thinking is to me — as we’ve designed software, space and graphics — finally an opportunity to do things right, to address that whole form/function balancing act. Because while some people choose to apply design at the end of a project, I think it’s equally tempting to start with design and risk getting sucked down Bells and Whistles Lane. To avoid the pitfalls of each of those scenarios, we’re using design thinking to ask not only what the space will look like, but how life will be better when one uses the space.
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And I think it’s really important to remember that every business is unique. Sure there are best practices. But turning those practices into a great experience is another level of design thinking, one that necessitates case-by-case analysis, to insure case-by-case best results. What works in Austin might not be as successful in another city.

Without design thinking, we wind up with something like Microsoft Vista — bloated, cumbersome, fatally flawed — a designed-by-committee, overly busy collage of crap. Whereas Apple’s OSX Leopard, is sleek, intuitive, beautiful and — equally important — functional and fun. Likewise, without design thinking you get HEB and Safeway, grocery stores that hardly inspire the sort of memorable experience that you want to gush about to others. But with Whole Foods, you wind up with a place that draws excited customers who know they’ll get a certain experience, a feeling, in addition to whatever products they wind up purchasing.

That sort of coveted experience isn’t a result of dumb luck. It’s a result of design thinking, a process that includes customer experience from the start, to make certain they are getting what they want and need, not merely what some bigwigs somewhere think they need.