Jaewoo teaches and writes about design thinking, behavioral economics, and field experiment for customer experience. He is professor of marketing and participating professor of experience design at Kookmin University. Jaewoo has been Visiting Scholar at Stanford University since September 2024.
When it comes to innovation, business has much to learn from design. The philosophy in design shops is, ‘try it, prototype it, and improve it’. Designers learn by doing. The style of thinking in traditional firms is largely inductive – proving that something actually operates – and deductive – proving that something must be. Design shops add abductive reasoning to the fray – which involves suggesting that something may be, and reaching out to explore it.
Because it’s pictorial, design describes the world in a way that’s not open to many interpretations. Designers, by making a film, scenario, or prototype, can help people emotionally experience the thing that the strategy seeks to describe.
Design thinking is synthetic. Out of the often-disparate demands presented by sub-units’ requirements, a coherent overall design must emerge. Design thinking is abductive in nature. It is primarily concerned with the process of visualizing what might be, some desired future state and creating a blueprint for realizing that intention. Design thinking is opportunistic: the designer seeks new and emergent possibilities. Design thinking is dialectical. The designer lives at the intersection of often-conflicting demands – recognizing the constraints of today’s materials and the uncertainties that cannot be defined away, while envisioning tomorrow’s possibilities.
In fact, design thinking always meant different things to different players. For some it was about teaching managers how to think like designers; for others, it was about designers tackling problems that used to be the preserve of managers and civil servants; and for others still, it was anything said on the subject of design that sounded smart. To most, it is was merely a new spin on design. All its proponents were, however, united by their ambition for design to play a more strategic role in the world than ‘making pretty.’ Who could argue with that?
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Now in 2023, what is design thinking?
People are gravitated towards different attitudes about design thinking. Some are disappointed by the fact that design thinking fails to produce visible, lasting outcomes. Others pay attention to its unique role in helping people creative. Design thinking might not be a short-term, direct tool, but rather a long-term, indirect mindset.
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Reference 1
Ackermann, R. (2023). Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong. MIT Technology Review.
An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.
Organizations have sought to adopt design thinking aiming at innovation. However, implementing such a creative problem-solving approach based on designers’ mindsets and practices requires the navigation of obstacles. Corporate structure and culture hinder the adoption course, and cognitive barriers affect non-designer engagement. In this regard, training has been used as a means of easing the process. Although considered a crucial step in design thinking implementation, research on training initiatives is scarce in the literature. Most studies mirror that about d.school boot camp and innovative programs developed by companies globally remain unknown. This practice-oriented paper investigates a training blueprint tailored for LG Corporation in South Korea, targeting R & D personnel working in several affiliates that needed creative problem-solving skills to improve business performance. The study findings unveil a customized initiative that expanded the established boot camp model by adding preceding activities to increase learning opportunities and enable empathetic observation. Fundamentally, the customization strategy aimed to provide participants with customer-oriented tools to solve business problems. In addition, the training program reframed the design thinking steps in order to make it relevant for employees and foster corporate implementation goals. Ultimately, this case study supplies literature describing a training blueprint to disseminate design thinking considering two dimensions: individual adoption and organizational implementation challenges.
Figure 1 The overall structure and time allocation of the d.school’s design thinking training program
Professors David Dunne and Uli Menzefricke taught me how to lead business courses from course development and teaching methods to teaching devices, student assessment and feedback. Teaching business sounds very different from teaching design.
Braun products by Dieter Rams (above) and Apple products by Jonathan Ive (below)
Dieter Rams listed 10 principles of good design. He is a legendary product designer who has developed a list of the Braun products and is still influencing our life through Jonathan Ive’s Apple devices. The above image comes from a Guardian article and the below image comes from Vitsoe.com. You could find his 10 principles for good design here.
Many design awards have their own answers about what makes a product well designed; it must be original, it must be aesthetically appealing, and it must be useful. Similarly, marketing researchers have also studied that newness, beauty, and usefulness contributes to the evaluation of a product. However, whether product usage context or the outer space of a product affects whether a product is well designed has been little discussed.
I found a nice example which shows the impact of usage context on design. Designers from Industrial Facility, a UK design studio, developed a Bath Radio for Muji. It is a radio but looks like a set of shampoo and rinse. This example shows that consumers may consider a product well designed when its design matches its usage context.
Last summer, I visited two design consulting firms in California: IDEO and Jump Associates. Visiting them raised several interesting research questions.
I was impressed by the space of the “Jump Associates.” It occupies two floors in one building and the two floors are connected by a steel stair inside the building. Employees can freely go up and down without using the external elevator. Besides, Jump Associates has several interesting rooms including “Zen Room.” This room has a low ceiling with several cushions. The Zen Room is often used for consumers who want to express their needs and ideas in a warm, comfortable setting. This is interesting because I have not seen any work telling the value of small sized space with a low ceiling. Instead, much work suggests that high ceiling facilitates creativity.
I wonder if spaces (rooms and their ceiling heights) are carefully selected for different stage gates of a product development process. Designers may want to collect consumer needs in a low-ceiling, close space but they may want a high-ceiling, open space to generate concepts.
Prototypes have different forms. According to an article written by two apple computer employees, Houde and Hill (1997), prototypes prototype the “role” of a product, its “look and feel,” or its “implementation.” Therefore, designers should choose a right type of a prototype.
One step further, prototypes serve different roles. When I visited IDEO last summer, I found three boards which describe what prototypes do; they “inspire,” “experiment (evolve),” or “validate (specify)” a product. This suggests that different types of prototypes can serve different purposes for a product.
Given that there are different types of prototypes and different objectives of prototypes, designers should create different types of prototypes for different objectives. For instance, the “role” prototype can be more appropriate when designers inspire a product, while the “look and feel” prototype can be better when designers validate a product.
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Reference
Houde, S., & Hill, C. (1997). What do prototypes prototype?. In Handbook of human-computer interaction (pp. 367-381). North-Holland.
Prototypes are widely recognized to be a core means of exploring and expressing designs for interactive computer artifacts. It is common practice to build prototypes in order to represent different states of an evolving design, and to explore options. How- ever, since interactive systems are complex, it may be difficult or impossible to create prototypes of a whole design in the formative stages of a project. Choosing the right kind of more focused prototype to build is an art in itself, and communicating its limited purposes to its various audiences is a critical aspect of its use.
On March 25, 2010, Samsung Electronics Canada introduced its 3D TV to bloggers, celebrities, and press at the Andrew Richard Designs, Toronto. Many Canadians showed great interest in watching dynamic programs such as car racing or footballs in a 3D way. The picture quality of the swimming fish in a virtual aquarium amazed me as well.
We often meet a product with a unique form and find it difficult to guess how it works. Examples include a donut-looking tape by 3M, a burger/fries/coke-looking USB key by Burger King, or a chocolate-looking mirror by Meiji, a Japanese chocolate manufacturer. One of my Japanese friends even pointed me a website in which a designer keeps posting his/her design prototypes (Prototype 1000).
I wonder whether consumers like a product more when its form and function are inconsistent than when they are consistent.
Marketers struggle with how best to position innovative products that are incongruent with consumer expectations. Compounding the issue, many incongruent products are the result of innovative changes in product form intended to increase hedonic appeal. Crossing various product categories with various positioning tactics in a single meta-analytic framework, the authors find that positioning plays an important role in how consumers evaluate incongruent form. The results demonstrate that when a product is positioned on functional dimensions, consumers show more preferential evaluations for moderately incongruent form than for congruent form. However, when a product is positioned on experiential dimensions, consumers show more preferential evaluations for congruent form than for moderately incongruent form. Importantly, an increase in perceived hedonic benefits mediates the former, whereas a decrease in perceived utilitarian benefits mediates the latter. The mediation effects are consistent with the view that consumers must first understand a product’s functionality before engaging in hedonic consumption.
I served as a panelist for 2009 Business Week’s World’s Best Design Schools (see the panelists).
How to Nurture Future Leaders
By Venessa Wong on September 30, 2009
Design thinking brings creative techniques to business. The only problem? No one can agree on how to teach its methods
It’s a scary time to be a new graduate. But some seem more optimistic than others.
Around the world, graduates are emerging from interdisciplinary master’s programs that integrate design, technology, and business. These professionals are trained in “design thinking.” Sure, it’s the latest trendy term to sweep the business world, but it’s a technique that designers and executives alike hope may help to provide a solution to some of the world’s serious challenges.
The only problem? There’s no consensus on how to teach it. And there’s no agreement on where these thinkers should spring from. Should design schools create more business-focused creatives, or should business schools foster creative thinking in their MBAs? For now, both approaches to innovating education are rolling out, and both types of programs appear on the 2009 BusinessWeek D-school List.
Different Programs, Different Results
As departments build on their unique strengths to formulate new programs, varied results have emerged. Some programs are co-taught by professors from design, business, and other departments, such as at Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school). Others, such as a partnership between three schools in Helsinki, bring together students from various universities for cross-disciplinary project work. Another approach: dual degrees in business administration and design, such as the MBA and Master’s in Design program from Illinois Institute of Technology.
Despite the different approaches, the programs have a similar aim: to merge design, business, and technology. Professors urge students to value cross-disciplinary teamwork, to defy inclinations and shatter silos. The theory: Working across functions will offer fresh perspectives on perennial problems and generate more comprehensive and original results. The goal is to combine creative confidence and analytic ability, says David Kelley, founder of Stanford’s d.school and design consultancy IDEO. “The best students are competent in both.”
It’s still early days, and the chasm between business and design yawns. Closer cooperation is necessary. Designers who exhibit business acumen can be involved at a more strategic level within a corporation. Executives who learn to apply design methods such as prototyping or brainstorming have a better shot at building a corporate culture that nurtures innovation—and the business’ bottom line.
What to Expect?
According to Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and one of the early supporters of the discipline, “Every corporation needs a design-thinking type.” That includes industries that may seem like unlikely bedfellows for design, such as banks and law firms.
Visa (V) launched the Global Innovation Strategy Group in September 2008 to align corporate strategy with consumer needs. “As great as an MBA is, we were looking for something more,” says Scott Sanchez, senior business leader for the group. Earlier in 2009, Sanchez hired Laura Jones, 27, a recent graduate from Stanford’s d.school program.
And a number of corporations such as Procter & Gamble (PG), Samsung, and Steelcase (SCS) are beginning to integrate design thinking and its proponents across operations. Harley-Davidson (HOG) has hired graduates from Northwestern University’s joint MBA and Master’s in Engineering Management program into its Leadership Development Program and gradually promoted them to all levels of management—from product development and marketing to finance and global manufacturing strategy, says Matt Levatich, president and chief operating officer.
Designer-Led Backlash
And yet, as design thinking moves to the front burner as an innovation tool of choice, questions remain about how its theories can slot into the framework of the business world. Jones is quick to detail that not all of her classmates have found jobs that call for design thinking. Not all corporations know what it is or how to apply it. “It is a work in progress,” she says.
Some designers also balk at the concept, seeing it as a dilution of an industry and discipline they themselves have studied so hard and for so long. “If you teach design thinking, you’re teaching talking: how to use words to describe design,” says Dev Patnaik, founder and chief executive of San Mateo (Calif.)-based design and innovation consultancy Jump Associates. Patnaik says he looks to hire designers and then trains them in business skills as necessary.
Gadi Amit, founder of San Francisco-based NewDeal Design, also has reservations. “Some people think they graduate with industrial design plus capabilities,” he says. Instead, he says, the graduates lack grounding. Nonetheless, Amit acknowledges things may yet evolve. “I am not precluding that maybe there will be a new type of designer, splitting the profession into all sorts of strands and directions, but we are not there yet.”
At this stage, the true impact of design thinking has yet to be seen in industry, as classes are small and graduates are a mere drop in the ocean of global business. But educators, executives, and public officials around the world are investing in the potential of the technique to provide new insight and enhance innovation in a time that desperately needs both. We may not truly appreciate the fruits of these educational experiments for some time, but if effective, these graduates might just redefine the way the world does business.
Consumers find it difficult to evaluate an object when it consists of many components. For instance, they cannot evaluate whether the designer’s interior with furniture, clock, wall, and window is good or bad.
In this case, according to decision research, consumers should break down an object into detailed components in order to evaluate it better. Doing so helps consumers identify how much each component contributes to the object. This suggests that, for instance, if consumers find the value of furniture, the value of clock and the value of wall to the whole interior, they can evaluate the interior as a whole. At this moment, LEARNING needs; If consumers are exposed to multiple interiors and each of which has its evaluation score and various interior components, consumers are able to LEARN how much each interior component contributes to each interior. In sum, breaking down a holistic object into components and learning the degree to which each component contribute to the holistic object help consumers evaluate the holistic object.
Recently, I believe that there is an alternative way to evaluate a holistic object; instead of breaking it down into pieces but by putting together the pieces. Doing so helps consumers infer the THEME that designers propose. If the designer decides the theme of her interior as jungle, for instance, she may choose a brown desk and green chairs to represent a tree with leaves, paint the walls with red dots to represent bugs, and place a round-shaped yellow clock on the wall to represent the sun. If consumers identify the jungle theme, they will be able to evaluate how much each component contributes to the theme.
Now, my question is whether consumers identify the designers’ themes. Put differently, I wonder whether consumers can reversely engineer the designers’ messages? If not, how can we help consumers find them?
