Tag Archives: design thinking

Cases

What are the problems of ATM machine?

Leave a comment

We use ATM machines to deposit, withdraw, and transfer money. However, strangers unintentionally overlook what we do when they stand behind us or next to us because they stand side by side and people queue behind us. Unfortunately, this issue has not been addressed in Korea yet. Only a tiny, low-resolution mirror is attached on top of each machine.

Differently from Seoul, Shenzhen provides safer and more comfortable experience. A orange-colored bank not only provides sufficient distance between machines but also allows users to get inside the closed space. Therefore, Chinese users feel safe while being “encapsulated.”

In fact, ATM safety is an international issue. Designers address this issue from an innovative perspective. For instance, IDEO designed humanized ATMs for the Spanish bank, BBVA. This concept was introduced in Fastcodesign.

The biggest overhaul, though, has nothing to do with the touchscreen; it’s the position of the machine itself. It’s rotated 90 degrees, forcing people to queue up next to the ATM rather than behind it — a remarkably simple solution to a longstanding problem: the ominous feeling, when you’re taking out cash, that the guy behind you is about to rob you blind.

Another interesting idea is a concept called Magic Carpet proposed by a Polish industrial designer, Judyta Wojciechowska. This concept was introduced at the Behance.

Magic Carpet is a decorative floor covering located on the footway beside an ATM. The carpet design guides ATM users as to where to stand to maintain the privacy of the person using the ATM and also to accommodate pedestrian flow. This visual guidance on the footway indicates the desired direction and distance for the people to form the queue for the ATM. If the ATM user’s private space is invaded then sensors in the carpet detect this movement and activate a vibration system beneath their feet. The vibration alerts the user to respond and the “invader” to step back. This design consequently protects the ATM user from crimes such as shoulder surfing distraction theft and pick-pocketing.

Publications

How to write a high quality design brief

1 Comment

PDMA_Design thinking

 

… Although the design brief plays an important role in concept development, there are few resources about how to write one. In general, the design brief is viewed as a competitive advantage and traditionally guarded as a business secret. Research on writing a design brief is scant and prescriptions for how to organize documents are heavily based on individual consultants’ experiences. As such, most design briefs are the writer’s interpretation of a Request For Proposals (RFP) or merely a reformulation of an existing business plan (Petersen 2011)…

… The responsibility for writing a design brief is usually relegated to one department and there is little or no cross-departmental collaboration. At the Industrial Design Society of America event in 2012, for example, design students and professional designers alike voiced their concerns about the design briefs they had seen. The design briefs written by engineering departments contained too much information and were overly restrictive, whereas the design briefs written by marketing departments contained too little information and did not inspire designers. Therefore, many designers read a design brief when a project is started and rarely revisit it afterward…

 

 

Table of Contents

1 A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO DESIGN THINKING 1
Michael G. Luchs

 

PART I: DESIGN THINKING TOOLS 13

2 INSPIRATIONAL DESIGN BRIEFING 15
Søren Petersen, Jaewoo Joo

3 PERSONAS: POWERFUL TOOL FOR DESIGNERS 27
Robert Chen, Jeanny Liu

4 CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MAPPING: THE SPRINGBOARD TO INNOVATIVE SOLUTIONS 41
Jonathan Bohlmann, John McCreery

5 DESIGN THINKING TO BRIDGE RESEARCH AND CONCEPT DESIGN 59
Lauren Weigel

6 BOOSTING CREATIVITY IN IDEA GENERATION USING DESIGN HEURISTICS 71
Colleen M. Seifert, Richard Gonzalez, Seda Yilmaz, Shanna Daly

7 THE KEY ROLES OF STORIES AND PROTOTYPES IN DESIGN THINKING 87
Mark Zeh

 

PART II: DESIGN THINKING WITHIN THE FIRM 105

8 INTEGRATING DESIGN INTO THE FUZZY FRONT END OF THE INNOVATION PROCESS 107
Giulia Calabretta, Gerda Gemser

9 THE ROLE OF DESIGN IN EARLY-STAGE VENTURES: HOW TO HELP START-UPS UNDERSTAND AND APPLY DESIGN PROCESSES TO NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT 125
J. D. Albert

10 DESIGN THINKING FOR NON-DESIGNERS: A GUIDE FOR TEAM TRAINING AND IMPLEMENTATION 143
Victor P. Seidel, Sebastian K. Fixson

11 DEVELOPING DESIGN THINKING: GE HEALTHCARE’S MENLO INNOVATION MODEL 157
Sarah J. S.Wilner

12 LEADING FOR A CORPORATE CULTURE OF DESIGN THINKING 173
Nathan Owen Rosenberg Sr., Marie-Caroline Chauvet, Jon S. Kleinman

13 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AS INTELLIGENCE AMPLIFICATION FOR BREAKTHROUGH INNOVATIONS 187
Vadake K. Narayanan, Gina Colarelli O’Connor

14 STRATEGICALLY EMBEDDING DESIGN THINKING IN THE FIRM 205
Pietro Micheli, Helen Perks

 

PART III: DESIGN THINKING FOR SPECIFIC CONTEXTS 221

15 DESIGNING SERVICES THAT SING AND DANCE 223
Marina Candi, Ahmad Beltagui

16 CAPTURING CONTEXT THROUGH SERVICE DESIGN STORIES 237
KatarinaWetter-Edman, Peter R. Magnusson

17 OPTIMAL DESIGN FOR RADICALLY NEW PRODUCTS 253
Steve Hoeffler, Michal Herzenstein, Tamar Ginzburg

18 BUSINESS MODEL DESIGN 265
John Aceti, Tony Singarayar

19 LEAN START-UP IN LARGE ENTERPRISES USING HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN THINKING: A NEW APPROACH FOR DEVELOPING TRANSFORMATIONAL AND DISRUPTIVE INNOVATIONS 281
Peter Koen

 

PART IV: CONSUMER RESPONSES AND VALUES 301

20 CONSUMER RESPONSE TO PRODUCT FORM 303
Mariëlle E. H. Creusen

21 DRIVERS OF DIVERSITY IN CONSUMERS’ AESTHETIC RESPONSE TO PRODUCT DESIGN 319
Adèle Gruen

22 FUTURE-FRIENDLY DESIGN: DESIGNING FOR AND WITH FUTURE CONSUMERS 333
Andy Hines

23 FACE AND INTERFACE: RICHER PRODUCT EXPERIENCES THROUGH INTEGRATED USER INTERFACE AND INDUSTRIAL DESIGN 351
Keith S. Karn

24 INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY PROTECTION FOR DESIGNS 367
Daniel Harris Brean

25 DESIGN THINKING FOR SUSTAINABILITY 381
Rosanna Garcia, PhD, Scott Dacko, PhD

 

 

Cases

How could we design a better fire extinguisher?

Leave a comment

IMG_1229

Since we spend most of our time in buildings, we are literally surrounded by fire extinguishers. It consists of a hand-held cylindrical pressure vessel containing an agent which can be discharged to extinguish a fire (Wikipedia). In general, we do not pay attention to them until needed. For me, I have never used any fire extinguisher in my life and have no interest in it. Interestingly, designers have noticed their problems and came up with two fairly different but equally interesting solutions.

Typical fire extinguishers have two critical problems. First, they are often ignored and difficult to be located. Even though they are red colored, fire extinguishers merely stand still and fail to grab our attention. Further, they do not go well with walls or interiors.

Recently, I found a series of eye-catching fire extinguishers at a store. In order to solve the first problem, some designers changed the appearance of the fire extinguishers. They painted skins to make them visually appealing and to make them go well with the walls. Some of the newly painted fire extinguishers look so nice that I even wanted to buy them for home decor.

DML_Fire distinguisher

The second problem is that typical fire extinguishers are difficult to use in emergency situations. Therefore, instruction manuals are prepared. A practice session runs for those who want to try to use them in advance.

Recently, I found another, newly designed fire extinguishers in a building. Designers changed the size and the container material so that the shape “says” how to use. Now, we do not have to spend time on learning how to use them; instead, we can simply  pick up one or a few water-bottle shaped fire extinguishers and throw them on a fire.

These two fire extinguishers teach me what designers do for us. Designers change the appearance of a product; alternatively, they change the way we use it.

Cases

Devices help us empathize with others

Leave a comment

Empathy matters in design and new  product development (e.g., Dev Patnaik’s Wired to Care). In order to deeply dive into target customers’ thoughts and feelings, marketers have used some combination of observation and interview (i.e., market-oriented ethnography in Rosenthal and Capper 2006) and even pictures (e.g., Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique). Academic researchers in the marketing area continue exploring tools (e.g., Listening-In in Urban and Hauser 2004).

However, designers seem to invest more effort into empathy probably because they are able to develop tangible devices. Last year, I met several interesting empathy support devices at the exhibition by the College of Design at Kookmin University. Students developed a series of devices that help researchers put themselves into the shoes of pregnant mothers, asthma patients, and even the seniors suffering from the pain of hands and legs. In order to empathize them, researchers carry baby dolls or wear masks, gloves and sand sacks.

DML_Hand

DML_Legs

Cases

Design Thinking: David Kelley + Roger Martin

1 Comment

David Kelley, the president of the IDEO, visited Toronto and talked with Roger Martin, the former dean of Rotman School of Management, under the title of unleashing the creative potential within us all.

He claimed that we need three things to innovate routinely. They include creative confidence, guided mastery, and design thinking.

DesignMarketingLab

First, creative confidence (or self efficacy proposed by Bandura) enables us to go beyond inside-the-box thinking. Next, guided mastery (or a series of small successes) helps us to generate wild ideas without losing our flames. Finally, design thinking (or mindful or open-mind attitude) encourages us to try something new, in particular when we work with others.

DesignMarketingLab

While introducing the three elements of routine innovation, he emphasized empathic observation by sharing with us the projects that his employees or students have conducted. For example, his team once aimed to help K-12 students in California eat more healthy food. Their key findings were that lunch is not just for food but a social activity. As such, they proposed games in which kids come back to the table together, sit down together, and eat vegetables together. This game activity successfully led kids to eat more vegetables.

DesignMarketingLab

***

Reference

Chang, YoungJoong, Jaibeom Kim, and Jaewoo Joo (2013), “An Exploratory Study on the Evolution of Design Thinking: Comparison of Apple and Samsung,” Design Management Journal, 8 (1), 22-34.

… Samsung is a good example of a “technology push” firm. Samsung has been a late mover in the electronics market. Responding to unparalleled business challenges, the company first expanded its design team from 200 designers in the late 1990s to 1000 designers in 2012. Samsung has made noticeable debuts in winning several international design awards. However, the company’s intuitive and analytic teams needed to work closely before they were able to deeply understand and appreciate each other’s way of working. The forced collaboration produced challenging decision-making conflicts—the types of conflicts that are difficult to resolve without a moderator. Instead, decisions were made exclusively by the intuitive team or exclusively by the analytic team. This issue explains why Samsung has performed well in design awards, but has not yet introduced an iconic product like the iPhone…

Technology-push path

… Apple approaches design thinking differently from Samsung. Its design team does not communicate with its manufacturing team. Instead, an independent team (consisting of Steve Jobs and his supporters) made most of the firm’s business decisions. In the process, Jobs limited the decision-making power of the analytic teams in order for them to be comparable with the power of the intuitive team. Note that although Steve Jobs was often criticized for his assertive decisions, he did free the intuitive team from the analytic team. As a result, Apple products are welcomed by a massive number of consumers—even though their individual features do not necessarily outperform the products manufactured by their competitors …

Technology-epiphany path
*Event

Jan Chipchase @ Seoul

Leave a comment

Jan Chipchase

.

Hidden in plain sightSpeech at Seoul by Jan Chipchase (Executive Creative Director of Global Insights at Frog, Author of Hidden in Plain Sight)

Title: “Leap of Faith”

Synopsis:  “Drawing on over a decade working for Fortune 500 and Korean clients Jan’s talk will explore the use of real-world insights to inform and inspire design, strategy, challenge minds and flutter hearts. The talk will cover a sample project all the way through to cutting edge techniques in obtaining insight and discuss why sometimes, against the better judgement of the organization it requires a leap of faith.”

Time: October 28, 2013 (Mon) 4-6PM

Place: Conference Hall, Administration Building, Kookmin University

.

.

.

관찰의 힘얀 칩체이스 서울 강연 (프로그 디자인, 크리에이티브 디렉터 / 관찰의 힘, 저자)

제목: 믿음의 도약

시놉시스: 얀 칩체이스는 지난 10년동안 포춘 500대 기업과 한국 기업들을 대상으로 프로젝트를 수행하면서, 현실 세계에서 발굴한 인사이트가 디자인과 전략을 개선하고, 틀에 갇힌 사람들의 생각에 도전하며, 심지어는 사람의 마음을 움직일 수도 있다는 점을 보여주었습니다. 본 강연에서는, 기존에 수행한 프로젝트 뿐만 아니라 인사이트 발굴에 사용되는 기법들도 함께 선보일 예정이며, 다양한 사례와 기법들을 통하여 언제, 왜 데이터에 기반한 판단보다 믿음이 조직의 발전에 도움이 되는지 논의하려고 합니다.

시간: 2013년 10월 28일 (월) 오후 4-6시

장소: 국민대학교 본부관 학술대회장

참고 1) 동아비즈니스리뷰 인터뷰 (201308): “르완디 시장조사때 밀수꾼 인터뷰… 극단적 아웃라이어는 통찰의 보고”

참고 2) 조선일보 인터뷰 (20131008): “제품 기능에만 치중하면 실패… 소비자 깊숙한 내면적 욕망 읽어야”

 

 

Welcome Jan! On Oct 28, 2013, he gave a speech at Kookmin University, Seoul. He shared with the attendants his unique perspective and rich insights as an Executive Creative Director of Global Insights at Frog and author of Hidden in Plain Sight. In total, 280 people showed up. This event was run by Ran Yoon who is working at the product development team, SK Telecom, and used to work at the marketing team, Samsung Electronics Canada. One of the attendants, Jaeyong Yi, the president of PXD, a Korean design consulting agency, wrote his review in Korean language.

 

Jan Chipchase @ Kookmin University

Jan Chipchase

Publications

Apple and Samsung took different approaches toward design thinking

4 Comments

The article presents research focusing on the development of design thinking in business context. It utilizes balancing intuitive and analytical thinking to determine the exploitation of design thinking in organizations. It explores the decision making processes of two electronic corporations including Apple Inc., and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. to offer practical implications to executives who are interested in implementing design thinking in their organizations.

… Samsung is a good example of a “technology push” firm. Samsung has been a late mover in the electronics market. Responding to unparalleled business challenges, the company first expanded its design team from 200 designers in the late 1990s to 1000 designers in 2012. Samsung has made noticeable debuts in winning several international design awards. However, the company’s intuitive and analytic teams needed to work closely before they were able to deeply understand and appreciate each other’s way of working. The forced collaboration produced challenging decision-making conflicts—the types of conflicts that are difficult to resolve without a moderator. Instead, decisions were made exclusively by the intuitive team or exclusively by the analytic team. This issue explains why Samsung has performed well in design awards, but has not yet introduced an iconic product like the iPhone…

… Apple approaches design thinking differently from Samsung. Its design team does not communicate with its manufacturing team. Instead, an independent team (consisting of Steve Jobs and his supporters) made most of the firm’s business decisions. In the process, Jobs limited the decision-making power of the analytic teams in order for them to be comparable with the power of the intuitive team. Note that although Steve Jobs was often criticized for his assertive decisions, he did free the intuitive team from the analytic team. As a result, Apple products are welcomed by a massive number of consumers—even though their individual features do not necessarily outperform the products manufactured by their competitors …

Cases

Research questions about design

Leave a comment

Research topics @ DMI_20120808 001
Research topics @ DMI_20120808 001

Research topics @ DMI_20120808 002
Research topics @ DMI_20120808 002

Research topics @ DMI_20120808 003
Research topics @ DMI_20120808 003

At the 2012 International Design Management Research Conference  (August 8-9, 2012 @ Boston), I have attended a group discussion session called Research Methodology Clinic. Its description says,

Join us for a group conversation, facilitated by Alison Rieple and Jeanne Liedtka, in which interested colleagues come together to offer feedback and coaching to each other on the thorny issues we face as academic researchers in design related areas. Come with a research issue you’ve been struggling with and/or to offer your successful methodological insights to others!

In this session, 12 participants have shared not only their research methodologies but also their research topics. From the pictures above, you will be able to identify who was studying which topic. The research topics vary from DESIGN (Understanding how design really happens), DESIGN THINKING (Definition, construct, and application / Its relationship with management), and DESIGNERS (Collaborative problem solving / Decision-making) to DESIGN POLICY (Corporate level of design polity), INNOVATION (Metrics to identify innovators), DESIGN PROCESS (toolkit, activities, and actions) and SERVICE DESIGN.

Cases

Interdisciplinary Design Workshop by NSF “Driving Innovation through Design” @ Northwestern University

Leave a comment

As design has attracted increasing attention across multiple academic disciplines, interdisciplinary design workshops have been hosted by the universities that have established their interdisciplinary design programs, including Stanford University and University of Michigan. In April 2010, the Segal Design Institute at Northewestern University hosted a workshop under the title of “Driving Innovation through Design — Engineering in the 21st century.”

Sustainable growth in the 21st Century requires technological and social innovations that effectively address the complex, interdependent problems that we face as a nation and throughout the world. Design research and education provides the intellectual underpinning and offers knowledge and experience to serve as a foundation for this endeavor. However, establishing interdisciplinary design research and education programs requires institutional transformation to overcome the current system that is structured around traditional disciplines with little cross-connection. This two-day workshop, supported by National Science Foundation (NSF), brought together a group of university administrators, faculty and researchers, and industry practitioners, to discuss the role that Design may play in helping universities transform their educational mission and practices to meet the challenges of the 21st Century.

– excerpted from the executive summary, NSF workshop report

I was invited to attend this workshop as the only business student. I have discussed a wide variety of issues with researchers, teachers, and practitioners. We worked in groups discussing interdisciplinary design research and nurturing design faculty, and presented the summaries (click here for the team presentations).

In particular, recommendations on design research are worth sharing (click here for the final report).

A large-scale, sustained education agenda must be supported and complemented by a research agenda that studies the pertinent questions and develops the knowledge and methods to address them. While interdisciplinary education is readily understood, interdisciplinary research is much less so. Rather than perceiving design research as an interdisciplinary area, it is more advantageous to view Design as a discipline in itself that can combine knowledge from other disciplines, akin to our concept of medicine as a discipline. Examples of design research topics include:

  1. Exploration of the intersection and interaction of people, products, and systems;
  2. Reconciliation of the creative, holistic thinking of the arts with the analytical, decomposed thinking of the sciences;
  3. Methods to enhance interdisciplinary communication and collaboration, knowledge capture, and reuse across disciplines;
  4. Design innovation of complex engineered systems;
  5. Identification of the characteristics of innovative teams;
  6. Exploration of the intersection of computing and human systems and how this supports the design process;
  7. Methodologies for the design of emerging systems, such as medical and health care systems, energy related products and services, and multi-scale devices and systems;
  8. Design of completely new products, services, and systems yet to be conceived; and
  9. Interdisciplinary design education including innovation, creativity, teamwork, leadership, entrepreneurship through curricular and extracurricular learning.
Cases

Evolution of design thinking

1 Comment

In 2006, what was design thinking? (see more at Luke Wroblewsky‘s blog)

Roger Martin

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.

Tim Brown

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.

Jeanne Liedtka

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.

..

Now in 2010, what is design thinking?

I recently came across a carefully written post at Core 77 about design thinking. It was done by Kevin McCullagh and titled as “Design thinking: Everywhere and Nowhere, Reflections on The Big Re-Think.”

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?

..

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.

***

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.

***

Reference 2

Bertao, R. A., Jung, C. H., Chung, J., & Joo, J. (2023). Design thinking: A customized blueprint to train R & D personnel in creative problem-solving. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 48, 101253.

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