Category Archives: Design Thinking

Design Thinking

Shifting To A Design Thinking Culture

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It can be a challenge to communicate what the design thinking process is and the benefits to be gained from implementing or using it in an organization. So imagine an initiative to shift the entire culture of a large industrial corporation to a design thinking mentality. It sounds nearly impossible, right? Well that is exactly what Procter & Gamble accomplished over the last few years. An article in Business Week profiles how P&G “changed it’s game”. If you are comtemplating how design thinking could be used to transform the work and innovation processes in your library, read up on P&G’s Design Thinking Initiative.

Now it’s true that P&G applied some considerable resources to this Initiative. For example, they’ve conducted over 40 design thinking workshops using over 100 internal facilitators. They also brought in design thinking gurus like Roger Martin from the Rotman School of Management and David Kelley of IDEO and the founder of Stanford’s D.School to help them develop and prototype their workshops. But there are some things that P&G has learned and developed that could be of help to other less well-resourced organizations – like your library.

One goal of any transition to a design thinking organization is to teach leaders to use it to reframe their problems. Here is how the change in approach at P&G is described:

“The analytical process we typically use to do our work—understand the problem and alternatives; develop several ideas; and do a final external check with the customer—gets flipped. Instead, design thinking methods instruct: There’s an opportunity somewhere in this neighborhood; use a broader consumer context to inform the opportunity; brainstorm a large quantity of fresh ideas; and co-create and iterate using low-resolution prototypes with that consumer.”

As an example of this reframing, for one of their personal care product lines the emphasis changed from telling the consumer why the product was right for them to creating a web-based interactive consultation that engages the consumer through a series of questions that allows consumers to identify, on their own, which P&G product is the right one for their specific needs. It is based on an empathic design process. Through the use of design thinking P&G employees are encouraged to work in groups to brainstorm new ideas and they are using much more rapid prototyping of products to learn what works and what doesn’t. Another key to the transformation process is that it must involve the entire organization which is why P&G is approached this as an immersion process. It seems like an enormous effort, and I don’t doubt it is. But this quote provides some insight into the benefits the company is gaining from its Design Thinking Initiative:

“Design thinking activates both sides of the brain—it makes participants more creative, more empathetic toward the human condition P&G consumers face. Our managers don’t leave their analytical minds at home; instead they are able to operate with their whole brain, not just the left hemisphere.”

What library couldn’t benefit from a more creative workforce? Though the article doesn’t come right out and say it I see a company that is going through a transformation that allows it, through the design thinking of its workers, to ultimately give their customers a better user experience with their products. To me that sounds like the effort required to shift to a design thinking culture is well worth the effort.

Design Thinking, User Experiences

Learn More About DT AND UX With Two New Resources

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I first came across an article about user experience (UX) in January 2006. At the time I was doing some research for the book that would become Academic Librarianship by Design. Almost immediately I saw the connection between the two. User experiences could – probably should – be the outcome of a design thinking process. A library user experience, in particular, struck me as a challenging concept. What would that possibly mean for the end-users? What would constitute, to their way of thinking, a great library user experience? Whatever that might be it seemed reasonable that design activities could help to produce a much improved library user experience.

Since then the book has been completed and I’ve gone on to read many more articles about DT and UX, and I continue to explore, with you, how these two practices can be applied to benefit our libraries. Though they provide no immediate answers, and perhaps might be best consumed by someone new to both DT and UX, I’m going to recommend that you look at the following two new resources.

First, take an hour and watch a highly informative video about UX. “Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services For an Uncertain World” features Brandon Schauer and David Yerba, two designers from the firm Adaptive Path. In this Google Talks video presentation they share the key concepts from their new book of the same title. I took away a couple of ideas. First, these folks excel at keeping their explanations simple. User experience – that’s all the user cares about. The experience is the product. Do they enjoy themselves, do they accomplish what they need to do, and do they manage to do it the way they want – with simplicity? Well, there’s more to UX than that, but that’s a good start. I also like their way of explaining the type of design they bring to the process of developing the user experience – an activity everyone in the organization can embrace no matter what their background. Then they discuss The Long Wow – a Wow experience that repeatedly delivers great delights for the user, is memorable, and impresses. In other words, users remember it and return again for more of the same.  I’m looking forward to reading the book.

But how do you design that type of experience for your library? If you haven’t done much formal reading about design thinking now is a good time to start. And what better way to start than with a basic article about design thinking from one of the masters of the art – Tim Brown the CEO and President of IDEO. The article appears in the just published June 2008 issue of Harvard Business Review (p.85). The article relates the basic concepts of design thinking and why it can provide a better approach to developing human-centered solutions. In particular I like that Brown further elaborates on his explanation of the “three I’s” – Inspiration; Ideation; and Implementation (see the graphic in the article). I had previously heard Brown discuss this in a video presentation, but the graphic in the article provides a good visual representation of the process as it applies to problem finding, user studies, brainstorming, prototyping and solution development. And since those new to design thinking always ask for examples of how it is applied in real life situations, the article contains several case studies to illustrate the application of design thinking.

Even though I’ve been studying these ideas for over two years I continue to be amazed at the great articles and videos that help me to clarifying my thinking about DT and UX, and how these activities and approaches can be applied to the design of better libraries.

 

Design Thinking

shiny new toys

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Interesting graphic in the back of the current Harvard Business Review. A nice warning not to rely on shiny new toys to drive interest, but rather we need consider the real issues/barriers preventing success and start there. Think of this as the librarian behind the reference desk– you get shiny new web tools or even a new physical desk for that matter– but is that really the solution– or is there a problem with the model instead?

Design Thinking, User Experiences

The Applied Empathy Framework

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Empathic design is an important part of an overall design thinking approach to designing better libraries. It’s all about understanding your users from their perspective – putting yourself in their shoes so to speak – as a way of rethinking how your library could deliver better products and services. If you want to explore the empathic design concept in greater depth I recommend a three-part series by Dirk Knemeyer on applied empathy. He describes it as a “design framework for meeting human needs and desires”. Part one of the series focuses on applying empathy to the design process and provides an introduction to the framework. Part two of the series explains the three dimensions of human behavior and outlines specific needs and desires to which products and services can be designed. Part three of the series shows how the framework can be put to practical use.

To understand the framework you first need to become familiar with the five states of being. About them Knemeyer says they:

reflect the increasing relationship between the power and importance of needs at each level and the degree of personal commitment and desire each level engenders toward a product or user experience. That is to say, even those who have not yet realized their lowest-level needs can identify the value and impact of, as well as tacitly desire, the highest-level states of being.

The five states of being are participation, engagement, productivity, happiness and well-being. While understanding the five states of being is important to appreciating the framework, Knemeyer’s three dimensions of human behavior are critical to the framework. The dimensions are the analytical, the physical and the emotional. Reading about the dimensions added to my thinking about how the overall library experiences need to be a totality of experiences rather than isolated ones. Great library user experiences need to be more than just an isolated experience at one desk or one person; they need to be delivered across the organization, not unlike reaching people on all three dimensions. All three are explained in greater detail in part two, where you can find a visual representation of these ideas, but of them Knemeyer writes:

Rather than simply considering a product and how customers will use it, be conscious of the fact that people ultimately need each of their analytical, emotional, and physical needs met…If we are cognizant of this and actively consider all three when planning our products, marketing, and experiences, we are much more likely to enjoy design success.

So how might a library experience meet the user’s needs on the analytical, physical and emotional levels? Meeting analytical needs is perfect for the library because it is all about the mind. Everything from a good book, a featured speaker, getting help with research and even getting involved in games can help to meet analytical needs and desires. The physical and emotional needs are a bit more challenging. Library activities are hardly physical, unless you count carrying books and bound volumes to the photocopier or circulation desk. But I suspect that most folks know that library work is a cerebral endeavor and don’t mistake it for a fitness activity. I’m on the border for emotional needs. For some readers, libraries can take on an almost spiritual quality. FInding the just right book or having a social moment can certainly elicit emotion in library users.

I’ll be thinking more about this and how the library experience could meet all three human dimensions of human behavior. Knemeyer’s ideas on applied empathy are helpful to me in seeing there is more to empathic design than just putting yourself in the place of the user. There are multiple dimensions in which an empathic understanding can develop. For now I’ve got to tackle a pile of good user experience articles that I’ve been meaning to read. More on that later.

Articles, Design Thinking, User Experiences

The Interview Learning Experience

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There’s nothing quite like reading good, clear explanations of the basic concepts and approaches we focus on here at DBL. Librarians may struggle as they seek to understand and familiarize themselves with design thinking, user experiences and other important elements of a library that delivers a great user experience. That’s why I found Kate Rudder’s interview with Nathan Shedroff to be informative and enlightening on several levels. Shedroff is experience strategist, author, and the Program Chair and founder of the brand new MBA in Design Strategy at California College of the Arts. Unlike some of the more technical articles on design thinking and user experience, the interview format makes it possible to learn from an expert who puts the theory into a more practical framework. Here are some snippets from the interview:

Design processes, specifically, approach the challenge to imagine and devise new solutions, in any context, by looking at customers in meaningful ways, integrating data from a variety of sources, and using it as a starting point instead of an ending point. Design respects different kinds of prototyping and iteration, which is an important part of the process.

You don’t have to be a designer to learn to innovate like one, but it helps if you’ve been through the process a few times to understand what to expect and how the process needs to be supported.

Design [with a big “D”]is about how people approach a challenge and develop a solution and, as such, these processes are extendable into almost any domain: interaction design, organizational design, etc. However, most of the time that the word design [with a little “d”] is used, it is often referring to a particular type of design or domain: graphic, industrial, web, interaction, fashion, interior, etc. and it invokes all of the baggage associated with that domain in both the speaker and the listener.

Great designers have processes they rely on to investigate, ideate, prototype, iterate, validate, and communicate that they can employ to validate what their intuition may be leading them to.

Check out the rest of the interview. I think you’ll find it a good learning experience

Design Thinking

Designing Thinking Backlash Surfaces

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It had to happen sooner or later. A business journalist decided it was time to burst the design thinking bubble. Does she succeed? Lara Lee, in a BusinessWeek article titled “Innovation at Risk” writes:

There’s a belief in some quarters that design can keep innovation relevant—that applying design thinking to our biggest business problems will deliver sustainable growth. “If we can just get business people to think more like designers,” the argument goes, “we’ll get them out of their linear, analytical boxes and inspire them to generate novel, customer-centered solutions that will drive new growth.” The problem with this thinking is twofold: First, it paints businesspeople who aren’t designers as uncreative and inattentive to customer needs. Worse, it runs the risk of overpromising what design thinking can deliver, which is a surefire way to undermine the role of design, and innovation, in creating new business value.

She goes on to compare design thinking with a previous business infactuation with strategic planning, and states that most companies did just as well with strategic planning as without it.

It’s certainly reasonable to question what design thinking can contribute to business practices, and Lee isn’t the first person to suggest that design thinking has all the makings of another business fad. On further reading one sees that Lee isn’t trashing design thinking. Rather she’s simply stating that its proponents must be careful about overpromising what it can deliver. Remember, the librarian-designer’s mantra should be “underpromise and overdeliver” – not the other way around.

While I view design thinking as more than just the innovation tool that Lee suggests it is, I do think it’s wise to avoid presenting it as a panacea for all that ails libraries. At DBL I think we’ve been thoughtful about how we view and present design thinking. Along with strategic planning, team-based organizations, identity branding and other methods being used in libraries to promote better user experiences, design thinking has its role to play in providing a mental process and practice approach for frontliners and administrators. I agree with Sherry Bailey’s recent comment here that more examples of good design thinking practice are needed, and we’ll be working to identify and promote them.

Design Thinking, User Experiences

Designing Better Skateboards – an example of user-centered design

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I caught a commercial on CNN last night that visually summed up the design thinking process in under 30 seconds. Unfortunately it has not made it to YouTube yet, Cisco isn’t that cutting edge, but you can view it here. In case they change their website around, look for the Thundersk8 Skateboard Manufacturer clip.

Essentially the video shows how they took a basic design and gave it to users, who in turn improve the product functionally and aesthetically, arriving at an ideal board. It demonstrates the process of working out flaws based on a prototype, and striving toward the perfect skating experience.

I can relate…

We’re in the process of exploring a minor renovation to a high traffic area in the library. We’re approaching it with a completely open mind, really trying to keep our bias out of it and listening to users. There is an elaborate assessment backbone to this renovation– one component involves a series of focus groups. I spent two hours composing “ideal” focus groups, matching up students sure to have interesting opinions, ranging for accomplished artists, scholars, leaders, and other interesting personalities. I sent out my invites and got little response. In fact, at my first session I had no participants.

Time to regroup. I starting spending a lot of time in the proposed area and approached people within the space and invited them to attend focus groups and other means of contribution—this has been very successful. Like the skateboard case study, I had to take it to the streets. Take the problem/idea/concept to the people actually using the space, who had a greater chance of being passionate about the area and an invested interested in the renovation. We’re hoping to design several prototypes which we will again turn over to our users for additional feedback.

Design Thinking

Design Thinking As The Intersection of Science And Design

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Another publication that I always look forward to is Rotman Magazine. It is published three times a year as the alumni magazine of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. You probably recognize the Rotman name because I’ve mentioned Roger Martin, the Dean of that School, a number of times in my past posts. He is one of the gurus of design thinking, and actively promotes the re-engineering of MBA education to focus as much, if not more, on design as it does on business theory and practice.

The latest issue, Winter 2008, has as its theme the subject “Thinking About Thinking.” That sounds somewhat nebulous, but there are quite a few informative and thought-provoking articles in this issue. If you seek to learn more about design thinking you should definitely have a look – the whole issue is openly accessible. I started my reading with the article “Design Thinking: On its Nature and Use”. The author, Charles Owens of the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design, has, according to his bio-blurb, been teaching design thinking since 1965! And I thought design thinking was something relatively new – I certainly have a lot to learn.

Owens lays out some interesting observations about scientific thinking and design thinking – both how they differ and where they intersect:

Whereas the scientist sifts facts to discover patterns and insights, the designer invents new patterns and concepts to address facts and possibilities. In a world with growing problems that desperately need understanding and insight, there is a great need for ideas that can blend that understanding and insight in creative new solutions.

He also talks about the importance of creativity for designers and provides his list of characteristics of creative thinkers; it will likely seem similar to other discussions of creative thinking you’ve read, emphasizing the importance of flexibility, intellectual curiosity and originality. Owens completes the article with his list of design thinking characteristics which adds to our understanding of what it is and how one develops it. It’s a list of ten items, not a top ten though, and I won’t rehash it here. What I do see are themes that pervade many of the ongoing conversations among library professionals as we endlessly discuss how we may best avoid marginalization while doing more to connect with our user communities. For example, the quality of having a “facility for avoiding the necessity of choice”. Presenting library users with far too many choices is of concern because it adds to their research confusion. Owens advises us to develop “have your cake and eat it too” solutions. I wouldn’t exactly say that federated search is such a design, but we may be moving in the direction of designs that offer a better balance between simplicity and complexity that will result in fewer choices for researchers.

I commend you to give the latest issue of Rotman Magazine a look, and if you have some time left over take a look at this interesting innovation model designed as a map – I’m still trying to digest it.

Design Thinking, Uncategorized

Add This Design Journal To Your Reading List

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Given how the interest in design thinking and design is spreading across disciplines (and a few design and UX bloggers noted their surprise at finding an article about design thinking in a library journal), being efficient and effective at capturing all this potentially valuable literature is a significant challenge. Subcribing to the feeds of the better design and UX blogs (see our blogroll) is one way to spot those occasional articles. But to be more systematic a well-designed journal alert approach may work best. So if you wanted to set up a journal (ToC) alert to capture the latest articles on design thinking, UX and related topics, how would you go about it? On what disciplines should you focus your efforts? 

Having access to one or more academic aggregator databases from companies such as ProQuest and EBSCO can certainly help. Not only do they cover hundreds of potential journals in which this literature might appear, but these databases offer two useful alerting systems. First, it’s easy to set up alerts to capture the table of contents (ToC) of those journals with a reputation for publishing articles in the design fields. You might know a few, but how do you discover others? That’s where the second method comes in. The databases also allow the creation of search alerts. I have constructed several search alerts for terms such as “design thinking”, “user experience” and “design strategy”. Whenver articles with these phrases are added to these databases I receive an alert in my e-mail inbox. Once I begin to see a journal that frequently publishes articles about these topics, I create a ToC alert for that specific title. What about Google alerts or RSS feeds for searches created in Yahoo and other engines? They might work also, but it’s likely that the number of irrelevant web sites retrieved from the alerts may make it a less than effective strategy.

As a result of months of screening the major library databases with these search phrases it’s becoming more apparent that one might see an article about design thinking in almost any discipline. However, I’ve noticed one journal in particular that has established itself as one of my must reads. If your library subscribes to the ProQuest ABI/Inform database, you can set up a ToC alert for it there. Design Management Review stands out as a journal that regularly provides insightful and thought-provoking readings about all the topics we cover here at DBL. The most recent issue, fall 2007, features several articles on design as a source of innovation and strategy. One of them, “Innovation in Organizations in Crisis” (Cherkasky and Slobin) has an excellent definition of innovation: finding new ways of creating value and bringing them to life. Simple and elegant. What if you don’t have access to ABI/Inform? The publishers of DMR do provide a listing of the articles in the latest issue on their web site. If you want to be alerted to the latest articles in each new issue, try using a web page change detection service (some are free) to monitor the page. Whenever the DMR article listing page is updated you’ll be notified by e-mail.

I will continue to highlight any publications I come across that are particularly valuable for keeping up with the latest literature and ideas in the fields of design thinking, UX and others of interest to DBL readers. If you have a particular favorite, please share it by way of leaving a comment.

Creativity & Innovation, Design Thinking, Uncategorized

Innovation, Not Information Overload, May Be What 2008 Is All About

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Information overload isn’t just for librarians anymore. As long as I’ve been in this profession, and especially in the past few years, having more information than I can possibly cope with is name of the game. Now everyone else is catching onto the challenges of capturing the most important information, applying it for decision making, and then storing it for future use. While some may think that the new year will be all about dealing with information overload, I think we’ll be focusing more of our attention and energy on stimulating our own innovation. Here are some signs.

First, even the New York Times is providing insight into if not outright advice on how to improve individual and organizational innovation. In a recent article the Times observed that “As our knowledge and expertise increase, our creativity and ability to innovate tend to taper off. Why? Because the walls of the proverbial box in which we think are thickening along with our experience.” This exact point was made in my post about Thinkertoys – that our expertise can blind us to possible solutions and innovative ideas because we are unable to see things from different perspectives.

Second, I recently discovered two excellent pieces about innovation. If you are looking for ideas on how to create an innovation culture in your organization, begin your reading with an Innovation Labs white paper titled “Creating the Innovation Culture: Geniuses, Champions, and Leaders.” According to author Langdon Morris an innvoation culture is one in which innovation happens, and does so consistently over time. He says organizations with innovation cultures have individuals who fill three essential roles:

1) The creative genius whose insights develop into ideas and then into value-adding innovations.
2) The innovation champion who supports innovation by helping creative people to overcome the obstacles that otherwise hamper innovation.
3) The innovation leader who define’s the organization’s expectations and policies so they favor innovation.

After discussing each of these three roles in greater depth, and supporting it with examples from the world of busines, Morris concludes by explaining (via his Innovation Culture Table) that most business practices exist to maintain stability and standardization while extending the status quo. Does that sound like a library for which you’ve worked? If an organization is able to start its innovation culture by bringing together these three roles, then it should begin to remove the obstacles that inhibit the growth of the innovation culture.

Though its scholarly approach (and length) makes for more challenging reading, the article “Innovation as a Learning Process: Embedding Design Thinking” is worthwhile for its attempt to better understand the innovation process by blending ideas about design and learning – two skills set that are of increasing importance to the work of librarians. The article was published in the fall 2007 issue of California Management Review (available on Ebsco). This blending results in a model that explains the innovation process as a set of four stages: 1) observation (contexts); (2) frameworks (insights); (3) imperatives (ideas) and (4) solutions (experiences). The authors, Sara Beckman and Michael Barry, focus more on the work of teams in this article. The learning styles intersect with design within the innovation team itself. The most effective teams include a leader with a concrete experience style, an artist with reflective observation style, a writer with abstract conceptualization style, and a speaker with active experimentation style. These are somewhat foreign sounding learning styles and the authors don’t do much to explain them, but there are a few good case studies which help to clarify things a bit. This is the sort of article that will demand a few more readings.

Perhaps what one can take away from all these articles on innovation is that good innovators are good information managers. They have methods that make the best of information received, and they are good at identifying worthwhile resources, applying appropriate filters to channel the most appropriate information to themselves, then screening the incoming news to identify the most salient information, and ultimately disseminating that information to their colleagues or team members. So for all the talk about 2008 being the year of information overload, I’m going with 2008 as the year of innovation.Â