On a Broader Purview for Design

Design thinking begins with skills designers have learned over many decades in their quest to match human needs with available technical resources within the practical constraints of business. By integrating what is desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable, designers have been able to create products we enjoy today. Design thinking takes the next step, which is to put these tools into the hands of people who may have never thought of themselves as designers and apply them to vastly greater range of problems. (p.4)

Brown’s fundamental proposal is that the methods and approaches of designers should be practiced by anyone seeking solutions to complex, real-world problems.

This leads Brown to a few recommendations. First, designers can and should be involved earlier in project processes and in more executive positions, where the exploratory nature of design thinking can have the most impact.

Next, is the necessity of an interdisciplinary team:

As design begins to tackle a wider range of problems—and to move upstream in the innovation process—the lone designer, sitting alone in a studio and meditating upon the relation between form and function, has yielded to the interdisciplinary team. (p.26)

Brown reasons that design teams will increasingly need to rely on collaboration with professionals in other fields to meaningfully create designs for contexts they are initially unfamiliar with. These collaborators should participate as design thinkers, sharing ownership of ideas.

Finally, just as non-designers can become design thinkers, projects traditionally seen as outside the design industry, like the planning of services or experiences, can benefit from the application of design thinking. Much of the book uses examples from IDEO’s work to describe how design thinking approaches were applied across fields such as hospitality, healthcare, finance, government, social activism, and sustainability.

At this point in time, these ideas seem to have propagated through the design field. Many design studios and agencies now have executive level design positions and sell service or experience design capabilities.

But I think the greatest obstacle to the aspirations described in Brown’s book is still the entrenched siloing of information and people, both internally in organizations and across industries. It’s not a trivial thing to de-program decades of industrial mindsets.