Design – A New Elephant?

Design thinking has become a rage and design agencies and consulting companies are falling over themselves to offer their versions of Design Thinking. We ourselves have explored (and debated) different aspects of design thinking in previous blog posts.

In their article, A Bridge Not Too Far (Industrial Designers Society of America’s (IDSA) Innovation Magazine, Summer 2018 issue), Jeff Smith and Sunil Malhotra liken the current wave of design thinking to the elephant: it is seen differently by different people—all partly true, and partly wrong—while proposing a new framework that can provide a holistic view of the design discipline.

They introduce the Integral Design Framework as a way to connect the different aspects of design to one another. They describe design from philosopher Ken Wilber’s integral reality perspective.

“As the theory goes, everything in the human experience happens within these four dimensions of reality (individual and collective, internal and external). Our aspiration in using this framework is that it leads to a more definitive and holistic approach for all who seek to leverage design more fully.”

The upper left quadrant is the internal, individual – the ‘I’ – and represents Design Being. The internal collective, the ‘We’ is Design Doing. When ‘We’ externalise Design through systems, it is Design Thinking, which drives Design Results.

Mapping these dimensions on Wilber’s Integral theory is the first step towards understanding the discipline.  The authors are optimistic about the possibilities to further describe, correlate, and develop the idea into a thesis for business leaders.

Start reading A Bridge Not Too Far here.

(To receive a pdf of the full article, please fill and submit the form below.)

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However, many organisations working with children, have observed that the children so rescued—as high as 50% of them—run away from their homes again. In this episode of Design Talks, Dunu Roy, founder & director of Hazards Centre, explains why this is the case.

The Voice of Children

“You should hear the horror stories,” cries Dunu. In just over two hours, Dunu paints a complete picture of the legal cross-fire in which children are caught—from a Juvenile Justice Act that places responsibility of care for children in the hands of cops, to welfare organisations returning children to abusive households.

“On one hand, they say, in the policy, that the child has the right to be heard… Does the child want to go to this home, or does the child want to go to that home, has to be heard. At the same time, the policy says, the best place for the child is with the family and in school…”

The Research

Hazards Centre, along with other organisations across India, has formed the All India Working Group on Rights of Children in Contact with Railways (AIWG-RCCR). Together, this group has spoken to 2148 children across 120 railway stations, to understand the ‘agency’ of children, and hear what they have to say.

As Dunu outlines the research methodology, I can’t help drawing parallels with Design Thinking—from being empathetic to children, and making sure the questions are such that they will understand and respond to, to the iterative nature of conducting the survey.

The group was keen to adopt technology to speed up the process of collecting information, and Ideafarms is proud to have partnered with Hazards Centre in designing and developing a solution to enable this research (read more about the tech here).

Early findings

Dunu shares some of the findings of this research, which has contradicted several widely held conventions about children living in and around railway stations. For instance, about 75% of the children do have an active link with their families—either living with them, or visiting them frequently (as opposed to the belief that they have run away from their homes); and a majority of the children come to the stations in search of livelihood, and have plans for their future, which they are working towards achieving.

A more chilling reality that the research highlights is that more than half the respondents in the study said that they were harassed by institutions (like police, NGO) which are setup for their welfare & protection.

Current Challenges : An Appeal

 
Listen to excerpts from our conversation in this episode of Design Talks (~ 34 minutes), as Dunu talks passionately about the complex legal system impacting children; the importance of listening to what children have to say, without adding our assumptions or value judgements; and the findings that are emerging from this research.

¹ Key Statistics, Year Book – 2016-17, Indian Railways

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In our world, it is easy for us to connect with friends, family and sometimes even rank strangers (or, as in the case of movies, fictitious ones). Why is it that in the context of business, these connections go out the window and all that matters is the bottom line, a few cold numbers on a paper/screen, and the proud poker face that doesn’t reveal a shred of strategy? Is there a way to bring about a shift in this status quo?

Ever since the industrial revolution, we’ve developed two personalities —  one human, and the other, industrial. This industrial personality dehumanises businesses — mass production, mass consumption and mass marketing take precedence over human beings and individuality. Outside of business, we’re human, but once in it, we’re industrial. It doesn’t help that businesses are legally separate from the people who run it — thus further removing any incentive to make businesses human.

Fortunately, for all of us ‘consumers’, the new world order provides platforms for expression — for authentic humans voices to be heard, and for these voices to influence others. One-size-fits-all value propositions can no longer be shoved down our throats with canned marketing messaging. The new world order dictates that businesses become more alive to the voice of their customers, or risk being overthrown by their competitors — Kodak & Blackberry are some of the more prominent examples of this.

Reversing the industrial mindset

We’ve already established that all of us are empathetic. The only thing left to do, is reorient the mind to bring it into the business context. Similar to the movie experience, if we immerse ourselves the context of consumers, we begin to empathize with them, which in turn can uncover insights that can lead to innovation.

Of course, it won’t happen overnight. Like someone learning to drive for the first time, it takes practice. For some, it is easier, and for some it takes more effort. One of the ways that this shift can be brought about is through the Design Thinking framework.

Design Thinking is a proven and repeatable problem solving protocol that any business or profession can employ. It combines creative and critical thinking that allows information and ideas to be organized, decisions to be made, situations to be improved, and knowledge to be gained. It’s a mindset focused on solutions and not the problem.

Ideafarms is breaking down the Design Thinking framework into bite-sized chunks for you. The first series of open workshops focuses on empathy, in which we learn about the ways in which we can immerse ourselves in the context of customers. This season’s last workshop is scheduled for 4 August 2018. Catch it before it’s too late. More details here >>

Missed the workshop?
Drop us a line at its.magic@ideafarms.com if you’d like to host one for your company / in your city.

¹ More about the study on Why we cry at movies.

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The answer to that lies in what’s different about in our world today. In the words of Eddie Obeng:

“The real 21st century around us isn’t so obvious to us, so instead we spend our time responding rationally to a world which we understand and recognize, but which no longer exists… Companies make their expensive executives spend ages carefully preparing forecasts and budgets which are obsolete or need changing before they can be published.”

We’ve all seen the three lenses of Design Thinking, you know the one I’m talking about. The Venn diagram of Desirability, Feasibility and Viability, and at the intersection, the holy grail of Innovation/User Experience/Design Thinking/(insert own phrase here).

When I first looked at this, I had two questions:

1. How is this so different from the way businesses have been functioning thus far?
2. How have they survived these past several years, if they haven’t been taking into consideration all these factors?

The answers to these questions are buried in the complex world we have seen evolve in front of us over the past couple of decades – primarily due to technology: Internet, Smartphones, Wearables, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, 3D Printing…

The information age
In traditional business context, customers were represented by broad demographics, example 18 – 25 years, urban, male etc. Market research was driven by a need to validate business decisions, and communication revolved around pushing marketing information.

With the introduction of smartphones, qualitative, location-based data is available to businesses, and that too, in real time – the sort of data that simply wasn’t possible to gather earlier. Businesses now have access to more specific information about ‘users’, as compared to the generic ‘market’. And with it, new businesses have sprung up, offering a larger variety of products/services catering to different types of users.

The social media effect
In the past, communication between businesses and customers was a one-way street. Not so anymore. With internet and communication technologies, customers are more connected with each other, and with businesses.

They can reach out to businesses directly and have platforms to share opinions in real time, thus giving them the ability to influence other customers.

In April 2017, a video of a passenger being dragged off a United Airlines plane created a world-wide sensation. The impact of those few minutes being caught on a smartphone continues to be felt by the Airlines, more than a year on – according to a survey, consumer perception of United stood at -6.9 compared to 17 in the days before the incident (on a scale of -100 to 100). Source: MarketWatch

Aside: The far-reaching consequences of social media extend beyond business, into governance, having positive, as well as negative consequences. Examples include the Arab Spring, which eventually led to turmoil in the middle east, the failed military coup in Turkey and the US Presidential elections. While significant in the context of our times, for the purposes of this post, we’ll restrict the scope of impact to businesses.

Advances in technology and processes
Apart from information technology, manufacturing processes are also seeing radical changes. While on the one hand automation is streamlining existing production lines, 3D printing has turned the process of subtractive manufacturing on its head – from economies of scale with mass production, to a perfectly feasible production line of one.

In 2015 Local Motors created the world’s first 3D printed car, opening up the possibility of safer, recyclable cars.

“Thanks to the nature of 3D printing, where the car is built in layers squirted from the nozzles of a massive printer, you can embed energy-absorbing crash structures or superstrong seat-belt mounts that are anchored deep in the body. You could bond springy bumpers to cushion pedestrian impacts… And if you managed to catastrophically damage the tub, you could unbolt the motor and suspension, melt the car down, and print a new one.”

More companies are adapting this technology, and 3D printed cars are likely to hit the roads in 2019.

Put them all together
The factors listed above are significant in their own right. Put all these together, and we have given rise to disruptive business models, given customers more choices, and made predicting the future uncertain.

Photographic film development has shrunk considerably with the arrival of digital photography. Ride-sharing services have created jobs for drivers, but they may be jobless in the near future thanks to autonomous vehicles.

And there’s more. Actions of one industry may impact unrelated industries. A rainy weather forecast may ‘scare away clients’ of car wash companies.

Coming back to the two questions I had at the beginning. I mentioned that the answers lie in our new world.

Earlier, businesses operated in a very different world that exists now. They operated in a world where desirability didn’t need to be accounted for. The market could be created and validated without involving end users. And even those that did take a step in that direction, the context of our current and uncertain future make past experience of conducting business inadequate.

What Design Thinking brings to the table
What Design Thinking does, can perhaps be explained by what it does not do.

• Design Thinking does not replace existing business methodologies and systems.
• It does not substitute experience.
• It is not a body of knowledge or skills to be mastered (and perhaps it cannot be).
• It is not a set of rules or a codified process that guarantees anything. Design Thinking cannot yield magical results by itself; it is not a magic ship that businesses can board and reach the promised land.

Design Thinking acts as the metaphorical bridge between our lessons from a very different (now irrelevant) past, and what lies ahead in the uncertain future by providing a framework for understanding and catering to customer needs; seeking new alternatives; and facilitating innovation.

Read more on Ideafarms’ Design Thinking Practice »

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Design Thinking is not design

Gagandeep Singh Sapra, Founder of MakersBox and SproutBox summarises the session for us:

When you hear the word Design Thinking, your mind hears Design and you talk about design and you think that it only a designer’s job; while had that been a different word, you would have thought differently – the meanings that I attached to it would not have happened.

Design Thinking is NOT Design

Misunderstandings around design thinking are quite common – even (especially?) within the design community. For instance, in her talk ‘Design Thinking is Bullsh*t‘, Natasha Jen, Partner at Pentagram in New York, talks about Design Thinking as being a linear process, and one that trivialises design into a wall of post-its.

If you see Design Thinking as a ‘designerly way of looking at business problems’, it stands to reason that it’s meant for non-designers. Unlike what most businesses expect from ‘methodologies’ and ‘frameworks’ it isn’t a codified, standard process. And that’s another part of the challenge. It isn’t meant to replace actual design, and it doesn’t magically transform business people into designers.

Of the many things it does stand for, Design Thinking balances Business (viability), Technology (feasibility) and Human Interaction (desirability) in defining the products and services organisations take to markets. This key aspect forms a highlight in our recent podcast: Design Talks: Design-in-Tech for the social sector.

Explaining away the tirade

Setting the misunderstanding of the phrase Design Thinking aside, why do designers still resist it? Khoi Vinh, Principal Designer at Adobe, answers this in response to Natasha Jen’s skepticism.

Khoi presents an insight into the design community, the wall that designers have built around the discipline, and why the rise of Design Thinking will not undermine design, as most designers seem to fear. He takes the analogy of engineering: the idea that ‘everyone can code’ and the availability of free online resources to learn code have not threatened engineers, or the discipline or trade of engineering.

Words like ‘bandwidth’, ‘beta’ and ‘reboot’ have become a part of our vocabulary — used by those outside of engineering — and has led to a greater understanding (and value) of engineering. This is where ‘design thinking’ presents an opportunity — to broaden the language of design, to help expand the community of design, and to help build a world that values and understands design better than it does today.

Jump into this debate.

Read the speaker notes from Khoi Vinh’s talk: a case for design thinking from a designer’s point of view.

Featured image: A little fun after the Design Thinking Session at MakersBox (Okhla)

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1. The new world of Immersive Experiences (IE)

13 year old Priyanka* looked around in wonder as she entered Delhi’s International Airport Terminal 3, with her three schoolmates in tow. Teach for India Fellow Manyata,  accompanied them through customs and security to board a flight to Poland for the month-long Brave Festival, an international cultural exchange program.

“Their excitement was palpable,” exclaims Manyata every single time she reminisces the awe and wonder with which the teenagers soaked in their very first flying experience. “From the time we entered the Terminal building, all the way through to Poland and their stay with local families, interacting with their ilk from across the world, performing pieces of India’s rich dances, collaborative choreography, et al, it was an experience few of their lot can even begin to imagine. These kids live in urban slums adjoining the most affluent neighbourhoods and yet may never have visited the local shopping mall. Could all the other 400 kids at Nai Disha—the foundation that runs their school—have an experience “nearly” the same as Priyanka and her friends had.”

Why nearly? Because Virtual Reality.

From the album of Priyanka and her friends at the Brave Festival in Poland 2016 //

There’s something to be said about immersive experiences. Until you’ve gotten out of your head into a headset, there’s nothing that comes even close to experiencing the richness of ‘being in the scene without ever leaving your present location’.

Manyata felt Virtual Reality could become a game-changer in taking education to the masses while, at the same time, keeping it close to the cultural context of these communities. Rich, entertaining content would engage them in ways traditional classroom content couldn’t. At least that was her thesis and she wanted to test it in “the real world with real people.”

Nai Disha became her partner, leading to a pilot study involving all its stakeholders—trustees, management, teachers and kids— in August 2017. Children were taken through approximately 5 minutes of immersive journeys in groups of 5 guided by their teachers using the Google Expeditions Android App. (You should try it to experience the power of immersion, first-hand.) The successful conduct of the Pilot Study (see excerpt below) has given Manyata unparalleled insights into applicability, adoption, user expectations, etc. This could truly be the next big thing using technoolgy and design for social impact in India and similarly situated countries. Affordable, on-demand, high resolution, immersive learning in the context of daily life. 

2. #VR will be a disruptive force

Virtual Reality isn’t new but has gained momentum in the last couple of years with falling prices of headsets tending marginal costs of technology down to zero. Google, Facebook, Microsoft are leading the pack with technology and platforms on which people are creating content, apps and other value propositions.

1. Currently popular and viable in Marketing, Entertainment, Games, Training, …  
2. Growing in real-time Operations and Maintenance type of work, augmenting curricular education,…
3. Early days in extra curricular and co-curricular education in K12 and Higher education, …

This technology is likely to go the way of smartphones in equalising educational disparity between haves and have-nots, especially via Hyperlocal + Cultural + Contextual content play. We never saw the smartphone revolution hurtling towards India. A so-called third world economy suddenly found itself riding its exponential rise.

The following video says it like it will be – The Biggest Tech Disruption in the Next 5 Years.

“I think in five years or so VR is going to be a really prominent platform for experiences, for business, for commerce, entertainment, and social.”

~Kevin Kelly

Author—The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future.

3. #DesignInTech and #VirtualReality

Now for the hard part. All the technology and all the content will fall short of the potential if users do not get to consume #VR in aesthetic, enjoyable and useful ways. Which opens out a whole new set of challenges and opportunities for Design. Leading the charge with Design Thinking we will need to design immersive environments in innovative ways—we will have to summon the building blocks of #DesignInTech—to keep in step with shifts in technology that are happening as we read this and will continue at an exponential pace. We will also have to orchestrate a concert of creative, technological, social, economic and business capabilities.

Welcome to the future of education.

*Name changed

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Highlights:
The social sector currently lacks awareness of technology exists and how they can use design thinking as a power tool for their own benefit.

If all organisations could come together to radically collaborate, it would likely get rid of all the challenges that the social sector is facing today — raising funds, getting solutions out in the market quicker, governmental support etc.

You don’t need the whole of design thinking, to be implemented in one go; and similarly you don’t need technology to be implemented in one go. Just by changing the orientation of the way you have been thinking and being open to divergent thinking as well as exploration of possibilities instead of starting with constraints, can show a tremendous amount of difference.

Listen to the whole podcast here:

Check out Ideafarms’ Design Thinking practice

Header image: Snapshot from Design Thinking Session at Aspire Circle’s Second Annual Retreat & Convocation (ARC 2018)

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Never before has anything fired the imagination of the world like Design Thinking. You can almost see Design Thinking vends pop-up in nooks and crannies where you can order ‘cup or cone in 3 flavours’.

But why this new attention to something that looks like common-sense-stuff-we’ve been-doing-forever? For one thing, while the sense is common, the practice is not. Especially when it comes to the world of business, steered by the twin objectives of feasibility and viability. Design Thinking suggests we get the customer into the equation even before we start creating the specifications of a new offering. The best way to do this is to ‘get out of the building’.

So Jorge and I had a chat, he in Mexico and I in India, to see if we could demystify the discipline, in our bid to protect businesses from themselves and from ignorant, opportunistic vendors.

From the post …

Just like innovation and artificial intelligence, design thinking is a buzzword. There is a cottage industry of practitioners who, with good intention or not, are hoping to get their pockets full from enterprises who want a step by step process that reduces the uncertainty behind innovation.

To many, design thinking is the answer.

Design thinking is powerful but misunderstood. I’ve written about these misunderstandings in the past:

• Putting their faith in a process and believing it will save them;
• Believing tools, not skills, makes anyone creative;
• Believing design thinking is the ONLY way to innovate.

This is a topic which resonates with design thinking practitioners like Sunil Malhotra. We’ve had back and forth conversations over Twitter and Facebook, and we felt the need to demystify design thinking for the benefit of businesses and the discipline itself.

#DesignThinking goes way beyond thinking and somewhat beyond design as well. It’s intuition with Data, it’s Visual Collaboration with Building and Testing ideas, its Iterating with Human Attention. And you think everybody can do it??

So what’s your order?

Watch the vidcast here …

I’ve been having a hard time finding people with the traits that are needed for Design Thinking. I’m wondering if there’s talent around and if so, where it is hiding.

Let’s talk.

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Over the week-long holiday, we had got used to the natural beauty of Sikkim, but it appeared that there was no way for us to document it through the windows of a moving vehicle. Try as we might, the rough terrain was impossible to capture without looking like a smudge of paint.

It was during one such trip, that one of our drivers, Mahesh, slowed down at a river crossing, and surprised us.

“You can take the picture now! See, I want you to take as many pictures as you can. I want, that when you go home and you see these pictures, you will remember me!”

Mahesh asked us to soak in the view and take our time — something, that we later realized, no one had said throughout any of our road trips.

Throughout our holiday, we traveled with many drivers, some for transfers, and some for sightseeing. As a driver, Mahesh was just like every one else. Every driver we traveled with, was equally skilled in navigating the rough terrain and guiding us to tourist spots. The difference was that while everyone took us from point A to point B, Mahesh cared about our experience while we were traveling. While some drivers kept calling us to hurry up so that we could complete the itinerary, Mahesh told us to soak in the atmosphere and take our time.

As Design Thinking is gaining popularity, companies are running every which way to train their employees in the methodology and its tools — and that’s a great thing. But at its core, Design Thinking starts with an emotional connect with the end customer. Without this mindset in all aspects of conducting a business, all the tools and methodologies are just jargon. What’s critical is that this emotional connect — call it human centricity or empathy — must permeate throughout the organisation’s culture to the very last mile — especially to the last mile.

Having previously worked within the travel industry, one thing that I observed was that it thrives on partnerships for pretty much everything — transportation, accommodation, sightseeing, recreational activities etc. Customers book their tours with one agency, and interact with other agencies who fulfil the itineraries.

Servicing the end customer may not be your job, but if your partner doesn’t, you lose the customer.

Collaborating with other stakeholders and sensitising them to the importance of ensuring that the customer has, at the very least, a neutral experience, if not a delightful one, is perhaps most crucial for the B2B travel ecosystem.

We loved Mahesh for his empathetic attitude; but even so, due to the overall handling of that tour, after that holiday, we vowed never to take tour packages. With travel advise from fellow travellers and bloggers online, our subsequent travels have been quite fulfilling, all without the involvement of travel agencies.

So how do you (and your partners) treat your customers? Are your employees like Mahesh, or is your entire ecosystem eroding to DIY travellers?

Read the unabridged post here.

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It’s a long journey and every health care leader’s mission is to improve patient experiences. With the onset of Design thinking in healthcare sector, decision makers will have to empathize with patients more, think creatively, prototype, and continually test alternate solutions to these problems, to bring about a revolution in this space. Let’s watch out for the next big breakout of Design Thinking practice in this sphere.

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