Michael Roller

NY Times on design thinking

The New York Times wrote a nice piece describing design thinking and how it helps solve business problems. For me, design thinking is still very challenging to define, but this article and Tim Brown’s blog have done a great job.

‘It’s the designers’ version of the scientific method,’ explains Greg Galle, co-founder and managing partner of the C2 Group, a consulting firm based in Half Moon Bay, Calif. ‘It’s sloppy and messy and not nearly as disciplined as the scientist, but we do trial and error and we hypothesize and test and we see what we learn and then we go back and try again.

Tim Brown points out that design thinking can easily be confused with good design or business practices:

I find it very easy to slip toward describing what is simply good design (based on a relatively conventional brief) or what is good business using normal convergent processes. A test is perhaps whether the business (or organizational, or societal) outcome is significantly different than would have been the case if design thinking had not taken place.

While I wait for a universal definition of design thinking, I tell people that design thinkers have the unusual ability to develop solutions despite a clear definition of where they should start. It’s this ability to arbitrarily dive in and then use trial and error that positions design thinkers to solve problems with complicated backgrounds or incomplete information.

Tags: design thinking

No comments yet.

Leave a comment