What’s the problem?

An essay on what you need to know to become a graphic designer with emphasis on the term Design Thinking.

By Philip Linnemann

What’s the problem?

An essay of what you need to know to become a graphic designer with emphasis on the term Design Thinking.

By Philip Linnemann

Graphic Design Communication, 2nd year essay.Chelsea College of Art and DesignJune 2011

What is my problem?

What is your problem?

What is Design Thinking?

Why design?

What is the solution?

What is the conclusion?

List of reference

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Contents

There has always been something rumbling inside me. Everywhere I go, at any time of the day, there is a mental and social process involving the generation of new ideas and associations in my mind - a process of either con-scious or unconscious ideation. With no specific explana-tion of the term, I believe it is what comes closest to my constantly developing creativity. I have always sought ways to stimulate it, but the more I feed it, the more it craves.

In my early years of age, passionate sketches and draw-ings of random things from my imagination often satisfied this urge. If not, I found it amusing trying to recreate my favourite cartoon characters on paper. As I got older I discovered more and more imaginative and artistic styles and expressions. Eager making my work as beautiful as possible, I often tried to copy the things I liked and give

it my own personal, though childish, style. The satisfaction of staring at it afterwards as well as the positive feedback from friends and family made me feel creative, but the thrill only increased when I started studying – a time where deeper thoughts

and creativity began to involve before and along the ex-pression and not just because of it.

In many instances, the project briefs at university of-fered a great potential of creativeness despite their given boundaries. I wasn’t used to play by any rules so in the beginning I naively applied my working process from my personal experience in an attempt of reaching an appeal-ing result – something friends and family would praise. But to my wonderment, there were other parameters

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than beauty when my once aesthetic expressions became holistic solutions. In my incessant search for a better understanding of the ultimate design approach I familiarized myself with terms such as concept, narrative and methodology evidently in-fluencing my work with structure and content. My experi-ence and curiosity have taught me to ask stu-pid questions and aspire sophisticated answers, yet I often find it a problem answering one of the supposedly most forthright questions of them all; For what purpose am I actually de-signing? This is not meant to be understood as a questioning of my doubt of choosing the right profession (in fact, the striving of reaching an honest answer is my ultimate motivation), but is referring to the problem of finding the fundamental reason behind each individual project and its attained problem.

As a designer I believe one is always on the lookout for methods and strategies in order to obtain the most creative and innovative solutions to questions we are fronted with. One of the most popular methods of this decade is called ‘design thinking’ and is, according to journalist Mark Dziersk from Fast Company, believed to be “a problem-solving protocol” that not only designers, but “any business or profession can employ to achieve extraordinary results.“

In this assignment I will be looking into what ‘design thinking’ is, how it works and what caused its evolving popularity and drastic downfall, which recently started a new debate within the design world – what now? Through

41 Mark Dziersk: Design Thinking... What is That?

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articles written by idealists of this term I will try to examine how ‘design thinking’ relates to design and how I can use it to reach clarity of what my future career is all about. I believe that by looking at your own as well as other peoples’ successes and most importantly failures enables you to somewhat develop an overview and under-standing of how you achieve your goals most efficiently. At the same time, however, I believe we need to address if creativity is formulaic in any possible way? And if not, how are we as designers then supposed to attain the cor-rect solutions based on any methodological frameworks?

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What is your problem?

I would like to start out by looking at my own on-going energetic attempt to become the great (graphic) designer with all of the answers to all of the unanswerable ques-tions. Through my journey I’ve made many abortive efforts in trying to achieve the desired skilful-ness I see people master on various popular online networks such as Behance and FFF-FOUND or in my everyday surroundings. This process of taste, style and expression is also one involving self-criticism and self-inspiration. In fact, if I go just one year back, I look at the majority of my projects with scepticism, but confidently as you try to be, I console myself by remind-ing myself that I don’t stand alone in what seems to be a never-ending mission and continuous effort. At Chelsea College of Art about 50 flaming graphic design souls are ignited each year and perhaps about a thousand annually in London alone. Further more, many other design-related students stand in the same self-dug grave of always hunting and constantly aspiring for the best. With no factsheets or game-defining rules, this is a competition of a personal design philosophy that works in ways not easy to describe. Obviously, this state of affairs results in a serious amount of failures and I am likely to suggest that design entrepreneurs starting their own businesses are challenged by more or less the same difficulties in their attempts of achieving their often utopian desires. The question remains, however, whether failing is an unavoid-able cost for doing business and especially designing? Frankly yes, but, as argued elsewhere, it is from our fail-ures we learn what we did wrong and only by recognizing and even embracing this we are able to do, not good, but better. 2

2 Interview with Milton Glazer on fear

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One of the things I have learnt, yet is still trying to really understand, is to not focus on making solely stylish projects, but to go beneath that superficial aesthetical level and find a double bottom line. So instead of asking: What do I want to make? I first of all try to question: What does this project really require? And how can I best provide that?

If you were dealing with a project aimed to increase consumer experience, for example, whether it’s by making a better information system, changing the packaging of a product or even redesigning its form, the first occurring idea could simply be to ask the people what they need. But already here I meet the first problem. I’ve done a little experiment to put this into perspective. Through social networks and first-hand research in London on a rainy day I’ve asked 107 people two very simple questions about a well-known product. Here are the results:

HAVE YOU EVER USEDAN UMBRELLA?

HOW CAN YOU IMPROVE ITS FUNCTIONAL VALUE?

BY...NO

YOU CAN’TYES

DON’T KNOW

HOW CAN YOU IMPROVE ITS FUNCTIONAL VALUE?

BY...

YOU CAN’T

DON’T KNOW

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As the results show most people don’t know how to answer this question at all, even while they are using the product. Now people may prefer different sizes and colours or fixed or adjustable shanks, but how are they able to picture a product that will fulfil all these needs – something that hasn’t been invented? According to the director of the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, Patrick Whitney, this is where innovation comes in. “If you can uncover and then satisfy unarticulated needs, the resulting products and services will tend to be innovative, distinctive, and coveted. And if you can do all of this somewhat consistently, you begin to close the innovation gap, bringing the company’s capabilities and efforts more in line with what’s needed in people’s lives,” he states and adds: “Design thinking […] is the key to closing the innovation gap.” 3

Eager to find a way of making my life easier as a designer, to solve my own problem, it seemed crucial to me to look into what this methodology was. This is what I found out.

3 Warren Berger: Glimmer, p. 106.

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Design thinking is a term used today as a way of defining a process that focuses on solving problems by creating transformative innovation. While the identification and de-termination as a concept stems from this decade, the way of thinking can be found in examples that existed long be-fore. As an example, Thomas Edison among many others, who helped reinvent an entire industry with a combination of bootstrapping ingenuity, technical know-how, cultural insight, a flair for the visual, brilliant storytelling and busi-ness acumen can be seen as a design thinker.4

In the lecture “Innovation through design thinking”5, CEO of design firm IDEO, Tim Brown, puts up this following model as an illustration for how to understand the term.

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5 Tim Brown: Design Thinking. Harvard Business Review.Tim Brown: Innovation Through Design Thinking. MIT Sloan

EMOTIONAL INNOVATION

GRAPHIC DESINGADVERTISING

FUNCTIONAL INNOVATION

INDUSTRAIL DESIGN

EXPERIENCE INNOVATION

PROCESS INNOVATIONDESIGNDESIREBILITY

DESIGNTHINKING

TECHNOLOGYFEASIBILITY

BUSINESSVIABILITY

EXPERIENCE INNOVATION

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This model suggests that different formations of innova-tion are spaced from three main directions. Here, busi-nessmen look at what is viable in the marketplace, inven-tors invent new technology and then go to look for needs to satisfy and business to build from that and designers then approach innovation through the lenses of people. This makes design thinking a human centred process where peoples’ needs and desires are in primary focus. In other words, you have to understand culture and context before you even start searching for ideas.

According to Brown, design thinking also helps positioning the origins of design professions into the innovation equa-tion, respectively creating emotional, functional and pro-cess innovation in the collisions between the three main categories. At last, one parameter assembles all aspect into an ultimate sweet-spot called experience innovation. Furthermore Brown describes the way designers think more thoroughly with another triplet of steps.

1. INSPIRATIONInsights are the fuel of innovation, since it facili-tates defining the right problem to solve. To achieve this, one has to be extremely critical and always question the brief and revise every opportunity be-fore embarking on its creation and execution. With empathy as the core, getting out of the cube and involving oneself in the process, product and user experience is fundamental. The goal of the inspira-tion stage is to target the right problem to solve, and then to frame the problem in a way that invites creative solutions.

03 What is Design Thinking?

11 6 Tim Brown: Innovation Through Design Thinking.

2. IDEATIONThis step embraces the idea of learning and think-ing by doing. By visualizing your ideas on an early stage through sketches and creating prototypes you are able to get rapid evaluations. This allows you to build a picture and come to a sense of what you have learnt, and as a result this sparks new ideas.

3.IMPLEMENTATIONThe last step builds upon the conviction that the better you communicate, the more likely ideas will survive. Using storytelling to develop and express ideas can help provide the framework for creating ideas since telling the story of a customer journey often helps enlighten and framing the problem.

Despite these many steps, design thinking is not just about methodology, Brown adds. It is just as much about culture and being inspired and inspiring by what’s going on in the world outside of your window. It’s about finding new roles to play and seeking new collaborations.6

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Why design?

Design thinking as a term has existed for about a decade now and has recently come in for a lot of scorn. One of the term’s biggest advocates, Professor of Innovation and Design at Parsons The New School of Design, Bruce Nussbaum, argues in his recent article on Fast Company’s blog that design thinking is a failed experiment. Nuss-baum has learnt from the past and is now moving on to another conceptual framework, hoping this will be able to define what we strive for and what we need as designers.7

However, does Nussbaum’s idea really mark the ending of so-called design thinking? Is it fair to suggest that the term that, accord-ing to the same man, “broke design out of its specialized, narrow, and limited base andconnected it to more important issues and a wider uni-verse of profit and non-profit organizations”8 is an out-dated framework that needs replacement of something that will probably be hailed as doing just the exact same as design thinking? According to Nussbaum’s new frame-work, Creative Intelligence, we can now finally deliver the answers of all the complex challenges we face today. But what can this new concept offer that design thinking cannot? Initially design thinking, as the name refers to, was a concept based on the way designers think. Does that mean that I, as a designer, am now thinking wrong? If this is the truth, has Creative Intelligence got the answers I am seeking? Was creativity and intelligence never combined before?

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Bruce Nussbaum: Design Thinking Is A Failed Experiment. So What’s Next?Bruce Nussbaum: Design Thinking Is A Failed Experiment. So What’s Next? Column 11.

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Warren Berger: Glimmer, p. 173Warren Berger: Glimmer, p. 186.Bruce Nussbaum: Design Thinking Is A Failed Experiment. So What’s Next?

First of all I believe it is critical to look at for what reason the term was initiated in the first place. When Brown presented his model at MIT Sloan it was for the purpose of sharing a conclusion on his and his colleagues’ experi-ences on working with design for many years. It is based on the observation that designers’ ability to focus on user needs differentiates their way of solving problems from everyone, essentially being an aptitude often missing in businesses and technology trying to achieve true innova-tion and communication. Initially, the model was formed by the company, for the company. It was a tool to shape a clear, yet unique working structure for their associates, at its best, delivering innovation.9

By thinking “out of the box” and thereby creating innovative solutions, IDEO became a great example of the fact that design-ers possessed something very valuable that other businesses didn’t, something that the corpo-rate world would not like to miss out on.10 Therefore, well-known

designers were called upon to give business people an insight in their exceptional viewpoint on innovation, and as the great designers they are, they presented it very well. They understood the brief, packaged creativity into a pro-cess format and made companies confident and welcom-ing to this new method granting incremental change.11 In other words, they found the holy grail of design and its innate potential, yet the question now remains: Did Brown

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and affiliates find the answers to the right kind of prob-lem? Did they remember to utilize their own technique and “question the brief” or have they simply just created another problem? They may have or may not, or maybe predicting the future 10 years ahead is a mouthful even too big for one of the most innovative companies in the world12, but at a time shortly before people were actually voting for change, IDEO prepared them for it.

However, looking back at the larger con-text, Bruce Nussbaum can now see the problem with design thinking: “From the beginning, the process of Design Thinking was a scaffold-ing for the real deliverable: creativity. But in order to ap-peal to the business culture of process, it was denuded of the mess, the conflict, failure, emotions, and looping cir-cularity that is part and parcel of the creative process.”13

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13 Wikipedia: Accorting to BusinessWeek.Bruce Nussbaum: Design Thinking Is A Failed Experiment. So What’s Next?, column 6.

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Bruce Nussbaum: Design Thinking Is A Failed Experiment. So What’s Next? Column 13. Bruce Nussbaum: Design Thinking Is A Failed Experiment. So What’s Next? Column 6.

So according to Nussbaum, creativity is the answer and this is what his new concept can deliver. Overexcited of being on the edge to discover the solution of my ultimate design brief I feverishly read further to find his defini-tion: “I am defining Creative Intelligence as the ability to frame problems in new ways and to make original solutions. It is a sociological approach in which creativity emerges from group activity, not a psychological ap-proach of development stages and individual genius.”14

Sadly, I must realize that this definition doesn’t sound to me like anything different than what I described in the inspiration stage of the design thinking process and what Brown said about finding new roles to play. Could it be,

that what professor Nussbaum has created is yet another blind for what he in the first place accused design thinking for not delivering; creative mess? Nussbaum approach the problem by asking “what’s next?” Well, this might be the right question, but personally I believe that he

fails when it comes to his resolution. I think the problem already occurs, not in the packaging process of creativity itself, but in the conviction that a term can deliver such a powerful impact as innovation on its own. To an extent I agree with Nussbaum that such a term will, to repeat his statement, be “denuded of the mess, the conflict, failure, emotions, and looping circularity that is part and parcel of the creative process”15, but I do not think that neither

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offering a new way to start an innovation dialogue nor to re-brand the approach with another label is the right solution, simply because the truth is that you will still be covering the same issues and be faced with the same challenges that exist with the current inability of large organizations to deliver real innovation. No matter what crea-tive buzzword you use.

Does this make design thinking a failed experiment? I believe not, but the idea that anyone uncritically and unknowledgeable of what they are doing can use design thinking as a way to make a company successful is wishful thinking. Today IDEO employs over 550 people with professions ranging from healthcare to electrical engineering to branding strategists working alongside each other.16 As such, living in an environment of multi-disciplinary creative minded people, design think-ing has fed a healthy diet of professional cultural insight and thus delivering effective results, but the term en-capsulates another problem that is missing in this dialog about the use of design thinking, and that is the name.

When Tim Brown first defines his ideal of design thinking at MIT Sloan he argues; “Designers have a unique way of solving problems.”17 To him, and his interpretation of design thinking, it’s implicit that every designer is think-ing this way. To me this is hardly the truth. First of all, I do not see all designers aspiring the same as Tim Brown. In fact, to a former colleague of Bruce Nussbaum, Helen Walters, the situation remains quite the opposite.

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17 IDEO homepage: http://www.ideo.com/contact/Tim Brown: Innovation through design thinking.

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Helen Walters: “Design Thinking” Isn’t a Miracle Cure, but Here’s How It Helps. Column. 9Helen Walters: “Design Thinking” Isn’t a Miracle Cure, but Here’s How It Helps. Column. 9Bruce Nussbaum: Design Thinking Is A Failed Experiment. So What’s Next?, title

“Designers often bristle when the term design thinking comes up in conversation. It’s kind of counterintuitive, right? But here’s why: Having been initially overjoyed that the C-suite was finally paying attention to design, design-ers suddenly became terrified that they were actually being beaten to the punch by business wolves in designer clothing.”18

She argues further that people relying blindfolded on design thinking are not only being injudiciously guided, but are likely to impose dramatic harm on the company they are operating with or within. They end “screwing up the delicate business of design itself,”19

which ironically Walters exemplifies as thoughtfully cre-ated packaging and artfully designed products. Too many incompetent designers with undeserved hero titles and naively thinking businessmen have practiced design think-ing resulting in the conclusion that the term is “a failed experiment.”20 So, the lesson to obtain with Walters state-ment, is to know what you are doing and not doing when using design thinking and not to not use it. I agree with her that there exists a divergence between idea process-ing and design visualization, but they are not and should not be isolated fields, since their true power only subsist in coherence.

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What is the conclusion?

To summarize, design thinking was firstly extolled under the influence of design leading people and later detested when it came in the hands of the mob. I see design think-ing as an extremely helpful tool to structuring ideas and methods. It provides a starting and an ending point, which can be immense as long as you keep in mind, that the short-est and easiest way is not necessarily the most adequate. The process requires enormous amounts of insight, not only in human behaviour and cultural understanding, but just as much in technological know-how and business acumen, which evidently places great demands to the designer. Moreover come the technical skills of visualizing an obtained terminology designers are ultimately supposed to master. My investigation has taught me that you can-not know too little, which simultaneously highlights the importance of being able to collaborate.

“So what’s next?” Hopefully people stop talking about se-mantic discourses and start to realize the reason for their misguidance in the first place. One strategy could be to initiate more group work and embrace multi-disciplinary thinking and then do something instead of talking about it. In other words, a mixture of design thinking and design doing. This would solve problems in the process I believe and hopefully also prepare a notion that at the end of the day, it is the end result that really matters.

List of reference

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Nussbaum, B., 2011. Design Thinking Is A Failed Experiment. So What’s Next?Fast Company Design

Available through: www.fastcodesign.com/1663558/beyond-design-thinking

Walters, H., 2011.“Design Thinking” Isn’t a Miracle Cure,but Here’s How It Helps.Fast Company Design

Available through:http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663480/helen-walters-design-thinking-buzzwords

Brown, T., 2008Design Thinking.Harward Business Review

Available through:http://www.unusualleading.com/wp-content/up-loads/2009/12/HBR-on-Design-Thinking.pdf

Brown, T., 2006Innovation Through Design ThinkingMIT Sloan.Running time: 57:17

Available through:http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/357/

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Berger, W., 2009Glimmer. How design can transform your business and maybe even the world.

Place of publication: Great Britain, London

Publisher:Random House Business Books

Wikipedia, 2011.IDEO.Business Week.

Available through:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEO

Glaser, M., 2011On the fear of failure.Running time: 07:26

Available through:http://vimeo.com/23285699

IDEO, 2011.On website under contact.

Abailable through:http://www.ideo.com/contact/

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Contextual Studies, Graphic Design CommunicationChelsea College of Art and Design, June 2011.