What Design Thinking Could Be
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Enthusiastic about the diversity of recent design thinking approaches, but frustrated that an opportunity to truly establish design thinking as a discipline might be missed, the What Could Be team developed the Design Thinking Canvas as a common first step in planning your design and innovation projects. In this webinar, David Townson introduces the logic behind the Canvas, acknowledges key influences, explains its structure and gives a quick-start guide on a number of ways to use it.
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What Design Thinking Could Be
- 4. Who are
- 12. Design Process
- 29. Don’t know how Know how Know what Don’t know what
- 30. Don’t know how Know how Know what Don’t know what
- 31. Design Strategy
- 34. What will our future look like?
- 36. What will we need to address?
- 37. Who will we need to involve?
- 40. A Design Thinking Canvas
- 47. How will we communicate over the course of the project?
- 48. How will we deliver the project and
- 50. Using the Canvas
- 51. 1. Don’t treat the canvas like a form (treat it like a canvas)
- 52. 2. Do a ‘Purpose Primer’
- 53. 3. Do a SWOT on your project readiness
- 54. 4. Work out the type of project, and therefore process, you will undertake…
- 55. 4. Work out the type of project, and therefore process, you will undertake.
- 56. LUMA Workplace has 29 recipes (method sets) for the Double Diamond. MURAL has over 55 templates for managing remote work. You have favorite methods in your own tool box. 5. Select the appropriate methods to support your work.
- 57. @What_Could_Be
- 59. Your questions
Hinweis der Redaktion
- Thanks Mark and hello everyone. It’s a pleasure to be with you all today and introduce What Could Be [CLICK]
- We’re going to share our particular viewpoint on design thinking. We believe there are some critical elements of it which are misunderstood. This means it isn’t communicated as well as it might be, which limits its potential as the impactful discipline we know it to be. We’d like to put that right. We’ll show you an approach we hope you find useful and that will allow you to get even more out of design thinking and even more out of Mural. First, some context….the WHY before the What and the How
- We’re five people you’ve probably never heard of. That’s because we’ve had our heads down for the last thirty plus years inside various organisations enabling others to learn about and benefit from design. As we’ve done so, we’ve watched the rise of design thinking with interest (from before it even had that name).
- With roots in the 1960s as a feature of product and industrial design practice…
- through IDEO and the Design Council in the late nineties
- the creation of the d.School at Stanford
- and the establishment of the field of service design in the early two thousands, there’s been real growth and adoption of design thinking, particularly in the last ten years. A project at Pittsburgh design agency Maya…
- …led to the creation of LUMA in 2010, who reviewed over a thousand design methods at play across many areas of design as they produced their fabulous methods-based system of innovation. By this point User Experience was more prominent in many organisations and some were selling design thinking training.
- In the last decade large corporates such as IBM invested in design thinking, and the big management consultancies began buying design agencies. Alongside this, governments were increasingly making making use of design to tackle difficult social challenges and improve citizens experiences of public services. And watching all this happening, and having been involved directly in some of it, myself Darren, Lesley, Jonathan and Justin found ourselves sharing our thoughts and realising we were all on the same page: we were talking about how design thinking was communicated and noticing we felt key aspects were being misrepresented or missed out.
- It seemed like we had something to say. So we formed a group – What Could Be - and like all good groups with something to say, decided to get out on the road, so to speak, and say it. And the first thing we wanted to say is that at the heart of design thinking is the design process itself.
- One particular model of the design process that you may have heard of, and is very dear to our hearts, is the Design Council double diamond. “How do we describe design process?” Our colleague Jonathan was a part of a small team at the Design Council in 2003 that were asked this question by then Director of Design and Innovation, Richard Eisermann. Richard knew of models of the process in the States that conveyed its divergent and convergent qualities but they were not well known. He wanted the Design Council to make these more popular and accessible. The team deconstructed the processes for the many methods used across a variety of design-led projects. Through review they saw similarities, patterns and repeatable characteristics emerging. And their findings, enabled them to distil and combine the simple elements involved in design process, irrespective of the methods or tools used. It’s widely used and referenced but we think occasionally misunderstood and misapplied. Many of you know what it is, but may be less clear on why it is. Which can really help when making use of it. So we’ll take five minutes to explain.
- At the start of any design project, someone is asked, or decides, to do something for the good of the organisation. Ideally, they’ll have captured the intent of the work - what they hope to achieve - in some sort of briefing document. From there on, they have a few options available to them. They may believe they know what the problem to solve is, and how to solve it. Here is the directive. Go execute.
- This is typical behavior in many organizations and creates projects which are what you might call a straight line piece of design. Projects in this category are simple tasks, low-hanging fruit, quick fixes … perhaps projects with tight requirements – maybe fitting in with an established standard of some kind. And by using the principles of stage gating – review criteria at regular stages along the way - this approach can ensure good outcomes. But the potential for innovation is limited. At best it will be incremental.
- On a project Justin worked on in Ireland with a crane manufacturer, they discovered tea breaks on the building site didn’t match the time when people were calling in for support. This was a simple fix – change or stagger tea breaks - but the perceived quality of service and support increased dramatically, and complaints about responsiveness decreased. I once designed a new litter bin (trash can) that had to fit within an existing product range, use existing components and existing manufacturing processes. The scope for innovation was limited to minor tweaks in aesthetics so it became easier and more efficient to make and assemble.
- If we know what the problem is but we’re not sure how to solve it, then we’ll benefit from being deliberately more divergent in our approach. Looking more widely at the ways in which we might solve the problem – using methods to generate lots of ideas, doing experiments. [CLICK] and iterative loops of make, test, learn through rough and ready prototyping – we learn what’s working and we also have more ideas. We’ll significantly increase our chances creating something innovative as as result. With many options for tackling the problem, we need to make some decisions and converge on the solution to deliver.
- We must be sure we’ve sufficiently tested our solution. Prototyping will become more sophisticated and we’ll move from testing into implementation and release. This is about getting the idea to market, whatever that means for the particular context: distribution and sale of physical goods, release and shipping of software, provision of service and so on. The Design Council team repeatedly found a divergent and convergent approach for developing and delivering solutions results in better, more innovative outcomes. Jonathan and I are both product designers. Whether developing bathroom fittings, toys or street furniture, we've many examples of successful projects when where a wider exploration of the solution space resulted in better outcomes. But we always asked 'why?' first. What if we’re not sure the problem as stated is the right one? We might not have a problem we’ve verified as being worth solving.
- In this instance, before we tackle the ‘how’ in the solution, we need to better understand the ‘what’ of the problem.
- The Design Council team found the same divergent characteristics applied to exploring the problem as much as they did for the solution, but with an emphasis on research. Here we want to make sure we’ve researched the problem sufficiently with the key people who will be affected by, or have an influence on, our project. We need to articulate our research objectives, the key question we will ask, who will participate and what methods we’ll use. We’ll broaden our understanding of the problem domain through various activities to help us observe people’s experiences.
- With increased understanding of the scope of the problem, and fresh data gathered from the field, we can analyze and share what we’ve found with colleagues. In doing so we’ll generate new insights and, as we converge, we’ll define what the problem, and our design intent, is. The Design Council found those organisations who spend time exploring the problem - time in the first diamond - before developing solutions in the second, produced the best outcomes. They were able to consistently innovate and outperform their competition as a result.
- The team named the four distinct phases of the design process discover, define, develop and deliver. The diamond shapes represent the divergent and convergent thinking happening at different stages throughout. Within the diamonds, there are also points of iteration for research, learning, prototyping and testing.
- The model became known as the Double Diamond, where the first diamond essentially asks “What problems will we solve?” and the second, “What solutions will we develop?” It became a corner stone of the Design Council programme that helped thousands of UK small and medium sized enterprises benefit: seeing turnover, profits and exports grow, by as much as £20 for every £1 invested in design.
- The Double Diamond is a great thing. It’s very neat. And symmetrical. It’s easy to draw. But we need to remember that it’s a model to help us communicate, understand and navigate, it shouldn’t be interpreted literally. We all know projects don’t fit a single, simple description or shape. If only it were that easy… The actual shape of your double diamond will vary.
- It might not exist Your project may be a straight line project and for good reason. In which case, you probably don’t need to consider either diamond too much (if you’re sure you know what the problem is and how to solve it) Use good design practice to help execute. In our experience however, using the model as a way to discuss within teams at the start of any project, before work begins, is a good way to go.
- If you do have a project that is mainly second diamond, and you’re fairly sure you know what the problem is, there may still be value in taking a step back before development work begins. Here we see a project team quickly reframe the challenge and gain alignment with colleagues in a short conversation before developing solutions and prototyping them. When LUMA was first looking to train new instructors, the initial directive was to “Build a LUMA Academy.” The leadership team took a step back and used a method called Abstraction Laddering to consider different approaches to the challenge. After landing on an easier approach to recruiting instructors by sponsoring someone they knew personally, they focused on building a pilot experience for on-boarding new instructors. The network of instructors flourished as a result.
- Your project might be mainly first diamond. Here a team have been tasked to perform research and then create a report or presentation of the findings. There might be a few suggestions of potential application, but the majority of the time on this project was extensive field research and synthesis. A centre for contemporary art in the UK wanted to improve customer experience and involve their staff in the process – co-design some call it. We undertook a series of walk-a-mile immersions with the staff in places that were Alternative Worlds compared to their day-to-day: teams visited a luxury spa, a sea life centre and a well known sandwich bar. The customer experience insights gleaned by staff then drove a round of early idea generation, where they came up with over 150 proposals for improvement, many of which were simple enough to be implemented straight away. So of course projects using the double diamond are not all the same. However, we’ve noticed some recent blog posts painting the Double Diamond in a negative light: one was even called ‘Death by Double Diamond. Such articles perceive it as prescriptive, even waterfall like’. This is not the case and was never the intent – it’s unfortunate that communications have perhaps not made that clear until now.
- Most project include activity in both diamonds to some degree, but if you tried to model it in a way that was proportionally correct, draw it accurately, whatever that means, it might look more like this perhaps. Though there would also be feedback loops and links between areas and perhaps gaps in time between parts of the model, depending on the exact nature and scale of the work. There might be multiple diamonds. The key thing to remember is not to view the Double Diamond as anything more complicated than a visual representation of the design and innovation process. It’s a graphic convenience. It’s simplicity is powerful however and can support some terrific conversations with colleagues before, during and after projects – particularly those skeptical about the value of design - but trying to interpret it too literally can lead to problems.
- One of the best conversations to have is to explore what type of project we’re about to do. Based on how certain we are, we can choose between straight line, second diamond, first diamond (or indeed both). Any project is likely to get off to a better start if we at least reflect on need for work in the first diamond.
- You can use this 2 x 2 to help focus minds. If you’re sure you know what and you know how, then it’s likely to be a straight line project. If you know what but you don’t know how, then perhaps it’s a second diamond project. You may be a company who knows its customers really well and are not locked in to one way of doing things. You could explore multiple ways to solve a problem and outsource production of your new products and services to relevant partners and sub-contractors.
- If you know how but don’t know what, then you need to spend time in the first diamond. Say you’ve got capability in the factory to produce certain types of product and want to add to your portfolio – you’ll need to spend time getting to understand your customers and what matters to them. If you don’t know how or what – but have ambition - then you’re truly looking to the future and want to innovate. You are open to exploring the problem domain to find fresh areas of opportunity, that others aren’t taking the time to find, and you’re not locked in to one way of developing your solutions in response. How might we choose the right process? We need to think about the strategic context in which it will sit.
- A shared understanding of the design process is great but without strategic context, its usefulness is limited. Before doing anything, we ask anyone we’re working with, “What’s the opportunity? What’s your ambition? What are you trying to achieve?” From that starting point we’ll explore the vision they have, the impact they want to make, what challenges must be tackled and who must be involved.
- We’ll use design methods to explore all four areas to give us a good grounding for the design process that then follows. We work through each using an approach we call the Purpose Primer.
- To start the purpose primer we ask people to think about the opportunity they wish to explore. We ask people to think about this before coming to one of our sessions and bring it along along with them on the day. You might say ambition, key challenge or goal but we like opportunity A company we’re going to talk about shortly, who make range cookers, believed there was an opportunity to double their turnover in the following 3 – 5 years. We unpack such statements in a structured way – using the Purpose Primer – as an initial warm up. And we start with vision.
- We’ll ask what will our future look like. Have we got a compelling vision of the future that everyone believes in and is inspired by? Let’s convey what we’re trying to create and why it matters. We capture thoughts on post its from colleagues…remember, this is the initial conversation – we’ll develop it further later. We then think about Impact.
- What dent do you want to make in the Universe as Steve Jobs said? A vision without Impact is not worth pursuing. So, What Difference will we make. Have we agreed upon measures of success? We should specify how we will measure and report upon impact. Again, we initial capture thoughts on post its from colleagues… Having thought about the future state, we then think about the challenges being faced today.
- What will we need to address? Have we identified what might prevent us from achieving our vision? On post its we list key enablers, obstacles, and areas of opportunity. Of course one thing missing from this people – we need to think about who we need to involve.
- Have we identified all the individuals who may influence the creation, delivery, and use of the solution we develop? We ask people to highlight who they see as the most important stakeholders – those that will be affected by, or have an influence upon, the work we do - and articulate their needs, goals or motivations where they can.
- The initial brainstorm captures top of mind thoughts, as individuals and as a team, about the vision, impact, key challenges and the people we wish to involve. This is a good time to pause and reflect and consider how might we dig a little deeper into each area. To do so we use various design methods in each area, for example: A cover story mock up helps convey a picture of the future – here a team from a City Council are sharing the vision for, and impact of, a potential anti-poverty programme. A national foundation explored the challenge of 'gaining alignment between regional chapters’. A method called abstraction ladder quickly expanded the conversation into analysing the benefits of the challenge which would help market the need for the effort to other chapters. It also highlighted provocative tactics around how they might achieve alignment. A well established family business used stakeholder mapping to explore people in the business, and their mindsets in relation to the challenge of cultural change. There are many methods that you can use to dig in to each area depending on the context. These are a handful from the LUMA system of innovation that we are familiar with and know to work well in multiple domains. We’ll come back to methods shortly. Spending time on a Purpose Primer really helps teams work out where they ought to focus effort to best effect and the type of design projects to be done. For example, following a stakeholder mapping exercise in response to a given challenge, you would be well placed to plan and do some deeper research with some of those people, perhaps some interviews in context, some journaling or experience mapping for example. Such activities will provide insights that could prove invaluable in progressing towards your vision and having the impact you desire. As you start to think about such activities you are beginning to plan design projects to help you navigate from the existing situation to the preferred future situation.
- I said at the start that we see design process as being at the heart of design thinking. If the process is at the heart, then the strategic context is what surrounds it. In reflecting on how we’ve been working we saw an opportunity to create a new artifact that could help ensure design process always has a strategic context.
- We’ve called it the Design Thinking Canvas – and while canvas is without doubt an overused term, we do think the word ‘canvas’ fits in terms of why our artefact exists and how it’s used.
- The four corners of our purpose primer, are the bookends to the design process. Thinking about navigating from the existing to the preferred situation led us to wonder how we might integrate both purpose and process.
- If you open up the purpose primer to get clear space between the existing situation and the preferred one, you can start to think about how you’ll get there. Getting there may be really straight forward, you know what and you know how – it’s a straight line project.
- Or perhaps it’s a second diamond project – you know what the problem is but not how to solve it….
- Or maybe you don’t really know what or how and need to open up a little further and give yourself space to explore the problem. As you can see, the design process is what bridges us from our existing situations to our preferred ones. We call it a canvas but it’s perhaps also useful to think of it as a map. And there’s a couple more bits to help us navigate our way across…
- We need to think carefully about the stories we tell and how we communicate over the course of the project. Have we determined what we need to communicate, when, and to whom in order to maintain momentum and support? We need to identify influential audiences and channels throughout the project and use appropriate methods of communication with each. There are a wealth of methods you might use as the project progresses. These will differ from when it’s a handful of internal people know and tell the story in the early stages, through to planning, communicating and implementing your marketing and brand strategies for a wider external audience. Design methods may help you tell the story but you’ll have other techniques that you already use and should therefore interface with this part of the canvas. Of course, methods are not only applicable to storytelling, we use them to help us manage a project too.
- And management is the last part of the canvas. How will we deliver the project and monitor progress? Have we got an overall project plan in place and the necessary resources? We need to identify key milestones, measures, and the people responsible for each. Again, like storytelling, there will be many methods in addition to those from design we can use (Mural has lots in its template archive and you’ll have your own favorites too). Linking them with this part of the canvas will ensure you have a complete picture. So here we give you the Design Thinking Canvas from What Could Be. How we’ve drawn it here today is how we’ve been drawing it for those we work with for some time, but we decided to make it a bit handier for us to use… We’ve tidied it up and made it print friendly…
- By turning into this template You can obtain this now from designthinkingcanvas.co.uk It’s not a new tool, we’ve been using it for some time, but it is newly published. We’ll be intrigued to see how you use it too.
- Talking of using the canvas… …while we can’t give you a complete case story today, from what we’ve done so far, we’d like to share five top tips.
- Our first tip is to not treat the canvas like a form. Don’t rush to complete all your answers and think you’re done. It’s a canvas – which like any creative process that uses a canvas – is going to build up over time. That might be days, weeks, even months. The bookends may stay relatively static while the detail of the project in the middle is added to and updated over time. It should be a living document. It’s not like a form that you complete and submit. You may have more than one project associated with the same strategic context, so you might have a few canvases with different centres sections but the outsides are the same. It’s a canvas, so hang it somewhere. And make it accessible. Share it, make it visible, walk people through it. Take it with you…
- Tip 2: Do a Purpose Primer. This is useful at the start of a project or programme of work when thinking about the future of the organisation and the types of change needed. It really helps make sure everyone is aligned or highlights key differences early on before you’ve burned too much time and effort. It can be a quick initial exercise that leads to further activity, such as at the start of workshops as a warm up activity as mentioned earlier. This is best for anyone in the business tasked with change projects (which design projects are of course). It could work at a relatively small scale level for a design team to better understand the context of their work. It could work equally well with senior executives charged with strategic direction. Jonathan used this approach with the management team at Esse, the manufacturer of range cookers, to help them work out a new product development programme, that also helped shift the mindset and culture at the organisation in terms of what design could do – they created the role of design manager as a result for example I used this with a top team at an international bank who were wanted to develop a new offer. It highlighted key areas of alignment but also some key differences that needed to be resolved before kick-starting any design activity. The work progressed more smoothly as a result and a prototype service was designed and built. It is now in the pipeline to go to market.
- Our third tip is to Do a SWOT Analysis on your project readiness. Before digging into each area of the canvas, or sometimes as an alternative to a facilitated Purpose Primer, it can be helpful to reflect on how ready you, your team and your organisation are for using design thinking. You need capability across each part of the canvas, so taking time to assess it can be helpful. Again, anyone in the business tasked with change projects or involved with influencing strategic direction would benefit from doing such an exercise. This example is a redacted version of a Canvas SWOT. Drafted by a participant tackling a sensitive management project during a What Could Be Masterclass. They have used a LUMA method called Rose Thorn Bud that colour codes information as strengths, weaknesses and areas of opportunity.
- The penultimate tip is to take the time to work out the type of project, and therefore process you’ll use… Discuss, argue even, with colleagues about the types of project you need to achieve your vision and address your challenges... Ask Are we confident enough in our understanding of the problem why it matters and how to solve it to go for a straight line? Have we got to explore how we develop and deliver more in second diamond? Do we need to work in first diamond? Any project is likely to get off to a better start if we at least reflect on need for work in the first diamond.
- Use our two by two grid to work out where your project might sit. You might also use it to keep track on your project portfolio – how many of each type have you got going on?
- Our final tip is to carefully consider the methods you use. Your choice and source of methods may vary. There’ll be many you’ll already be familiar with. IDEO, Design Council and others all have well developed and widely method sets. And many, like the BBC, have great systems that are equally good but are not in the public domain. You’ll perhaps have your own. Use what works for you. We are particularly familiar with the LUMA system as we’ve mentioned, which already has method based plans that relate to the double diamond. And of course Mural have many templates to help you plan, facilitate and undertake work. Including one new one which I’ll let Mark tell you about in a second. Our plea here is that you can’t do design and innovation by methods alone. Methods can only be successfully deployed if they're chosen and used within the wider context demanded by the challenge or opportunity. You need a to structure your approach to planning design-led strategy and innovation. And we think our canvas does that. We’ve got our favourite methods but the canvas is method agnostic. Think of it as an interface between methods, process and purpose.
- We’d love to know how you might make use of the canvas and which methods you use. Get in touch via twitter
- Or send us an email
- We believe using the canvas will also mean you’re well placed for thinking about the participants to accompany you on the journey and the places where it happens. More on that another time. For now, I’d like to thank you all for your time and hand back to Mark to take us into the Q & A.