'Change By Design' - Tim Brown

I would never have thought to read a book like this myself but attending Mike Press’ lectures where he mentioned his work for the NHS and MI5 got me intrigued about what design thinking might be.

At first I found the book quite confusing to read, trying my best to keep up with the constant stream of examples and comparisons but I soon managed to grasp the concept of what ‘Design Thinking’ is (at least I hope so). From what I understand It is a modern way of thinking in which a collection of individuals from interdisciplinary backgrounds come together in order to solve complex problems in new, innovative ways. The book discusses how the ideal candidate for such a team would adhere to the ‘T-shaped’ individual so sought-after in today’s workplace, where they posses a large breadth of knowledge over a variety of fields focusing with a depth of expertise in one subject area. In page 26 of the book Brown quotes “All of us are smarter than any of us” which really backs up this idea of working with others who have different skills while still having the basic knowledge to understand where they are coming from, to form a sort of ‘super-team’.

A section of the book which I found particularly interesting however was the chapter on ‘Converting Need into Demand’. Here, Brown discusses “The mission of design thinking is to translate observations into insights and insights into products and services which will improve lives”. He goes on to speak about how design thinkers actually acquire their data on what consumers need by not only listening to what they have to say (as this could be a small portion of the actual market) but by actually going out there and seeing the world from the consumers point of view in order to identify problems and solve them! An example of this being when re-designing kitchen utensils the researchers not only watched how adults used existing products but how children openly struggled with using such devices, highlighting the difficulties people may face when using such things as a tin opener. As a result the company were able to use these findings to create a new range of products which quickly became top selling products. I found this interesting as it was only the other day I was having a discussion with my flatmates about tin-openers as one of them had absolutely no idea how to use one, admitting that for years she had actually avoided buying tins without a ring pull so as to not need to use one!

Overall ,the theory behind the idea of ‘design thinking’ is to employ people from a variety of backgrounds to help solve a problem or issue instead of leaving it solely to the design or marketing team within a business. Incredible business people and designers including Steve Jobs have used this technique to ensure that all points of view are considered when solving a problem.

In relation to our forthcoming project, this way of working is exactly what we are about to be involved in ourselves by joining with students from the whole of Craft and Design and as a result I am excited to see how efficient our team can be by tackling the problem given from various points of view!

Image below – taken from http://www.amazon.com. Quotes above come from ‘Change by Design’ by Tim Brown