Over the last 6 months, I have been sharing our innovation methodology with some of most innovative design firms from Boston to Shanghai and London, not only were they impressed but were asking me a lot of questions around process and rigor in design and innovation. My simple answer is that design is all about context and process, and innovation is more about dealing with the unknowns and unpredictable, both are not mutually exclusive.
There are always two types of designers: 1/ one that believes in the process and see how collectively creativity can deliver results 2/ the second believes that it is all about the one person who happens to have an idea – in another words persona creativity.
Creativity in the design or innovation process is often characterized by the occurrence of a significant event, called it the “creative leap” or “ah ha” moments. Often such events occur as a sudden insight that designers recognize as significant and important, but often it is only in retrospect that the designer is able to identify a point during the design process. These retrospective accounts of creative events in design and innovation may not be reliable and the process was underplayed and the personal creativity taking most of the credit.
Field research results suggested that the creative event in design is not so much a “creative leap” from problem to solution as the building of a “bridge” between the problem space and the solution space by the identification of a key concept. The creative design process involves a period of exploration in which problem and solution spaces are evolving and mix-matching until they are fixed by an emergent bridge which identifies a problem-solution pairing. A creative event occurs as the moment of insight at which a problem-solution pair is framed: what Schön called it “problem framing” or for some “sense making”. I think “sense making” is a better word.
When presented with today's vast quantities of information how can a designer makes sense of it as quickly and easily as possible? Sense making builds on a core "time-line" interview that is highly structured with open-ended interview that allows the designers to construct a view of the world from his or her own perspective. It starts with a list of questions and the responses are then "circled," focusing on the gap, bridge, and helps, and probing the manner in which the person has constructed the event and the significance of this event to himself or herself. It is n important skills that are not commonly taught at design schools.
