I believe design thinking is less about design and more about creative ways to create value. It should not reside in any particular type of schools. Any schools should be training people to recognize value when they see it or creative means to create them. Business schools may have an advantage of teaching people to capture value. We didn't teach students enough about what creating value means.
Idea Couture is now becoming more and more like a school, we’re training (or retraining) our people from wrong practices everyday. We’re also helping clients to look for hidden value and show them how to unlock them. We’re also starting external programs on design thinking so people can learn what it is beyond that yellow stickies and fancy buzz words.
I see Idea Couture as a place of design thinking projects, everything is a project and some shorter and some longer, always on and always moving, and always something to learn for everyone. There is no office, only project spaces, and workshop spaces. People work long hours sometimes, travel across the world, constantly learning from others and collectively pushing each other. High trust and high pressure. Plenty of fun and plenty of caffeine. Everyone needs to earn his or her credibility here; it doesn’t matter where you came from. Everyone is passionate about insight, design, strategy and innovation.
We will be broadening our partnerships this year with two schools and will be working with other to develop educational programs and events. We are operating in different intersections between design thinking and social thinking; strategic innovation and design innovation; strategic foresights and emerging behaviors. And I am making sure that we always have a few our own projects running all the time parallel to client projects.
Design thinking is part of our day-to-day problem-framing-and solving approach - in another word it is work. It is something that we preach and breathe. It is no buzzword or marketing slogan here, it is real. Design thinking is where D-school meets B-school. Why is design thinking unique?
Design thinking proposes a cross-discipline learning-by-doing experience. It allows us to accommodate varied interests and abilities through project/action learning experiences. The good and bad thing about it is that it is not a subject area you find in a textbook.
Design thinking integrates imagination into the strategy process. It opens up the future and invites us to look at uncertainties and allow us to be comfortable and working with many unknowns. Design thinking expects us to cope with inadequate information and multiple levels of unknowns in order to create a tangible outcome.
Design thinking is a dynamic constructive process in nature. It requires ongoing definition, redefinition, representation, assessment and visualization. It is a continuous learning experience arising out of a need to obtain and correctly apply knowledge to achieve goals that may change as knowledge of the problem; its context is acquired and new behavior unfolds.
Design thinking promotes empathy. It encourage the use of tools to put us in the shoes of customers and allows us to observe and identify any unarticulated and unmet needs. It puts users at the very core of everything. And we can use these insights to develop new knowledge through creative learning and experimentation.
Design thinking can create meanings. Power Point and Excel spreadsheets cannot not create meanings. Creating meaning is the hardest part of the design process; you're not going to get it right the first time. But you can iterate it, again and again. And you need to have something to touch and feel. Design thinking allows you to create things that you can experiment with and see what happens.. and in the process you may be able to find meanings.
I can go on and on. but have a plane to catch.
