Our ideas

Recently, Rob van der Haar attended Interaction18. This 5th edition of the event was themed Scaling Ambitious Endeavours. After first having been a participant of the event, this year Rob took the stage and presented on three essential transformations of the enterprise and the value experience design brings.

Founded in 1966, the Design Research Society celebrated this year its 50 anniversary with an international conference themed 'Future-focused thinking' in Brighton (UK) this year. We selected a few useful papers from the proceedings.

The occasion to start thinking about connecting computational to design thinking is John Maeda's recent introduction of 'computational design'. What can we learn from 'computational thinking' as a mindset for designers to solve problems?

With the shift from UX to CX, many designers broaden their view. Their focus is not just on individual products, applications or websites, but more on how customers use services and channels in their journey.

As a means towards innovation and customer-centricity, “design thinking” is lauded as a technique to infuse creativity throughout an organization. We know it’s being taught to future business leaders at places like Stanford’s d.school, but how’s it being applied in the real world? Global enterprise services leader Citrix provides an interesting example.

Well-recognized for decades, design management has paved the way in establishing the value of design in business success, through defined practices and an active community of practitioners. What learnings from the field can be applied for design projects in the digital and multi-touchpoint world?

Suggest to a board level executive that they double the number of retail outlets – or expand product lines sold in a web shop – and they might easily envisage the required investment and predicted profits. Selling the value of a design project is notoriously more difficult, however.

Our experience has taught us that ad hoc design efforts within the enterprise environment are often doomed to fail. Success in planning and implementing design-based change requires a structured, repeatable and process-based approach. Design models and methodologies provide just this.

Establishing the value of design in today’s large-scale enterprises is a difficult challenge. Inflexible IT structures, a change-resistant organizational culture, or perceived cost might all be to blame. An external player with clout and authority is one way to get it done, and a new approach promoted by Deloitte is doing just that.

Earlier this year we looked at the role that service design is increasingly playing in government, reflecting a trend that is being picked up around the world. While it’s one thing for designers and external parties to suggest the discipline to government clients, what’s the view from “the inside”?

Milan Guenther’s recently-published “Intersection: How Enterprise Design Bridges the Gap Between Business, Technology and People” takes an in-depth look at the broad set of disciplines and techniques that fall under the term “enterprise design” – a subject close to our heart.

Although it’s recently caught on as an industry buzzword, “Design thinking” has been around for more than two decades. It evolved in response to the need for a more structured, methodological approach to previously free-form creative problem-solving. Here’s a dense but compact overview of the discipline.

It’s perhaps no surprise – given the firm’s decades-long record of success – that another “Designer in suit” featured here belongs to the IDEO stable. Tom Kelley (brother of founder David Kelley) is IDEO’s general manager, and a firm proponent of the value of innovation in creating success.

If you wanted to instill “design thinking” into today’s organizations, integrating it into a design school curriculum might seem like a good start. But Richard Buchanan made a more astute choice, leaving a design school to teach at a management school, and ensuring that MBA students leave with a truly innovative perspective.

This is the second in a series of posts in which we introduce the thoughts and works of those that champion the value of design within the business world. Today’s post focuses on Tim Brown, of “innovation and design” firm IDEO.