Design Thinking

During the fist lecture, I have mentioned that I will not let out the “design” concept from the design patterns course and we will discuss what makes design excellence in other science like architecture, cognitive science and, not in the last place, art. We have seen that design patterns in software engineering represent reusable solutions to commonly occurring problems in software design. Those solutions turned out to work well in a given situation therefore they have been captured in a pattern of catalog to facilitate reuse. Once you have identified the problem you can apply a pattern to solve it.

But how about the when you a have problem that has not been solved before and there is no satisfactory recipe to solve it? How one can solve such problems? What is the process for finding a solution?

Design Thinking is a new way of thinking about solving problems in which problem solving and innovation activities are closely linked with human-centered activities in which designer can take the role of the user. The product and the product development strategy are created by experiencing rather than simply carefully planning. For those of you that had contact with any of the agile development process this may sound familiar. Prototyping often in small development cycles and putting the customer in focus are the main driving ideas in any agile process. Among the multiple definition of the design term I like the one that states that “design is creativity in reaction to everyday problems”. That’s why I told you that I’m looking for creativity in this course. Thinking like a designer and using creativity is an important asset for every software engineer.

The June issue of the Harvard Business Review has just published an interesting article by TIM Brown CEO of IDEO on Design Thinking. If you are interested in some case-studies to see how design thinking takes place this article is a good start. Tim Brown gives also some guidelines on how to make design-thinking part of the innovation drill. Below I have selected some of the guidelines that I consider relevant for the software development process.

Begin with the beginning. Design thinkers should be involved from the very beginning of any innovation process. In this way more ideas would be explored that otherwise would have disappeared.

Take a human centered approach. I could not agree more. Technology is only one part of the story. One should never forget that technology is to make users life easier. In the design thinking process, the customer is on focus (like in any agile development method).

Try early and often. This sounds actually very familiar from the Agile Manifesto: “Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale”. Prototyping is one of the main ingredients in Design Thinking.

Seek outside help. Consumers should be involved the design process. Tim Brown’s advice is to exploit Web 2.0 networks to enlarge the scale of innovation. My favorite example is the My Starbucks Idea web site in which Starbucks is encouraging customers to share, discuss and vote on ideas that could improve their business. Take a look and let me know what you think. It seems that finally a big company got the idea how to exploit an emerging technology and listen to the customers.

Find talent anyway you can. Tim Brown advocates for interdisciplinary teams that can have a new perspective over the problem and a new way to find solutions. Sometimes I have the impression that some web sites are made only by software engineers. They could use some help from a multidisciplinary team including designers and usability engineers.

For Design Thinking in action you can watch the following movie made by a group of students from Stanford



Still not convinced? Maybe the following links would help:

• Video of a presentation given by Tim Brown at the MIT Sloan School of Management
• Better Linux release notes through design thinking by Karsten Wade, article published in the Red Hat Magazine
• Intro to design thinking. An interview with David Burney conducted by Tim Hyer published in the Red Hat Magazine
• Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University