Great Throughts Treasury

"A culture that believes that it is better to ask forgiveness afterward rather than permission before, that rewards people for success but gives them permission to fail, has removed one of the main obstacles to the formation of new ideas."

"A purely techno-centric view of innovation is less sustainable now than ever, and a management philosophy based only on selecting from existing strategies is likely to be overwhelmed by new developments at home or abroad. What we need are new choices--new products that balance the needs of individuals and of society as a whole; new ideas that tackle the global challenges of health, poverty, and education; new strategies that result in differences that matter and a sense of purpose that engages everyone affected by them."

"A well-constructed brief will allow for serendipity, unpredictability, and the capricious whims of fate, for that is the creative realm from which breakthrough ideas emerge. If you already know what you are after, there is usually not much point in looking."

"Above all, think of life as a prototype. We can conduct experiments, make discoveries, and change our perspectives. We can look for opportunities to turn processes into projects that have tangible outcomes. We can learn how to take joy in the things we create whether they take the form of a fleeting experience or an heirloom that will last for generations. We can learn that reward comes in creation and re-creation, no just in the consumption of the world around us. Active participation in the process of creation is our right and our privilege. We can learn to measure the success of our ideas not by our bank accounts by their impact on the world."

"A successful prototype is not one that works flawlessly; it is one that teaches us something ..."

"All children draw. Somewhere in the course of becoming logical, verbally oriented adults, they unlearn this elemental skill."

"As more of our basic needs are met, we increasingly expect sophisticated experiences that are emotionally satisfying and meaningful. These experiences will not be simple products. They will be complex combinations of products, services, spaces, and information. They will be the ways we get educated, the ways we are entertained, the ways we stay healthy, the ways we share and communicate. Design thinking is a tool for imagining these experiences as well as giving them a desirable form."

"As the challenges of the industrial age spread to every field of human endeavor, a parade of bold innovators who would shape the world as they have shaped my own thinking would follow him [Isambard Kingdom Brunel]. We have met many of them along the ?reader?s journey? that I have tried to construct: William Morris, Frank Lloyd Wright, the American industrial designer Raymond Loewy, and the team of Ray and Charles Eames. What they all shared was optimism, openness to experimentation, a love of storytelling, a need to collaborate, and an instinct to think with their hands?to build, to prototype, and to communicate complex ideas with masterful simplicity. They did not just do design, they lived design."

"As soon as two or three children get together they start to role-play: they become doctors and nurses, pirates, aliens, or Disney characters. Without prompting, they begin to perform lengthy enactments full of complex plots and subplots. Research suggests that this form of play is not only fun but also helps establish internal scripts by which we navigate as adults."

"Although it might seem as though frittering away valuable time on sketches and models and simulations will slow work down, prototyping generates results faster. This seems counterintuitive: surely it takes longer to build an idea than to think one? Perhaps, but only for those gifted few who are able to think the right idea the first time. Most problems worth worrying about are complex, and a series of early experiments is often the best way to decide among competing directions. The faster we make our ideas tangible, the sooner we will be able to evaluate them, refine them, and zero in on the best solution."

"Because design thinking balances the perspectives of users, technology, and business, it is by its nature integrative."

"Brainstorming, ironically, is a structured way of breaking out of structure. It takes practice."

"At IDEO we have dedicated rooms for our brainstorming sessions, and the rules are literally written on the walls: Defer judgment. Encourage wild ideas. Stay focused on the topic. The most important of them, I would argue, is ?Build on the ideas of others.?"

"But the mark of a designer, as the legendary Charles Eames said often, is a willing embrace of constraints."

"Curse deadlines all you want, but remember that time can be our most creative constraint."

"Design can help to improve our lives in the present. Design thinking can help us chart a path into the future."

"Cultures are basically built around value; they?re built around what people think are important. And if you evolve what you think is important, you can evolve the culture. I mean IBM is a great example of a company that went from being a highly technocratic technological culture to being essentially a management consulting culture today by changing what they thought was important. You can?t expect to change it overnight; it takes a lot of effort by a lot of people over a lot of time. But I absolutely believe it?s possible to do. I think it?s essential. I mean, let?s face it, the world is changing so dramatically today that hardly any organization is set up for the future. And so if we can?t change our cultures, then essentially we?re accepting that the organizations we have today will disappear and other ones will emerge to replace it. It?s not a very optimistic view and it?s also not one that shareholders will probably get very excited about."

"Design of participatory systems, where value beyond cash, created and measured, will be theme of design and economy."

"Design projects must ultimately pass through three spaces. We label these ?inspiration? for the circumstances that motivate the search for solutions; ?ideation,? for the process of generating, developing and testing ideas that may lead to solutions; and ?implementation,? for the charting of a path to market. Projects will loop back through these spaces ? particularly the first two ? more than once as ideas are refined and new directions taken."

"Design thinking becomes with examining opposing ideas and opposing constraints to create new solutions."

"David Kelley calls prototyping ?thinking with your hands,? and he contrasts it with specification-led, planning-driven abstract thinking. Both have value and each has its place, but one is much more effective at creating new ideas and driving them forward."

"Design is about delivering a satisfying experience. Design thinking is about creating a multipolar experience in which everyone has the opportunity to participate in the conversation."

"Design has the power to enrich our lives by engaging our emotions through image, form, texture, color, sound, and smell. The intrinsically human-centered nature of design thinking points to the next step: we can use our empathy and understanding of people to design experiences that create opportunities for active engagement and participation."

"Design is human-centric. It may integrate economics, but it begins with what?s useful and enjoyable."

"Design is all about learning from doing, that?s how we evolve to the best solution."

"Design of participatory systems will be the major theme not only for designers, but for the economy."

"Design is: learning by making, building in order to think."

"Design thinking is neither art nor science nor religion. It is the capacity, ultimately, for integrative thinking."

"Design thinking needs to be turned toward the formulation of a new participatory social contract. It is no longer possible to think in adversarial terms of a ?buyer?s market? or a ?seller?s market.? Were all in this together."

"Design thinking is unlikely to become an exact science, but as with the quality movement there is an opportunity to transform it from a black art into a systematically applied management approach. The trick is to do this without sucking the life out of the creative process ? to balance management?s legitimate requirement for stability, efficiency, and predictability with the design thinker?s need for spontaneity, serendipity, and experimentation."

"Design thinking is about creating a multipolar experience in which everyone has the opportunity to participate in the conversation."

"Design thinking is really about using the sensibilities and methodologies that designers have developed to create new choices, new alternatives, new ideas that haven?t existed in the world before. But it?s being applied today much further upstream and to a much broader set of problems than it has been traditionally. It?s the same skills that designers developed literally for decades, but [those skills are now] applied on a much broader canvas than they used to be."

"Design thinking moves the design process from consumption to participation."

"Design thinking extends the perimeter around a problem."

"Design thinking can be applied in short-term ways and in long-term ways. In fact, the imperative for doing this is even greater in a downturn. The opportunity to capture more market share is greater because many of your competitors have taken their eye off the ball."

"Design thinking needs to move ?upstream,? closer to the executive suites where strategic decisions are made."

"Design Thinking says ?Design is too important to put into the hands of (just) designers.? Everyone needs to participate."

"Design thinking starts with asking the right questions."

"Divergent thinking is the route, not the obstacle, to innovation."

"Design?s too important to be left to designers."

"Designers learn to draw so that they can express their ideas. Words and numbers are fine, but only drawing can simultaneously reveal both the functional characteristics of an idea and its emotional content. To draw an idea accurately, decisions have to be made that can be avoided by even the most precise language; aesthetic issues have to be addressed that cannot be resolved by most elegant mathematical calculation. Whether the task at hand is a hair dryer, a weekend retreat in the country, or an annual report, drawing forces decisions."

"Design understands culture and context before beginning to create new ideas."

"Design thinking starts with divergence, the deliberate attempt to expand the range of options rather than narrow them down."

"Empathy is the mental habit that moves us beyond thinking of people as laboratory rats or standard deviations. If we are to ?borrow? the lives of other people to inspire new ideas, we need to begin by recognizing that their seemingly inexplicable behaviors represent different strategies for coping with the confusing, complex, and contradictory world in which they live."

"Ideas should not be favored based on who creates them. (Repeat aloud.)"

"From the perspective of the design thinker, a new idea will have to tell a meaningful story in a compelling way if it is to make itself hear. There is still a role for advertising, but less as a medium for blasting messages at people than as a way of helping turn its audience into storytellers themselves. Anyone who has a positive experience with an idea should be able to communicate its essential elements in a way that encourages other people to try it out for themselves."

"Fail early to succeed sooner."

"If it is truly innovative, it challenges the status quo."

"If we are to build on one another?s good ideas?one of the key tenets of design thinking?we will, at least for the time being, have to focus on a finite set of problems so that our successes can be cumulative over time and place. This begins with nurturing the natural creativity of all children and keeping it alive as they advance through the education system and into professional life. There is no better way to fill the pipeline with tomorrow?s design thinkers."

"If we focused less on the object and more on the design thinking behind it, we?d see a bigger impact."