Great Throughts Treasury

"In a multidisciplinary team each individual becomes an advocate for his or her own technical specialty and the project becomes a protracted negotiation among them, like resulting in a gray compromise. In an interdisciplinary team there is a collective ownership of ideas and everybody takes responsibility for them."

"Instead of accepting a given constraint, ask whether this is even the right problem to be solving. ... A willingness to ask "Why?" ... will improve the chances of spending energy on the right problems."

"In contrast to the champions of scientific management at the beginning of the last century, design thinkers know that there is no ?one best way? to move through the process. There are useful starting points and helpful landmarks along the way, but the continuum of innovation is best thought of as a system of overlapping spaces rather than a sequence of orderly steps. We can think of them as inspiration, the problem or opportunity that motivates the search for solutions; ideation, the process of generating, developing, and testing ideas; and implementation, that path that leads from the project room to the market. Projects may loop back through these steps more than once as the team refines its ideas and explores new directions."

"Instead of primary objective as consumption, explore potential of participation, where everyone actively engaged in experience."

"It has to be an experimental culture. There has to be an enthusiasm for new ideas. You have to have a culture that?s willing to explore new ideas, test them and then get rid of them if they?re not good ideas. If ideas get shut down, if they?re only allowed to happen in some little corner, or if only certain people are allowed to have ideas, then you?re failing to tap into the innovation potential of an organization. So this notion of experimentation is thoroughly important."

"It?s critical that young people start flexing their creative muscles in order to take on the world's most complex challenges."

"Instead of an inflexible, hierarchical process that is designed once and executed many times, we must imagine how we might create highly flexible, constantly evolving systems in which each exchange between participants is an opportunity for empathy, insight, innovation, and implementation. Every interaction is a small opportunity to make that exchange more valuable to and meaningful for all participants."

"It's not an 'either/or,' it's an 'and.' You can be serious and play."

"It?s possible to spend days, weeks, or months conducting research of this sort, but at the end of it all we will have little more than stacks of field notes, videotapes, and photographs unless we can connect with the people we are observing at a fundamental level. We call this ?empathy? and it is perhaps the most important distinction between academic thinking and design thinking. We are not trying to generate new knowledge, test a theory, or validate a scientific hypothesis?that?s the work of our university colleagues and an indispensable part of our shared intellectual landscape. The mission of design thinking is to translate observations into insights and insights into products and services that will improve lives."

"Invention is not the same as innovation."

"Mastering the art of asking questions is essential to creativity and innovation. A More Beautiful Question should be standard reading for all aspiring design thinkers as well an inspiration to those searching for a life of curiosity and meaning."

"Like every other kid, I was thinking with my hands, using physical props as a springboard for my imagination. This shift from physical to abstract and back again is one of the most fundamental processes by which we explore the universe, unlock our imaginations, and open our minds to new possibilities."

"Most business processes are about making choices from a set of existing alternatives. Clearly, if all your competition is doing the same, then differentiation is tough. In order to innovate, we have to have new alternatives and new solutions to problems, and that is what design can do."

"My message for business leaders is always, if you want to be more innovative, if you want to be more competitive, if you want to grow, you can?t just think about what your next product?s going to be or what your technology?s going to be. You have to think about the culture that you?re going to build that allows you to do this over and over and over again."

"Mostly we rely on stories to put our ideas into context and give them meaning. It should be no surprise, then, that the human capacity for storytelling plays an important role in the intrinsically human-centered approach to problem solving, design thinking."

"Optimism requires confidence, and confidence is built on trust. And trust, as we know, flows in both directions."

"One of the techniques we have developed at IDEO to keep the consumer-designer involved in the creation, evaluation, and development of ideas is the ?unfocus group,? where we bring an array of consumers and experts together in a workshop format to explore new concepts around a particular topic. Whereas traditional focus groups assemble a random group of ?average? people who are observed, literally or figuratively, from behind a one-way mirror, the unfocus group identifies unique individuals and invites them to participate in an active, collaborative design exercise. 61"

"Often, in our enthusiasm for solving the problem in front of us, we fail to see the problems that we create."

"Observing "analogous" situations ... will often jolt us out of the frame of reference that makes it so difficult to see the larger picture."

"Our objective, when it comes to the application of design thinking in schools, must be to develop an educational experience that does not eradicate children?s natural inclination to experiment and create but rather encourages and amplifies it. As a society our future capacity for innovation depends on having more people literate in the holistic principles of design thinking, just as our technological prowess depends on having high levels of literacy in math and science."

"Part of maintaining a thriving creative culture is giving people time and permission to play."

"Social issues are, by definition, human-centered. The best of the world?s foundations, aid organizations, and NGOs know this, but many of them have lacked the tools to ground this commitment in ongoing, sustainable enterprises fueled not just by outside donations but by the energies and resources of the people they serve."

"Perhaps the most important opportunity for long-term impact is through education. Designers have learned some powerful methods for arriving at innovative solutions. How might we use those methods not just to educate the next generation of designers but to think about how education as such might be reinvented to unlock the vast reservoir of human creative potential?"

"Rather than thinking to build, build to think."

"Storytelling needs to be in the tool kit of the design thinker?in the sense not of a tidy beginning, middle and end but ongoing, open-ended narrative that engages people and encourages them to carry it forward and write their own conclusions."

"Our real goal ... is helping people to articulate the latent needs they may not even know they have ..."

"Technology alone does not necessarily result in a better customer experience."

"Synthesis, the act of extracting meaningful patterns from masses of raw information, is a fundamentally creative act; the data are just that?data?and the facts never speak for themselves. Sometimes the data are highly technical?if the task is a sophisticated piece of medical equipment, for instance; in other cases they may be purely behavioral, for example, if the problem is to encourage people to switch to energy-saving compact fluorescent bulbs. In every case we may think of the designer as a master storyteller whose skill is measured by his or her ability to craft a compelling, consistent, and believable narrative."

"That?s the tremendous opportunity of design thinking, particularly in the world of services. It?s the opportunity for the people who are actually delivering the service to spot needs, develop new ideas and implement them, and kind of have some level of control and influence on the way that they interact with customers."

"The ?paradox of choice.? Most people don?t want more options; they just want what they want. When overwhelmed by choice, we tend to fall into behavioral patterns used by those whom Schwartz calls optimizers?people paralyzed by the fear that if they only waited a little while longer or searched a little harder, they could find what they think they want at the best possible price."

"The design process is best described metaphorically as a system of spaces rather than a pre-defined series of orderly steps. The spaces demarcate different sorts of related activities that together form the continuum of innovation."

"The evolution from design to design thinking is the story of the evolution from the creation of products to the analysis of the relationship between people and products, and from there to the relationship between people and people."

"The black art of design thinking is identifying what is the question. Figuring out the brief is the most interesting part for me."

"The greatest design thinkers have always been drawn to the greatest challenges, whether delivering fresh water to Imperial Rome, vaulting the dome of the Florence Cathedral, running a rail line through the British Midlands, or designing the first laptop computer. They have searched out the problems that allowed them to work at the edge because this was where they were most likely to achieve something that has not been done before. For the last generation of designers, those problems were driven by new technologies. For the next generation, the most pressing?and the most exciting?challenges may lie in the highlands of southeast Asia, the malarial wetlands of East Africa, the favelas and rain forests of Brazil, and the melting glaciers of Greenland."

"The Internet, in other words, characterized by dispersed, decentralized, mutually reinforcing networks, is not so much the means as the model of the new forms of organization taking shape. Because it is open-sourced and open-ended, it allows the energy of many small teams to be brought to bear on the same problem."

"The important thing is to make ideas tangible, to make them real ? say, using storyboards if it?s a narrative idea, using a model if it?s a physical idea, however you want to do it. You can act it out. The quicker you do that, the quicker the ideas start to speak for themselves rather than the person who?s promoting them."

"The mission of design thinking is to translate observations into insights and insights into products and services that will improve lives."

"The myth of creative genius is resilient: We believe that great ideas pop fully formed out of brilliant minds, in feats of imagination well beyond the abilities of mere mortals. But what the Kaiser nursing team accomplished was neither a sudden breakthrough nor the lightning strike of a genius; it was the result of hard work augmented by a creative human-centered discovery process and followed by iterative cycles of prototyping , testing and refinement."

"The movement from insight to observation to empathy leads us, finally, to the most intriguing question of them all: if cultures are so diverse and if the twentieth-century image of ?the unruly mob? has given way to the twenty-first century discovery of the ?wisdom of crowds,? how can we tap that collective intelligence to unleash the full power of design thinking? The designer must not be imagined as an intrepid anthropologist, venturing into an alien culture to observe the natives with the utmost objectivity. Instead we need to invent a new and radical form of collaboration that blurs the boundaries between creators and consumers. It?s not about ?us versus them? or even ?us on behalf of them.? For the design thinker, it has to be ?us with them.?"

"The natural evolution from design doing to design thinking reflects the growing recognition on the part of today's business leaders that design has become too important to be left to designers."

"The process of the design thinker, rather, looks like a rhythmic exchange between the divergent and convergent phases, with each subsequent iteration less broad and more detailed than the previous ones. In the divergent phase, new options emerge. In the convergent phase it is just the reverse: now it?s time to eliminate options and make choices. It can be painful to let a once-promising idea fall away, and this is where the diplomatic skills of project leaders are often tested. William Faulkner, when asked what he found to be the most difficult part of writing, answered, ?Killing off your little darlings.?"

"The specific set of tools will vary according to the particular disease or treatment, but two underlying principles are the same: first, as with every other type of time-based design project, each patients? journey through the process will be unique; second, it will be far more effective to engage individuals as active participants in their own stories. Designing with time means thinking of people as living, growing, thinking organisms who can help write their own stories."

"The willing and even enthusiastic acceptance of competing constraints is the foundation of design thinking."

"The tools of conventional market research can be useful in pointing toward incremental improvements, but they will never lead to those rule-breaking, game-changing, paradigm-shifting breakthroughs that leave us scratching our heads and wondering why nobody ever thought of them before."

"There are at least three significant areas where design thinking can promote what Canadian designer Bruce Mau calls the ?massive change? that is called for today. The first has to do with informing ourselves about what is at stake and making visible the true costs of the choices we make. The second involves a fundamental reassessment of the systems and processes we use to create new things. The third task to which design thinking must respond is to find ways to encourage individuals to move toward more sustainable behaviors."

"They liked the fish. Next time give them the net."

"There is a popular saying around IDEO that ?all of us are smarter than any of us,? and this is the key to unlocking the creative power of any organization. We ask people not simply to offer expert advice on materials, behaviors, or software but to be active in each of the spaces of innovation: inspiration, ideation, and implementation. Staffing a project with people from diverse backgrounds and a multiplicity of disciplines takes some patience, however. It requires us to identify individuals who are confident enough of their expertise that they are willing to go beyond it."

"There are at least three significant areas where design thinking can promote what the Canadian designer Bruce Mau calls the ?massive change? that is called for today. The first has to do with informing ourselves about what is at stake and making visible the true costs of the choices we make. The second involves a fundamental reassessment of the systems and processes we use to create new things. The third task to which design thinking must respond is to find ways to encourage individuals to move toward more sustainable behaviors."

"Thinking like a designer can transform the way you develop products services, processes and even strategy"

"To design an interaction is to allow a story to unfold over time."