Will Design Thinking Deliver to the Consumer?

A new mantra among the corporations of the world is emerging for the teen years of the 21st century - Design Thinking.  Just like the concept of Innovation rose in the early 2000s, Design Thinking as an idea is finally on the rise.

The leaders in this space have existed for a while, couple of examples being IDEO and Procter & Gamble (with its Innovation Centers).  The level of understanding, misunderstanding or not understanding this space are clear from the Business Week article "Inside the Design Thinking Process", here.  The author, Helen Walters, discusses the Aspen Design Summit where multiple design driven sessions were conducted to solve hard problems.

I give credit to Ms. Walters on stating about the Design Thinking process as implemented at the Aspen Design Summit, "... the strongest takeaway was that those looking for a prescribed way to implement design thinking are destined to be disappointed. It's a messy, opaque process that depends as much on group dynamics as intellect or insight."

Preparation of such sessions requires experience and insights into human behavior.  Someone I personally know to be exceptionally talented at this is the Marketing Consulting Services of Copenhagen, see information here.

Yet, the one reason I suggest giving this article serious consideration is because the author highlights the key to the success of all Design Thinking processes, having the end user or consumer of the product or service engaged, which apparently was missing from all the sessions conducted at the Aspen Design Summit.  The author termed the results being developed out of the sessions to "seem like entirely inappropriate bunk" for the end user or consumer.

Perhaps all this is becoming news due to Roger Martin causing an uproar with his open challenge to the research driven, heavily analytical product and service development organizations and management consultancies, see my blog "Roger Martin - On Designing the Future", here.

I believe that exciting times are ahead as the left and right brained individuals realize that to truly deliver a breakthrough to their consumer, they must work collaboratively, break down the silo and unburden themselves from the past to really "create".

Is it all about Design and Experience?

SCAD

While conducting a seminar on Design Innovation and a Design Charrette at Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD), I left the students with the question whether in the final analysis it was all about design and experience of any product before they began their Charrettes?

The deep consumer understandings gleaned at places such as the Innovation Centers at Procter & Gamble enable product companies to capture the sale at the point of purchase - First Moment of Truth (FMOT) as P&G puts it, see definition here. My work at the various Innovation Centers around the world continuously helped me realize that P&G had captured the essence of reaching the consumer - Design enables success at FMOT.

See my friend and colleague Franz Dill's blog here discussing P&G's Innovation Centers and some of the work we did as detailed in Mr. A. G. Lafley's book "The Game Changer". Franz was also the founder of the first Innovation Center there.

While the above is a commercial venture for increasing shareholder value, I was happy to see that in academia SCAD has introduced anthropology and psychology to compliment their excellent curriculum in Industrial Design program, see here.

The quality of experience offered by the product or service may or may not result in repeat business. This is where the product companies of the world are engaging in immersive and experiential environments for learning consumer behavior. See another of Franz's blog here regarding Cargill's Innovation Center.

The SCAD students produced impressive results for the dilemmas I brought to them from UAE and Germany. My friends and faculty at SCAD that is; the Industrial Design Dean - Mr. Victor Ermoli, the Chair - Mr. Tom Gattis and a dedicated Professor - Mr. Robert Fee, should feel proud of their accomplishments as the No. 3 Industrial Design program in the USA.

This Charrette helped me solidify my belief that in the end, yes, it is all about design and experience. Or did Dr. Ivan Pavlov already discover this indirectly in the late 19th century when he developed the concepts of Classical Conditioning?

Usability - "Universal Design" Through Human Factors Science

During a recent lecture visit to Georgia Institute of Technology I had a chance to catch up on the ever growing group - The Center for Assistive Technology & Environmental Access (CATEA), see details here. Even though the mission of the center is driven to explore accessibility for disabled or handicapped individuals to consumer products and their ease of use - the center has employed "human factors" design and engineering approach that focuses on the interface between humans and machines. Products studied have included everything from photocopiers, mobile phones, and TVs to medicine bottles, printers and scanners.

An outcome of the efforts has been "universal design" intended to make a product accessible to as many different types of users as possible. For example, a mobile phone may have a specific function for people who are hard of hearing. Yet, this is useful for anyone trying to carry on a mobile phone conversation in a noisy environment. Another example is a mobile phone designed for the blind - it could be useful for individuals whose visual attention is focused elsewhere, such as while driving a car.

I learned and practiced the science of human factors with probably some of the best in the industry at the AT&T (then NCR) Human Interface Technology Center (HITC), folks such as Dr. Mark and Nong Tarlton, Dr. Richard Henneman and Dr. Tom MacTavish. Here is a short abstract on HITC:

"The NCR Human Interface Technology Center (HITC) exists to meet its customers' business needs through the application of new human-interface technologies. The HITC designs and develops these user-interface solutions through a user-centered design (UCD) process, in which user needs and expectations guide all design and development decisions. The HITC consists of about 90 engineers and scientists with expertise in such areas as cognitive engineering, graphic design, image understanding, artificial intelligence, intelligent tutoring, database mining, and new I/O technologies. Established in 1988, the HITC is funded by work performed for its customers."

Absolutely way ahead of its time, HITC was the place where research met or tried to meet the commercial world. I was engaged in a National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) project “Information Infrastructure for Healthcare” – details here.

I am reminded of Steve Jobs statement - "It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them." This was how we conducted our business at HITC!

Raymond Loewy - Father of 20th Century Design Innovation

If you don't know of Raymond Loewy then he is one of the two or three individuals from the 20th century in America who have made design the impactful reality in products - from maximizing on revenue to the consumer feeling the "need" to "must have" a particular brand.

Wired magazine online profiled Raymond Loewy in November here. Also, I visited an informative exhibition on Raymond Loewy chronicling his design through the decades including family and commercial videos in Bozeman, Montana called "Raymond Loewy:Designs for a Consumer Culture". See details here.

For me there is no getting away from the fact that Raymond Loewy brought together the initial principles of Industrial Design, perhaps not all of them yet the most important ones, including that it begins and ends with the consumer, in delighting the consumer through design and the experience that design imparts for the consumer of the product.

See a photo gallery of Raymond Loewy's designs here on Wired online.

Design in work spaces

Are you working in an open office environment where the only thing the collaborative spaces drive you to is a deep desire to make another version of the Harlem Shake?

"Excessive collaboration can lead to the very opposite of creativity; groupthink, conformity and mediocrity."

Google's Venice Beach, California, USA offices.

The laggards in the industry, not revenue based but ones who do not have an impetus to relentlessly innovate, are trying to be Googlist in the environments they create for their employees.  With neither an understanding of their employees behavior nor how the users or consumers of the spaces they design, these faux Bauhaus architectures lie around as relics as soon as they are birthed.

"Over the past five years Gensler, a design firm, has asked more than 90,000 people in 155 companies in ten industries what they think of this way of working. It has found an astonishing amount of antipathy. Workers say that open-plan offices make it more difficult to concentrate, because the hubbub of human and electronic noise is so distracting. What they really value is the ability to focus on their jobs with as few distractions as possible."

Design is driving the question of who is the user and the consumer of whatever we engage in, and interior design for professional work environments is no exception.  The corporations that do not live on the leading edge are trying to copy experiments in employee environment development from the bleeding edge companies that are not best practices.  If you are not a Google, which innately has the DNA of allowing to fail fast to learn, you should consider caution as in Schumpeter's article in The Economist here.

Design in engineering

"... without the proper design, without considering how new products and services fit into people’s day-to-day lives, any new technology can be terrifying."

States the article in Wired here.

How many engineers in the world comprehend the power of design in bringing the intuition to life in a product?  Why do I ask? Because all products offer services, and if a product does not, it ceases to exist.

I welcome challenges to my belief above.

"The task of making this new world can’t be left up to engineers and technologists alone—otherwise we will find ourselves overrun with amazing capabilities that people refuse to take advantage of. Designers, who’ve always been adept at watching and responding to our needs, must bring to bear a better understanding of how people actually live. It’s up to them to make this new world feel like something we’ve always wanted and a natural extension of what we already have."

"Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect."

Design was introduced into my life when I was working at NCR Human Interface Technology Center. There were sociologists and psychologists working on designing experiences in virtual spaces.  It was fascinating to learn about how and why human beings act and behave the way they do and how to incorporate it via HCI and UXUI.

"But as designers move off of screens and into the larger world, they’ll need to consider every nuance of our everyday activity and understand human behavior every bit as well as novelists or filmmakers. (Otherwise they may engender the same kind of backlash as Google Glass, a potentially cool product that has unleashed a torrent of privacy concerns.)"

So, where can the engineer impact design?  Just look at a Mac logic board and one for a PC; the beauty of the Mac board makes grown up electrical engineers cry, or hide in their cubicles because they know such marvels are not their realm.

And for the software engineer:

"“AI is the new UI.” That is, the effort and attention that designers once poured into interfaces should be extended to code that doesn’t just react to the push of a button but anticipates your actions."

Human memories are of experiences; experiences are part art, part science; the right and the left brain has to come together for such to be accomplished.  We are steadily on our way.  I am afraid the industry doesn't have leaders like Steve Jobs to drive it.

Farrokh Mistree - Outstanding Design Educator Award

Having had the honor of working with Dr. Farrokh Mistree for the past five years, what a thrill it is to see this come to fruition:

"(Dr. Mistree) is being recognized for lifelong dedication and numerous contributions to the engineering design community, particularly for instilling a passion for design in generations of students as an inspirational advisor and mentor. He will receive the Ruth and Joel Spira Outstanding Design Educator Award."

Details here.

I can personally attest to Farrokh being one of the few individuals I know who lives the concept of "Sharing to Gain". It was this passion of his that convinced me five years ago to join him in developing "Designing Open Engineering Systems" course at Georgia Tech, along with Dr. Jitesh Panchal, and Dr. Dirk Schaefer.

Farrokh continues to inspire and give of his time freely in sharing to gain!

Gensler surveys design in work space

One of the design and architecture companies I follow is Gensler.  Most of their work shows that they comprehend the user and the consumer of the space well.  See Gensler here.

Mr. Gerald Gehm, Managing Director, Gensler, forwarded the this work space survey to me "2013 U.S. Workplace Survey; Key Findings."  Worth reading!

I took the liberty of pulling the following visual from one of Gensler's publications.  It describes the "work modes" an office worker lives.  Key is focus versus what has become the goal of work spaces i.e., collaboration.

See my previous blog "Design in work space" here; see my blogs on design in general here.

World's Largest Retail Space - Dubai Mall (The Consumer Heaven)

"Of the total indoor floorspace of 5.9 million square feet, a massive 3.77 million square feet is the gross leasable area."

States an article in the Gulf News here regarding the newly opened Dubai Mall. During my evaluation of retail markets of Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Ras Al Khaimah in early 2006, it was obvious that Dubai was redefining how one looks at the concept of "shopping". Again, as I have discussed in my previous posts regarding design and experience (see "It is all about Design and Experience?" here) - the design of these retail spaces are associated with functionality of being able to purchase products / services of choice while enjoying a unique experience whether it is  sking the 1.5 kilometer slope at the Mall of the Emirates (see here) or the aquarium at the new Dubai Mall (see here).

Back in early 2006 during my analysis, it was clear that foot falls were the measure more so than for example adjacency of complimentary sale opportunity, ex: outside a niche, high-end watch shop a cheap children's toy cart was parked. It had not improved tremendously till this past summer when I was there. Many other retail space use and growth principles were missing. Another reason I discovered was the space's owner has to contend with a globally diverse population.

Dubai to me is an ideal place for using immersive and experiential environments to understand the consumer and uniquely deliver to them what they desire. For now, it is big, bigger to huge! In a little rewording per Mr. Abed Bibi a marketing executive and friend of mine - "Please come and Do-Buy".

User Centric Design is Dead

Found at Design Sojourn "User Centered Design Innovation is Dead", details here.  Reminds me of a Steve Jobs quote - "You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new."

Company Highlight - live|work

live|work

I want to highlight a service design company, live|work, and a friend Mr. Chris Downs, founder of live|work, with whom a conversation began about three years ago whether it is all about the experience? Chris (if I am remembering it right) was of the opinion that it is all about the service as in the end all products have to provide a service. A lesson learned at Procter & Gamble and the result being the concept - Second Moment of Truth i.e. what happens when the consumers try the product after making the purchase decision. Here is an interesting blog providing insights on this.

I have not seen a "Services Design" firm such as Chris's in my international work that has successfully combined all the varied pieces of use and usability, incorporation of the five senses, pre-present-post emotions, and so on and delivered hard ROI. Have a look at few of the case studies of live|work here.

Read more about "Service Design" here.

See an insightful conversation here that Chris had with NextDesign Leadership Institute's (NextD) GK VanPatter.

Shoppers Reality at the Shelf

Having been the Architecture Leader at Procter & Gamble on the shopper and consumer virtualization platforms, I am thrilled to see that the statistics still hold true when you and I stand in front of the shelf to make the buy or not to buy decision.  My work was covered in AG Lafley's book "Game Changer" blogged here by friend and colleague Franz Dill.  Franz was instrumental in setting up the P&G Innovation Centers, now enabling P&G to be the leader in shopper and consumer insights to impact product development at the concept stage:

"In the Bases research, the biggest driver of new-product awareness in store was simply seeing the product on the shelf -- accounting for product awareness in 71% of cases where people cited the store. All the other tools marketers and retailers use to drive in-store awareness -- including off-shelf displays, retailer circulars, product demos, in-store media and samples, accounted for awareness in only 2% to 18% of those cases. In-store media and product demos both scored in the low single digits. That helps drive home the importance of packaging and signage, Mr. Twitty said."

States the article "This Upfront, P&G May Want to Boost Spend on Piggly Wiggly" here. 

Though AdAge's graph here from Nielsen showcases the impact of shopper based design, shopper driven marketing communication, shopper based package design, etc. see below a video from the Economist on the impact of TV on the shopper and the consumer.

Design and customer experience

"No one buys a Swiss watch to find out what time it is.  The allure is intangible: precise engineering, beautifully displayed."

So states an article in The Economist.  Why does one drive a BMW versus a Ford?  "Precise engineering beautifully displayed."

See the graph to illustrate the point.

See more of my blogs related to design here.

(algorithmic) Evolutionary Innovation - Pt. I

I have always wondered whether all new inventions, concepts and ideas have existed before at some abstracted level. Philosophically speaking, I believe that is the case. In innovation, we have tried to mimic evolution, adopting the lessons from nature's selection processes, resulting in successful gains. Perhaps one day understanding punctuated equilibrium and replicating it will start to help us bring about the true breakthroughs desperately needed within innovation.

My points above seem to find validation in The Economist's article (in the Technology Quarterly) talking about evolutionary algorithms being used to "evolve" ideas, methods and even existing patents to create something new. Of course, "new" here takes on subjectivity.

Here is an excerpt that caught my attention... it touches on another topic I will discuss in my blogs - Patents.

"... the most cunning use of an evolutionary algorithm, though, is by Dr Koza himself. His team at Stanford developed a Wi-Fi antenna for a client who did not want to pay a patent-licence fee to Cisco Systems. The team fed the algorithm as much data as they could from the Cisco patent and told the software to design around it. It succeeded in doing so. The result is a design that does not infringe Cisco's patent—and is more efficient to boot."

I see an interesting future here!

India's National Institute of Design

I am always inspired by some excellent work at the Young Designers website of National Institute of Design in India, see various examples related to communication, interdisciplinary, industrial, textile and IT here.

Congratulations to the faculty, administration and the students on bringing the institute through to its 50 years this year.  I hope to visit in person one day!

See the NID's website here.

Lateral Innovation - Network Problem Solution from Nature

I analyze "adjacencies" and "lateralities" in innovation to discover solutions from industries a sector specific or vertical expert perhaps may not choose to.  Here is an excellent example of engineering solutions for network problems validated in natural organisms through the research of Atsushi Tero at PRESTO, Japan Science and Technology Agency in his recently published paper in the Science, "Rules for Biologically Inspired Adaptive Network Design".  The abstract:

"Transport networks are ubiquitous in both social and biological systems. Robust network performance involves a complex trade-off involving cost, transport efficiency, and fault tolerance. Biological networks have been honed by many cycles of evolutionary selection pressure and are likely to yield reasonable solutions to such combinatorial optimization problems. Furthermore, they develop without centralized control and may represent a readily scalable solution for growing networks in general. We show that the slime mold Physarum polycephalum forms networks with comparable efficiency, fault tolerance, and cost to those of real-world infrastructure networks—in this case, the Tokyo rail system. The core mechanisms needed for adaptive network formation can be captured in a biologically inspired mathematical model that may be useful to guide network construction in other domains."

The researchers grew the slime mold using 36 oat flake template representing cities around Tokyo, while they placed the mold itself on Tokyo.  The paper states:

"Overall, we conclude that the Physarum networks showed characteristics similar to those of the rail network in terms of cost, transport efficiency, and fault tolerance.  However, the Physarum networks self-organized without centralized control or explicit global information by a process of selective reinforcement of preferred routes and simultaneous removal of redundant connections."

Open publication - Free publishing - More network

What business can learn from military

One of the delights each week for me is to read Schumpeter in The Economist.

"Military mottoes make strong men cry:("The few, the proud"; "Who dares wins"). Most corporate mission statements make desk warriors cringe with embarrassment."

Military in however small or large a form or design has been one of the oldest institutions in the world.  They have always had a special forces concept and the general armed forces.  That is what the astute corporations are doing as well - creating a front end of innovation arm feeding the products or services development and deployment organizations.

Schumpeter's article here highlights the wealth of experience a military men and women bring to the table and their value to today's businesses.  The education provided to the military has tremendous knowledge embedded in it, with a few millennia of detailed case studies to learn from.

"An officer must never issue an order that will not be obeyed, so he must learn to gauge the mood of his men."

I had the opportunity to work with three corporate leaders across four companies who interestingly all were West Point graduates. Another individual, a colonel gave me the best advice when I choose to build two companies out of the ashes of the economic meltdown of 2008; "Recon ten times before you attack."  Because once the battle has begun, you are in it - in business, or otherwise.

Silicon Valley in 2015 and onwards: A new technology decade on its way

I have been working with Silicon Valley for the past 20 years off and on.  I have been living here for the past year, running a research and innovation center.

For the first decade of this millennia, I noticed a trend which was well articulated by Dr. Gordon Moore that "… corporate R&D is moving away from the kind of fundamental research that wins Nobel Prizes and toward a narrow focus on business goals."  See my blog on the topic here.

I start this year with the hope and I see it as well in the past couple of years that things are making a shift in Silicon Valley from Dr. Moore's concern.  In The World in 2015 from the Economist, my favorite columnist Mr. Adrian Wooldridge, writes:

"In 2015 the buzz (and the money that goes with it) will shift from social media to intelligent devices. … The most successful companies will focus on connecting the virtual and physical worlds. … The year’s buzzword will be “wearables”: for example, medical gadgets that keep a constant watch on your blood pressure, glucose level and food intake, and tell you if trouble is on the way."

Remembering the days of craze about social media in the first half of 2000s, and software doing more than automation in the 1990s, and personal computer like devices in the 1980s, the craze already has established the buzz word IOT (Internet of Things).  Makes me smile as I have never heard such an amorphous term in technology before, perhaps IOT will trump the word innovation in the coming years!  I digress.

What is absolutely thrilling and exciting for me is:

"The rise of intelligent devices will allow the Valley to rediscover its roots as an engineering centre. This Valley was briefly sidelined by the social-networking revolution. But engineers are returning to reclaim their own. Tesla is making cars in Palo Alto. BMW, Mercedes, Samsung, Nissan and General Electric have all established research and design laboratories. Medical-device companies are flocking in."

The types of business that are emerging interestingly all have one specific aspect in common, or essential to their success, data and its analysis for value extraction.  A different technology decade is beginning in the valley.

"Intelligent devices will provide the Valley with a new-found seriousness. Social-media companies essentially dealt with virtual candy-floss: nice to have but, for the most part, hardly essential. The new generation of entrepreneurs will deal in devices that can save lives. Truly, all that is airy will become solid."

Read the complete article here.

Roger Martin - On Designing the Future

My astute friend from McKinsey, Samvit Kanoria forwards "What's Thwarting American Innovation? Too Much Science, Says Roger Martin", in Fast Company, see here.  The article highlights Mr. Martin's focus on creativity in innovation being a combination of science and design aspects of product or service development working together.

For the scientist, he states - "The future has no legitimacy for analytical thinkers."

Mr. Martin thrashes the large management consulting companies and lays the blame of innovation bottle neck on a corporate structure mired in research and analysis of the past - "But what they analyze is the past.  And if the future is not exactly like the past, or there are things happening that are hard to measure scientifically, they get ignored."

Mr. Martin is asked - "Are you saying that the regression analysis jockeys and Six Sigma black belts have got it all wrong?" and he states - "Well, yes."

Interestingly, my tenure at P&G was during the time Roger Martin was advising A.G. Lafley and I was a part of the substantial changes brought within P&G's approach to business.  See information on some my work related to Virtual Shopper here on my friend Franz Dill's blog, who also was one of the founders of the P&G Innovation Centers.

Though Mr. Martin speaks candidly, yet the change he suggests carries pain to the corporate as a whole and the machinery of suppliers supporting it.  Corporate innovation remains more perception than reality, with incremental results seen in their markets from licensing, buyouts, etc.  Breakthrough innovation remains the domain of the entrepreneur, one who can imagine a future unburdened by the past!

Info-Gap Theory

By way of my dear friend Dr. Farrokh Mistree, I have had an introduction to Yakov Ben-Haim, Professor and Yitzhak Moda'i Chair in Technology and Economics, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology and his work on Info-Gap:

"INFO-GAP THEORY is a method for analysis, planning, decision and design under uncertainty. The future may differ from the past, so our models may err in ways we cannot know. Our data may lack evidence about surprises: catastrophes or windfalls. Our scientific and technical understanding may be incomplete. These are info-gaps: incomplete understanding of the system being managed. Info-gap theory provides decision-support tools for modelling and managing severe uncertainty. Three ideas are central in an info-gap analysis: robustness to uncertainty, satisfying critical requirements, and exploiting favorable opportunities."

I plan to speak with Yakov in the near future and will post more on the subject. See Yakov's site here.