I was actually quite surprised to find myself deep undercover in Design Thinking activities in the last 12 months. The great thing was that these activities were varied, spanning from running Design Thinking workshops, developing a Design Thinking curriculum, lectures on leveraging on the power of design, and best of all implementing Design Thinking within organizations that are non-traditional buyers of design. What a ride!

What is even more interesting, was finding out that Design Thinking has not died (or become a failed experiment as some say), but more accurately, it has evolved into a vibrant ecosystem of activities that focuses on businesses, brands and organizations leveraging on design as a strategic competitive advantage.

Some of you might mistakenly think that I’m against the whole concept of Design Thinking. I don’t blame you as this probably stem from an article I wrote on how Design Thinking is Killing Creativity. If you read that article, it actually explains that the problems of Design Thinking stems from the activity not being facilitated or managed correctly, or worst still, subjected to the negative influences of traditional corporate culture. Those observations in that article have been validated time and time again during my yearlong involvement with Design Thinking.

Therefore I thought it would make a lot of sense to run a regular series here on Design Sojourn to share my thoughts and my experiences in how I helped companies implement Design Thinking as a tool for business success and ultimately Design Leadership. Furthermore, this seems to be a Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) and discussion point with my clients and participants of my workshops.

This post will contain a table of contents that will be updated whenever new posts from this series are published. So I would like to encourage you to bookmark this post and visit our blog frequently? I hope you enjoy my thoughts and the ensuing conversation. Do stay tuned!

Table of Contents:

Implementing Design Thinking 1: Focus on the Outcome not the Process
Implementing Design Thinking 2: Have the Guts to Say it Sucks
Implementing Design Thinking 3: Next Week
Implementing Design Thinking 4: TBC…

John Gruber, from Daring Fireball, tells it like it is. For example, his thought on people wishing for larger 4-inch iPhone screens:

Apple decided on the optimal size for an iPhone display back in 2006. If they thought 4-inches was better, overall, as the one true size for the iPhone display, then the original iPhone would have had a 4-inch display.

I agree. Jony Ive probably had a bunch of iPhone foam models with different sizes and the model with the 3.5-inch screen probably felt the best in Steve Job’s hand.

John also shares some good insights on how and when we can expect a new iPhone form factor:

Apple isn’t going to make a new form factor just for the sake of newness itself — they make changes only if the changes make things decidedly better. Thinner, stronger, smaller, more efficient. If they don’t have a new design that brings about such adjectives, they’re going to stick with what they have.

[snip]

Apple is a company of patterns and cycles. These product cycles keep the machine functioning at a steady pace. They broke one pattern with the iPhone 4S: all previous iPhones were released in June. But they’ve added a new one: a two-year cycle that starts with a new form factor (3G/4) followed a year later by a new phone with the same form factor but significantly improved internals (3GS/4S). If next year’s phone is named “iPhone 5”, then I’ll expect a lookalike iPhone 5S in 2013.

John’s comments mirrors my own thoughts in my earlier article on mobile phone brands copying iPhones. I never really expected the new iPhone to have a change in its form factor. However when I called it the new phone the iPhone 5, what I missed was that Apple only changes the number when the form factor changes such as how the iPad evolved to iPad 2.

Finally, I like to say that Siri intrigues me. Is it strange that I keep on wondering how she looks like for real? Is she even a she? Function wise, I’m excited. Since it can do speech to text, it looks like it can help me with a faster blogging workflow. But I’ll hold off my judgment until I get a chance to play around with it. How about you? What are your thoughts on the new iPhone 4S?

This morning I work up to the sad news of the passing of Steve Jobs. Though I expected it, I had hoped it would never come. As the world mourns the passing of a legend, I’m at a lost for words to describe the breath and depth or the everlasting impact of his achievements. I therefore though it would be better instead to celebrate his life with a small tribute by sharing 8 things I would like to thank Steve Jobs for.

1) Showing the world what the power of design can do.

2) Showing that a design focused and design-integrated organization is vital for innovation and leadership in today’s market environment.

3) Showing that passion and going that extra mile turns good to great.

4) Not being afraid to fail, and instead launching paradigm shifting products with guts, and iterating as you go.

5) Showing the world that good design is about making choices.

6) Showing that it is not about products or services but about ecosystems.

7) Showing us how to stand above criticism while keeping sight of the bigger picture.

8) And finally, for demystifying technology by making it simple to use and turning it into our friend.

Though we have never met, you have indelibly left your mark on me (via my Apple IIe) and, not to mention, the world. Thank you for doing more for Design than anyone else could. RIP.

Harry Marks writes a very insightful piece on what Apple has done or will do for the computing industry in a Lion, iOS 5 and iCloud environment.

To some, it means Apple has locking you in to its “walled garden”. To others, the company is giving you everything you need in a pretty, all-inclusive package – like a Sandals with free WiFi. To me, it means Apple is getting ready to finish the first volume of its 10 year long opus on the true definition of “ecosystem”.

With your iTunes ID, you can make sure any music, apps and books you purchase on your Mac, iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad are automatically downloaded and synced on all your devices at once. If you start a document in Pages on Lion, it automaticaly saves each change and uploads it to iCloud, then syncs it back down to your iPad where you can work on it later at a coffee shop, or waiting for your train. No buttons are pressed to initiate the sync, no wire is required to transfer the files. Everything is done in the background without the user’s knowledge. Apple’s iCloud is one step closer to making “user error” a thing of the past and that’s the brush being used to paint the bigger picture.

One side of the industry thinks Apple is a hardware company, whose prime directive is to sell Macs and iPhones. The other side considers Apple a software company, where the devices are just shells to run the services and apps it provides. But Apple is more than just “hardware” and “software”. It’s an experience maker.

Devices and apps are nothing compared to the industry-shifting ways in which Apple is changing our perception of what “personal computing” should be. Steve Jobs’ legacy isn’t going to be a giant spaceship in Cupertino, nor will it be the iPad or iPod. Steve’s legacy and, more importantly, Apple’s, will be having built a biome for customers where online services and devices work together so mundane tasks and troubleshooting become unnecessary, while at the same time lowering the barrier of entry for users of all levels. Essentially, Apple has made “your nephew who’s a whiz with computers” obsolete.

(I bolded certain sentences to emphasize the key message.)

It is not only just about creating great products or services, it’s about creating an entire ecosystem. Not only that, it is about creating an ecosystem with parts that all work beautifully together. That’s the key. This is Apple at its best and not wavering from their fundamental, and now ancient, creed: “It just works”.

Check out Harry’s full article at Curious Rat.

Via: Revert to Save

While preparing for our Introduction to Design Thinking Workshop next week, I stumbled over a nice little infographic by Prof. Ralf Beuker, that clearly spells out the relationship between Design, Design Management and Design Thinking. A relationship that many designers, including myself, would have pondered about at some stage of their professional career.

However, what is even more important to note is that 45-degree arrow that represents a very important but rarely talked about term: Design Leadership. A term that might have been a better descriptor for the activities we now call Design Thinking.

Interestingly enough, I created a blog category called Design Leadership a few years ago to combine articles from two other blog categories called Design Strategy and Design Management. Therefore, I can safely say that my work in progress definition of Design Leadership is:

Design Leadership = Design Management + Design Strategy

I’ll share more of my thoughts on Design Leadership in time to come. But if you can’t wait and want a quick primer, check out my Orbital Strategic Design (Leadership?) Process used as part of my activities for the Design Engage program or look back at the older articles in the Design Leadership category.

Via: Flickr.

Sadly WebOS/HP is no more…

In a surprising about face, Google, who not long ago slammed the Nokia and Microsoft deal, goes ahead to buy Motorola Mobility a spinoff company (setup in January 2011) that focuses on mobile devices such as Smartphones and tablets.

In Internet time, this is old news by now.

I’ve taken my time to write this post, simply because I wanted to read what the different financial analysts or technology critics had to say about the pros and cons of this deal. The general sentiment if you like. Most of them shot it down, and Google stock took a beating. Standard and Poor (S&P) even downgraded their rating of Google stocks to sell and lowers the price target to $200 from $500.

Let’s get this straight. This deal is no good for investors. Simply because it goes against the traditional corporate thinking of cash is king, play to your strengths, play to win, and companies acquired should compliment and add value to the company. If the deal is none of the above, it is going to hurt in the short term.

But this deal is vital for Android’s survival as a business unit, and perhaps even to Google’s long term success as a company on a whole.

I’ve always said we need to build or design ecosystems not just products (software or hardware). Google buying Motorola is really this idea personified. There is no hardware without the software, and no software without the hardware. Case in point, the amazing successes of iPhone/iOS and Nintendo Wii.

So indeed it was ironic that they slammed the Nokia and Microsoft deal. Perhaps they had hoped that Nokia could have been Android’s close hardware partner instead of Microsoft. It would have been a lot cheaper! But it was not meant to be, so Google went out to buy a partner instead.

Indeed conventional wisdom is correct to advise companies to play to their strengths, but the world of innovation and design is changing. Companies cannot afford to ignore the big picture experience, and say things like, “Oh, I’m not good at software, so lets outsource it to an expert and let them deal with it”.

Now what?

Well, I’m just going to sit back and watch how awesome our mobile lives is going to become.

From the direction Android is heading, and now with Motorola on board, I think we might finally see a credible competitor to Apple’s iPhone dominance in the Smartphone market. So I’m bullish, especially since Google is great at acquiring companies and making the different cultures work.

Clive Thompson, in his column on Wired, dispels the myth that innovation comes as a surprise and is difficult to predict. He writes:

The assumption is that breakthroughs are inherently surprising, so it takes special genius to spot one coming.

But that’s not how innovation really works, if you ask Bill Buxton. A pioneer in computer graphics who is now a principal researcher at Microsoft, he thinks paradigm-busting inventions are easy to see coming because they’re already lying there, close at hand. “Anything that’s going to have an impact over the next decade—that’s going to be a billion-dollar industry—has always already been around for 10 years,” he says.

Buxton calls this the “long nose” theory of innovation: Big ideas poke their noses into the world very slowly, easing gradually into view.

Makes a lot of sense if you think about it. If we study paradigm-changing products, such as the Nintendo DS or the iPod, the technology within them is really nothing new, just the application.

This is why truly billion-dollar breakthrough ideas have what Buxton calls surprising obviousness. They feel at once fresh and familiar. It’s this combination that lets a new gizmo take off quickly and dominate.

[snip...]

If you want to spot the next thing, Buxton argues, you just need to go “prospecting and mining”—looking for concepts that are already successful in one field so you can bring them to another.

So that’s the trick! Innovation happens when we reinterpret or reframe familiar technology in a manner that people will find refreshing. But wait a minute? Is reframing not the role and key value of designers?

I think it is time to share one of my all-time favorite quotes with you. A quote that perfectly compliments this discussion as well as succinctly describes what designers do:

Thus the task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees”
~ Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788-1860

Synergies, my friends, synergies!

Via: Wired.

Derek Sivers, whom I have had the pleasure to meet recently, shares in a short TED snippet advice on “How to Start a Movement”. What was very interesting was his key insight between the relationship of the leader and his first follower. Derek says: “It was really the first follower that transformed the lone nut into a leader”. Indeed without the first follower, the leader is just a Lone Ranger raving at the top of his soapbox.

I immediately saw the potential of reframing this insight as an opportunity to better shape the marketing activities around of our design propositions.

Traditional marketing (or business) strategy often celebrates the Alpha Consumer as a key influencer. As a result, precious few marketing dollars are spend wooing them, assuming that the followers will come after we get this Alpha Consumer on board. However from Derek’s anecdotal analysis, we can see that perhaps it is the first few followers, instead of the Alpha consumer, that have the power to actually get products to move. This makes a lot of sense. As I have found many times, followers often admire the choices Alpha Consumers make, but not necessary follow their lead with similar purchases.

Check out this really cool video about Supermarket chain Tesco’s Korean arm, Homeplus, and its bid to become the Number 1 supermarket chain in Korea.

While the video does not overtly champion Design Thinking, you can see how it captures the spirit of the methodology where Homeplus seeks to first better understand the needs and motivations of their users, and then crafts an innovative service solution that is meaningful to them. The best design solutions are a win-win for all parties, the stakeholders and the consumers.

Oh, just ignore the title of this video, it was obviously written by someone disillusioned with Marketing.

Six months ago I called the consumer electronics (CE) industry ugly after they launched a plethora of computing tablets to compete with the iPad. I’m happy to say that my faith is slowly being restored by not one, but two CE industry stalwarts.

Both have similar backgrounds. They once enjoyed market leadership, but have since fallen out of favor. Their businesses struggle in the red against a competition that is stealing boatloads of their market share. They have Design in the DNA, but it was lost and now rediscovered as they looked to design and innovation as a means to resurrect their brand from the ashes. They are Sony and Motorola, and I believe they will shine again.

Sony Vaio Z

The brand new Sony Vaio Z is what I would call the next archetype evolution between a desktop and a laptop. This “ultraportable” boast a carbon-fiber chassis, 13.1″ 1600×900 screen that runs on a 2.7GHz Intel Core i7 processor, 256GB SSD, and 8GB RAM. It uses a “sheet battery” that allows the Vaio Z to run for up to 7 hours. (Sorry, I got carried away with the specs! )

Before you scream MacBook Air COPY, take a look at their Power Media Dock attachment that boosts the computing power of the Vaio Z with an AMD Radeon 6650M GPU with 1GB of dedicated memory connected with Sony’s own Thunderbolt type technology called “Light Peak”.

So instead of building a MBA copy, it looks like they are creating a hardware modular ecosystem that may allow them to carve a new computing paradigm for themselves. Is this the start of modular computing or modular product design? I can also imagine a range of add-ons that could include faster CPUs, snap on HDD for additional storage and even displays. Oh my, many computing concepts of 10 years past are rushing back to greet us!

Motorola Atrix

Here is another interesting proposition that made me look twice. When the Motorola Artix smoothly slots into it’s revolutionary Lapdock, the Lapdock automatically fires-up to allow you to continue your mobile activities on a bigger screen. This is not an entirely new idea, but it was unexpected in this era of tablets. Together with the Lapdock, the Artix is basically an archetype that allows for users to bypass the need for tablets.

Not only that, when you have phones that are as powerful as computers, why would you need to own both? I’m sure many of you will dive into the software details and the things you can do with the Lapdock, but if you consider again the long term computing potential of mobile phones the possibilities become endless. Best of all Motorola just has to leverage on their strengths in mobile communications and the way forward is starting to become clear.

———-

I’m actually really excited to see the CE industry do something they have not done in a long time, and that is to think, design and innovate ahead of the competition. Hopefully, the general sickness of “follow the leader” can now finally come to an end, well unless it is a strategic competitive advantage to follow the leader. Now please excuse me while I go and try to get my hands on one of those gadgets!