Change By Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations And Inspires Innovation (2009) - Plot & Excerpts
Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, an innovation and design firm ranked among the ten most innovative companies in the world, debunks the myth that brilliant ideas, creativity, and innovation are the sole province of geniuses and specially gifted people, but are more often the result of disciplined thinking and careful observation, skills the rest of us can develop and apply. He argues that traditional organizational structures are designed for efficiency, which causes new ideas to be incremental, predictable, and too easy to copy, in contrast with the culture of innovation, which is social as well as spatial, in which people know they can experiment, take risks, and explore the full range of their faculties.He then shows us how we can apply the skills of traditional designers to develop the capacity for design thinking, and ways to create innovative, empathetic, human-centered solutions not only to organizational problems and redesigns, but also to pressing social and environmental challenges. I'm a big fan of journey mapping and using design thinking to rethink complex problems, but this book was lousy. Brown uses lots of examples from his days at IDEO to illustrate ways his approach can be revolutionary, which is fine. But then there are also lots of examples of other innovative approaches (like the edible schoolyard) that did not use his approach but get mentioned just because they are good ideas. He seems to want to let design thinking take credit for any and all new solutions to old problems, and is blind to the fact that these non-designers are capable of creative problem solving without using the design thinking lens. This is a blindness that I've consistently encountered in the art/architecture/creative class world. This quote in particular sums up my problem with this book: "There are ten potential projects for every design thinker with the time and talent to tackle them, and 95 percent of them are in Africa, Asia and Latin America -- which complicates the challenge of getting out into the field to gain insight or quickly and iteratively prototype ideas." (p 216) Thank you old, upper middle class, white dude! Your revolutionary approach to listening to other people's needs and responding in an empathetic way is a skill that does not exist on these three major continents. Good thing you're available to fly in and Solve their Problems!
What do You think about Change By Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations And Inspires Innovation (2009)?
Love design thinking and the concepts introduced, but the book itself is just ok.
—readingvivikt
