Design thinking
- Author
- T. Brown
- Year
- 2008
- Type
- journal article
- Category
- Teoría y Diseño
Tim Brown, CEO of the design firm IDEO, argues that the methods designers use to develop products can be applied more broadly, to services, processes and even organizational strategy. He illustrates the idea with cases such as a project with Kaiser Permanente hospitals to redesign how nursing staff hand over shifts.
Design thinking, as Brown presents it, is a way of meeting people's needs and desires that is both technologically feasible and viable as a business strategy, not a method limited to the look of products. Brown uses the history of the electric lightbulb to make the point: Thomas Edison did not just invent a bulb, he understood that it needed an entire supporting system of power generation and distribution to be genuinely useful, an early example of thinking about a whole system rather than a single object. The article argues that this same systemic, human-centered approach, moving between observation of real needs, prototyping and iteration, can help organizations innovate in areas well beyond product design, including services and internal processes such as the Kaiser Permanente shift-change project it describes.
Credits: Brown, T. (2008). Design thinking. Harvard Business Review, 86(6). http://doi.org/10.1145/2535915
Where to find it
Related in Community
Entries this one is tied to through the book.
Books and references
- Change by Design · by the same author: Tim Brown
In the book
- Chapter 10, section 100 · Human Component | Referential (Who?)
Mentioned in
Academic papers