Fast Company on Design Thinking

Design thinking in business is becoming increasingly mainstream. The October 2007 issue of Fast Company magazine has a terrific special feature section on design thinking, profiling the designers who have brought design thinking to the forefront of modern corporate thought.

Particularly interesting is the article on Yves Behar, founder of fuseproject. Fuseproject, founded 8 years ago, has won more International Design Excellence Awards in the past 5 years than any other design firm save the trailblazing firm Ideo – and fuseproject’s staff numbers 28 compared with Ideo with more than 500. Behar views the role of design as fusing technology with humanity. As Behar describes it:

“We have one foot in the consumer’s space, and one foot in our client’s space, so we can act as the bridge, or the glue.”

For Behar,

“The simplest definition of design is how you treat your customer. If you acknowledge their intelligence, and treat them well from an environmental, emotional, and aesthetic standpoint, you’re probably doing good design.”

However, by that standard, he says, few CEO’s come close: They just don’t know how hard it is, and what it will take on their part. There’s pain in transformation, pain when you have to do things differently.”

The article points out that designers such as “Butler at Coke, Hacker at J&J, Claudia Kotcha at P&G, and Jonathan Ive at Apple” are getting traction in their organizations, and getting backing from the top. In a second article, Fast Company interviews Sam Lucente, formerly from IBM and currently HP’s first Vice President of Design, who talks about some of his activity that took design thinking into the heart of HP’s corporate mindset.

One example Lucente gave was presenting a slide of dozens of different HP logos, each created by a different team within the company, followed by a slide of a single logo created by his team – and pointing out that when 500 million of the new logos were used consistently across the company, HP would stand to gain $50M in development and manufacturing costs. Lucente argued that equally impressive results could be achieved across the Enterprise with respect to software, product controls, packaging, enterprise systems, and even parts of it’s supply chain, and went on to produce similar design outcomes for HP, for example standardising the navigation controls used on HP’s products from enough to fill a 4 foot by 8 foot poster to one sleek standard navigation design.

The article noted that design thinking at the corporate level has challenges – it is one thing to gain the CEO’s executive backing, but the value and practice of design thinking needs to be driven in to organizational units across the organization. In addition, design thinking needs to coordinate and drive both marketing and product development or engineering thinking.

However, the article suggests that design thinking leads to successful corporate outcomes, reporting that “a three year study of more than 40 Fortune 500 companies by research firm Peer Insight found that companies focused on customer-experience design outperformed the S&P 500 by a 10-to-1 margin from 2000 to 2005.” This is a significant testimonial to the business value of design thinking.