[Book 51] Change by Design by Tim Brown

Change by Design reveals how to incorporate design thinking in any business role. Designers lead with a human-centered approach, which means thoroughly designing with respect to the end-to-end user experience. At the heart of this ethos is empathy. To design well, you must acquire an intimate understanding the users’ pain points so that you can create emotionally satisfying experiences. This is achieved through extensive conversations with, and observations of, your customers.

Tim explains that great designs aren’t discovered fully formed. Instead, they begin by experimenting with prototypes. By learning what resonates versus what does not, we can move beyond the status quo and onto novel solutions with a much higher chance of successful adoption.

The design community has shown that there is an ever-increasing blurring between creating products and services. Both consist of several user experiences: purchasing, educating, using, getting help, etc. Great design considers all of these experiences while building the product or service. Further, it’s often the service providers within the organization who are actually delivering these experiences.

This book has helped me broaden the list of optimizing criteria when developing products and services and encouraged me to focus on the end clients emotional experiences with what I’m creating.

You should read this book if you…

• seek an approach on how to design great products or services
• want to improve your customer experience
• are looking to bring more empathy into your work product

Additional Information

Year Published: 2009
Book Ranking (from 1-10): 8 – Very Good – In depth insights on a specific topic
Ease of Read (from 1-5): 3 – Average

Key Highlights

1. Put simply, Change by Design set out to make two points. First, design thinking expands the canvas for design to address the challenges facing business and society; it shows how a human-centered, creative problem-solving approach offers the promise of new, more effective solutions. Second, design thinking reaches beyond the hard skills of the professional trained designer and should be available to anyone who wishes to master its mind-sets and methods
2. The classic starting point of any project is the brief. Almost like a scientific hypothesis, the brief is a set of mental constraints that gives the project team a framework from which to begin, benchmarks by which they can measure progress, and a set of objectives to be realized: price point, available technology, market segment, and so on
3. In the end, this ability is what distinguishes the merely multidisciplinary team from a truly interdisciplinary one. In a multidisciplinary team each individual becomes an advocate for his or her own technical specialty and the project becomes a protracted negotiation among them, likely resulting in a gray compromise. In an interdisciplinary team there is collective ownership of ideas and everybody takes responsibility for them
4. When a team of talented, optimistic, and collaborative design thinkers comes together, a chemical change occurs that can lead to unpredictable actions and reactions. To reach this point, however, we have learned that we must channel this energy productively, and one way to achieve this is to do away with one large team in favor of many small ones
5. Though it is not uncommon to see large creative teams at work, it is nearly always in the implementation phase of the project; the inspiration phase, by contrast, requires a small, focused group whose job is to establish the overall framework
6. We build these bridges of insight through empathy, the effort to see the world through the eyes of others, understand the world through their experiences, and feel the world through their emotions
7. There are many approaches to prototyping, but they share a single, paradoxical feature: They slow us down to speed us up. By taking the time to prototype our ideas, we avoid costly mistakes such as becoming too complex too early and sticking with a weak idea for too long
8. In A Whole New Mind, Pink argues that once our basic needs are met—as they already have been for most people in the affluent societies of the West—we tend to look for meaningful and emotionally satisfying experiences. We need only note the disproportionate growth of the service—entertainment, banking, health care—economies relative to manufacturing. Moreover, these services themselves have gone far beyond the support of basic needs: Hollywood movies, video games, gourmet restaurants, continuing education, ecotourism, and destination shopping have grown dramatically in recent years. Their value lies in the emotional resonance they create
9. To design an interaction is to allow a story to unfold over time. This realization has led interaction designers to experiment with the use of narrative techniques such as storyboards and scenarios borrowed from other fields of design
10. One of a small number of enlightened business leaders who understand that a steady flow of innovative products rests upon an underlying culture of innovation. While he is excited by the challenge of designing new products, he is even more excited by the challenge of designing the organization itself
11. There is a seemingly inexorable blurring of the line between “products” and “services,” as consumers shift from the expectation of functional performance to a more broadly satisfying experience
12. Don’t settle for the first good idea that comes into your head or seize the first promising solution presented to you. There are plenty more where they came from. Let a hundred flowers bloom, but then let them cross-pollinate. If you haven’t explored lots of options, you haven’t diverged enough. Your ideas are likely to be incremental or easy to copy