Adaptive Path Blog

In a recent conversation on the dplusb.org blog, Jess McMulln and I discussed some of the base assumptions of what the ‘design thinking’ term is all about and where design thinking can fall short. A couple of excerpts:

Jess: “Now design thinking is great, and one of the reasons it gets hyped is because its novel and people hold out hope for a silver bullet. I think it gets reinforced by some people in the design community who make the leap from the fact that ‘I identify as a designer, and therefore I am a design thinker, and I can make these great strategic contributions if they’d only let me.’”

Brandon: “Just diagnosing the real business problem is a challenge [for design thinking]. Is the market growing or shrinking: is there going to be more pie out there in terms of the market, or am I going to have to steal pie from other people? What are my competitors doing and can I trip them up by releasing capabilities that they can’t copy? How can I do things that are competitively smart? What are the real forces that are at play in the marketplace? It’s probably not just features and customer empathy.”

Design is a powerful tool for businesses to adopt, but our discussion points out that designers can’t expect to have that impact without an appreciation for the critical thinking brought to bear from a business viewpoint. See the full conversation.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 13th, 2007 at 11:02 am and is filed under Experience Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.