Design Thinking: Integrating Innovation, Customer Experience, and Brand Value

by Thomas Lockwood (editor)

Design Thinking is packed with intriguing case studies and practical advice from industry experts. This anthology is organized into three sections that focus on the use of design for innovation and brand-building, the emerging role of service design, and the design of meaningful customer experiences. This book provides readers with the strategies necessary to encourage the creative thought process in their companies, which will ultimately help to cultivate innovation, and therefore boost business. Experienced design leaders share their personal stories and give specific examples of their companies’ forward-thinking creations. This unique approach helps the reader learn how to build a solid brand foundation, solve problems with simplified thinking, anticipate and capitalize on trends, figure out what consumers want before they do, and align mission, vision, and strategy with a corporate brand. A sense of the content within Design Thinking can be gained from the titles of some of the key “Building Leadership Brands,” “The Designful Company,” “Brand Building by Service Design,” “Service Design Via the Global Web,” “Customer Loyalty,” and “Driving Brand Loyalty on the Web”.

Genres: Design, Business, Nonfiction, Art, Art Design, Management, Productivity

304 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 10, 2009

Reviews

[Aimée]

Design thinking is about applying a designer’s sensibility and methods to problem solving. It’s more of a methodology – a theory of doing research – than a particular tool or technique. Design thinking may involve various methods such as field observation or ethnography in addition to market research. The tools, however, are not as important as the overall approach. This book is useful in that it provides numerous case studies on design thinking featuring Eames, Steelcase, Bon Appétit, Linux, Dyson, etc. Most useful, I believe, is what the book says about creating a meaningful people-centered experience. Here a few takeaways:

Create experiences that people care about

People demand experiences that matter. Social capital is just as important as economic capital. Social capital helps people create meaning from their experiences. A designer’s role should help people create meaning through various touchpoints. Designers can do this through research that identifies “moments of truth.” A good research design might examine users’ patterns, stories, and insights. The designer can then engineer more meaningful moments like those.

Develop empathy

Designers need to conduct research that helps them to:

Understand what is meaningful to users
Discover user’s unarticulated needs and desires
Imagine the world from the user perspective
Connect with users around what is meaningful and valuable to them
This makes people care more

A strange thing happens when a person sees that you care. They often reciprocate the gesture and care about you right back. The emotional connection is powerful; people have a natural tendency to care, a gut-level intuition. People who are emotionally influenced will seek the product, service (etc.) because they desire a tangible, physical manifestation of the relationship. This is where social media comes into play. Nurturing and sustaining relationships via designed social media strategies facilitates more meaning, more connection, more lifestyle integration.

[Philippe · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book leaves me with mixed feelings. The background: recently industry designers have been trying to break out of their confinement which held them captive to the whims of fickle marketeers. They've moved on from styling consumer products to more strategic briefings: designing experiences, services and even business models. The ambitions reach beyond the corporate sphere, leading designers to confront the systemic, "wicked problems" of our age: climate change, rapid urbanisation, obesity ... The basic logic underpinning this strategic upframing is "Design Thinking". According to Thomas Lockwood, President of the Design Management Institute and editor of this volume, this "is essentially a human-centered innovation process that emphasizes observation, collaboration, fast learning, visualization of ideas, rapid concept prototyping, and concurrent business analysis, which ultimately influences innovation and business strategy." So, design thinking is a new way of thinking that builds on careful mapping of consumer needs, collaborative visualization of alternative solutions and rapid prototyping of emerging concepts, with the ultimate aim to generate more compelling customer experiences and toncontribute to businesses' top line growth. And the approach seems to work even when dealing with the big societal problems, which "don't need necessarily big solutions" (says Lockwood) but just a complete "reframing". Sounds good. However, I feel that this book overstretches in its ambition to sell the concept of design thinking.

[Ian Stewart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great series of essays on what makes Design Thinking. Most interesting for me turned out to be the essays service design and brand. A little dry at times so don’t go in expecting an easy read.

[BLACK CAT · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fusion of brand, business model and product/service design.

[Merlin Zuni · Rating 3 out of 5]

A pretty good collection of ideas about how design structures can influence business.

[Chandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m wayyy late to reading this book and it’s very obvious. Society and business is changing so fast that a lot of the innovations discussed are very old news. I also didn’t like the format of having different experts write the different chapters. It could have benefited from a lot heavier editing to make it feel more cohesive. Well, I checked it off my list.

[Eric Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not quite as practical as I hoped.

[Arthur Chow · Rating 4 out of 5]

First business book I've ever read. Insightful case studies on how to build and grow design thinking culture for large corporations.

[Bob Schatz]

Highly recommended for Product Owners!!

Great quote from p.20
A company can't will itself to be agile. Agility is an emergent property that appears when an organization has the right mindset, the right skills, and the ability to multiply those skills through collaboration. To count agility as a core competence, you have to embed it into the culture.

And another from p.246
True vision can't be imposed on a company; it has to grow from the authentic, mutual purpose and passion of its people. True vision leads to commitment rather than compliance, confidence to create goods and services in a bigger picture-a brand people will love.

[Robert Bogue · Rating 3 out of 5]

Designers think differently. Instead of what is minimally sufficient to get the job done, they think about how to make the experience one that the consumer will enjoy. Minimally sufficient is the right answer in some cases; but in the market place, it’s becoming more important to consider how the consumer will experience the product. That’s what Design Thinking: Integrating Innovation, Customer Experience, and Brand Value is all about. It’s about how to make the experience the right experience.

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[Gergely · Rating 3 out of 5]

It feels quite a bit text-bookish approach, which can highlight a big number of different aspects well, while still feeling a bit too dry or didactic. The "Design Thinking" part of the title appears quite a bit less pronounced within the contents, whereas branding, services, and customer experience takes up most of the space, much less about design thinking in general, or even applied to these topics.

[Kyle]

Guy

[Gerold · Rating 5 out of 5]

..awesome read - crosses over design thinking, brand and strategy ...recommend