Agile Design Thinking Sprint Planning

The highest priority of Agile Development is to “Satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.” Agile Development advocates adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, and continual improvement, and it encourages rapid and flexible response to change. Agile development achieves these goals through short development cycles called “sprints.” The short time frame … Read more

Innovation, Design Thinking and Human-Centered Design

Lately, I have been hearing a lot talk about design thinking and human-centered design. What are they? How are they different? Are they the same? It reminds me of the old debate around user experience and “usability. You may have missed that one… The usability folks felt that “usability” was a hard science with an … Read more

Design Thinking Enhances Culture, Speed, Efficiency, Customer Experience and Profitability

A recent Forrester Total Economic Impact Study found that Design Thinking practiced across diverse portfolios of products and services helped clients reduce costs, increase speed, and design better solutions. The purpose of the study was to evaluate design thinking’s financial impact for both individual projects and a grander organizational transformation. Forrester interviewed over 60 executives … Read more

Design Thinking Metrics

Design Thinking is a discipline – a mindset. A way of thinking – not a process. Thinking like a designer, Design Thinking applies the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and a viable business strategy. The process follows the designer’s methodology from vision to implementation. Starting with understanding … Read more

Design Thinking, Lean and Agile Better Defining Customer Problems and Solutions

In today’s experience economy, successful companies don’t stand out because of their efficient production or their better engineering. It is their dedication to understanding their customers and their strong commitment to solving customers’ problems and servicing their needs. In the article, Why Design Thinking is the Future of Management, Stefan Link shares: “Design Thinking helps … Read more

Human-Centered Design, Design Thinking and Design Making

Human-Centered Design (HCD), as the name implies, is designing solutions around people. HCD involves the human perspective in all steps of the problem-solving process by observing the problems within context, brainstorming, conceptualizing, developing, and implementing a solution.  It is the process that innovators like Apple and IDEO follow. In this process, you first need to clearly define the problem then … Read more

Data Science Meets Design Thinking

In the O’Reilly article, Design thinking and data science: Solving problems with data necessitates a diversity of thought, Dean Malmgren from Datascope and Jon Wettersten from IDEO shares: “Problem solving not only requires a high-level conceptual understanding of the challenge, but also a deep understanding of the nuances of a challenge… Solving problems with data necessitates a … Read more

Service Design Trends for 2017 – Agile Meets Design Thinking

John Knight posted this a few months ago. I believe that that these 10 trends are worth paying attention to: “…underpin digital transformation across mobile, tablet, desktop and the wave of new UI technologies such as wearables… these changes will shift the focus from consumer to co-creator and from metropolitan chic to global reach, thus … Read more

Design Thinking and the Circular Economy

In the Fast Company post, Ideo Says The Future Of Design Is Circular, Adele Peter shares that Designers are now considering the entire system and design products with materials that can be used in closed loops. The Circular Design Guide, a new tool from IDEO and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, an organization that works with … Read more

Design Thinking is Iterative and Cyclical

Design Thinking is an iterative process. In the larger context, we understand then explore then materialize our solution. Every step of the way is iterative. What we learn in one step of the process may cause us to go back and refine what we learned in a previous step. Especially when we prototype our ideas … Read more

Design Thinking: Divergence and Convergence Cycles

  In the creative process, you start with an idea. You explore aspects of that idea – go wide – and diverge into many directions to better understand and define your problem. You follow many paths – some lead to dead-ends, some stray too far off from your vision and some lead to the same … Read more