I recently had a wonderful opportunity to hear Tim Brown, founder of IDEO, discuss his new book Chang by Design. The talk, which was graciously hosted by the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, covered many topics relating to his thoughts on design thinking and IDEO’s approach to helping companies with innovation. In his article, Design Thinking for Social Innovation (Stanford Social Innovation Review) Mr. Brown describes the process as such,

“Design thinking incorporates constituent or consumer insights in depth and rapid prototyping, all aimed at getting beyond the assumptions that block eff ective solutions. Design thinking—inherently optimistic, constructive, and experiential—addresses the needs of the people who will consume a product or service and the infrastructure that enables it… As an approach, design thinking taps into capacities we all have but that are overlooked by more conventional problem-solving practices. Not only does it focus on creating products and services that are human centered, but the process itself is also deeply human. Design thinking relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, to construct ideas that have emotional meaning as well as being functional, and to express ourselves in media other than words or symbols. Nobody wants to run an organization on feeling, intuition, and inspiration, but an over-reliance on the rational and the analytical can be just as risky. Design thinking, the integrated approach at the core of the design process, provides a third way.”

They key element being a complete focus on the needs of the consumer. Naturally, in addition to working well in the business world, this approach lends itself well to the non-profit sector. When applied to economic and social problems it can, “lead to hundreds of ideas and, ultimately, real world solutions that create better outcomes for organizations and the people they serve”.

Sadly, these problems are just as Mr. Brown describes them – tough. Thankfully,  people are becoming increasingly more realistic about the complexities of the issues at hand in many developing countries. What Tim Brown found through research while working on a project with the Acumen Fund/ Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was that instead of designing a water transportation solution themselves, they would be much more effective by giving the design tools to NGOs to solve the issues themselves.

“It isn’t just about a bunch of bright folks in California or Europe or anywhere else coming up with a solution and then sort of exporting it to India or Africa or South America or where ever it might be, China. The large part of the opportunity to tackling these problems is actually around building the compacity for people to solve these problem themselves… I’m actually talking about the ability for these people to design for themselves”.

Specifically, Tim Brown points to the fact that international, and more often times, local organziations are better at providing a delivery mechanism for these solutions. It’s this ability to deliver solutions that makes local NGOs much more effective then foundations like Bill and Melinda Gates or companies like IDEO. Rather, these entities are better suited at supporting NGOs by enabling  them to identify and solve the problems the NGOs see amongst their constituencies. For example, IDEO introduced  the Human-Centered Design Toolkit as a way to empower organizations to create social innovation through design using this open source framework. (we will discuss the human centered design kit further in an up coming post)

Below you can find Tim Brown’s entire talk recorded at CCA.

Hello, jambo, salaam aleikum, bonjour, sawubona, hallo, molo, in-i-che, teanastellen, mhoroi, boa tarde, oli otya, how de body,

We are glad to introduce you to Zuri-Design, a project headed by Guillaume Driscoll. At  the moment we are a blog dedicated to following and reporting on the various uses of design for change currently being utilized Africa. Zuri-Design will focus on highlighting projects and programs that address social and economic challenges through the use of innovative and human-centric design solutions.

Our goal in the future is to develop as an organization to be able to support projects in Africa that use “design thinking” to benefit society.