Posts Tagged ‘design thinking’

human centred branding as platform for innovation

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009

This blog hasn’t gotten much of my attention lately but that doesn’t mean I have been idle. To the contrary, I’ve been extremely productive this first half of 2009. I’ve just found other ways to express myself than through this blog. One of these is twitter, where you can follow me. I’ve met some great like-minded people to learn from and be inspired by on twitter, so give it a try!

I have also been doing a lot of presentations. In an educational context but also as consultant to new and existing clients. These presentations are always a moment for me to collect my thoughts into something that makes sense. The process of creating a good presentation helps me clean up my cluttered mind so I can move on form there.

Here’s a public adaptation of a presentation I did for Priva, a wonderful Dutch company where we at Zilver have been spending a lot of pleasant time lately, coaching them on branding and design management. The presentation is about what we’ve come to call Human Centred Branding: building brands that are fruitful platforms for innovation and design requires a human centred approach. Only human centred brands will be used by innovators and valued by users.

Here’s Zilver’s take on human Centred Branding, plus a quick overview on how we build human centred brands. I hope you enjoy it, and if you do, spread the word! and comments or improvements are always greatly valued!

Human Centered Branding

this presentation is licenced under a creative commons attribution-non commercial-share alike licence.

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guest post by Jan Buijs

Monday, April 28th, 2008

Here’s what prof. Dr. Jan Buijs wrote on the DMI conference. We spent the week with him, he’s a great guy and a veteran in all that concerns design, innovation, creativity and education.

Summary Design Thinking
DMI conferences Paris, April 2008

JB thoughts/ideas/concepts/…. after three days of Paris brain crunching. Both the academic conference on design thinking as well as the beginnings of the professional conference about design as the linking force. And getting back all those old memories of earlier design/creativity and innovation conferences and of editorial comments in the famous design/creativity & innovation (research) journals.

jan buijs and me at dmi paris 08

Design thinking as the linking force

Its a linking force between *):

  • all functions inside the company
  • all relevant (probably all) departments
  • and within the “open innovation-concept”: this goes beyond corporate borders (so with and including all outsiders) (think about Fleur’s PhD project)
  • clients/customers/users
  • suppliers and distributors
  • the whole chain (including pre-sales, sales, purchase, USE, maintenance, cleaning, repair, second (or more) use, recycling and or discharging)
  • and all other relevant stakeholders from the outside world
  • brand, the products & services and the company as a whole, regarding ALL touch points, and ALL strategic issues (values, planning, mission, vision, HRM, etc) (more…)

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Ask not what design thinking is, ask what it can do for your client.

Monday, April 21st, 2008

Both at the academic and the business DMI conference in Paris this week speakers were very keen on defining design thinking. From an academic point of view, this is quite understandable: epistemologically (wow!) there’s some very interesting stuff happening when a designer/creative puts his teeth in a problem. (See many articles by Roger Martin on this topic) This merits much research which requires a rigorous approach.
From a business point of view however, I’m not so sure all this talk about what design thinking is will help us reach our goals. Let’s explore what’s going on:

As experienced designers and design managers, we have discovered that in many cases our added value to business and entrepreneurship lies not so much in what we do (eg design artefacts or identities) but in how we do it. It is not our design results that make the biggest difference but the way we go about solving problems, applying creativity, involving stakeholders, and creating opportunities. It’s what zilver’s consultancy practices are based on. We have a great urge to capitalise on these qualities: if only we could bring design thinking to the market, we would be able take upstream what we are best at, and having a great time in the process.
The mistake we are making is that we think we need to know what it is before we can sell it. What we have to watch out for in this context is that we don’t apply ‘traditional’ business thinking to explain design thinking. Imagine trying to sell design thinking to a CEO of a large company using only very strict definitions, measurable benefits, predictable outcomes and proven processes (off course embedded in a nice over the top PowerPoint presentation using a template with groovy fly-in effects, talking paperclips and totally distracting slide transitions). That would be missing the point big time wouldn’t it? Still, that’s exactly the trap I saw some people at the DMI conference fall in to.
My point: from a business point of view, design thinking is not something that needs to be defined before it can be sold. It is many things at once, and none of the above. Like creativity, vision, empathy, excellence and leadership, we all recognise it when it’s there, without having a clue as to how to define it.
If you want to sell design thinking, just make sure it’s recognised: demonstrate what it can do, gather case-studies, ring the bell when it happens, or keep a design thinking diary. I’m sure after seeing these things there won’t be single CEO in the world asking you: “yeah, right, but what exactly is it?”

here’s some thinking on design thinking:

Dan Saffer Victor Lombardi Ralf Beuker stanford but also google it and have a field day!

Rachel Cooper’s mindmap on design thinking, based on our dicussion at the academic dmi conference paris 2008

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