Design thinking and creative intelligence

If we are to take Bruce Nussbaum’s word for it the role of ‘design thinking’ in business development and innovation has been in decline since 2011 when he called it a ‘failed experiment’. Nevertheless, I suspect that its value as a methodology for re-framing ‘wicked problems’ (Rittel and Webber 1973) has yet to be fully realised. Undoubtedly, there remains considerable confusion around the notion of design thinking. For example, 'Designing Growth', a discussion hosted by Dublin City Council in 2013 to explore how design could be harnessed to drive economic growth in Ireland revealed competing understandings of the role of design in design thinking.

The international panel of experts held divergent opinions – as did the audience, largely made up of members of the design community. The event was intended as 'a discussion on ways to develop new and better public services, communication platforms, education and business models through design' but had difficulty getting beyond a debate on the value of design itself, never mind design thinking. This was a disappointing, if not altogether surprising, outcome: all the more so due to the missed opportunity to convince John Moran (the panel’s deliberately selected sceptic and influentially positioned Secretary General at the Department of Finance) and other policy makers of the value in utilising alternative methodologies to plan the rebuilding of the national economy following its collapse in the recent recession.

The confusion between ‘design thinking’ and ‘designing’ in evidence at the event is not unusual. From an academic perspective Lucy Kimbell writing in 2011 suggests that:

Even on a cursory inspection, just what design thinking is supposed to be is not well understood, either by the public or those who claim to practise it.

In 2007 Nussbaum was a proponent of the role of designers:

My own current thinking is that designers must play a critical role in the creation of this new field of design thinking. The whole core culture of design is essential to design thinking.

Later that year Nussbaum's thinking has developed to the point where he is recommending that CEOs:

have to understand design thinking – using the process to manage the company. That is what [Steve] Jobs does – he isn't a trained designer but he gets it. He focuses on what is important these days. And it took him a while to get these skills. Remember all those mistakes along the way?'

This understanding of design thinking as an approach to problem framing and problem solving – derived from the design process – emerged from business schools. Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management, interviewed by David Dunne in 2006 says 'today’s business people don’t need to understand designers better, they need to become designers.' Martin had gained an insight into the design process from encounters with a small design firm in Toronto and a later involvement with IDEO. He was fascinated by the way designers approached problem solving by accepting constraints and ‘creating something that looks great and sells’. He also recognised that the same approach applied in business:

As I watched it, I saw that this is what great business leaders do. They enter some kind of constrained environment where they want to do something that is near impossible. They have to figure it out by thinking differently from anybody else. The best of what I see in the best business people is the same as what I see in designers at their best.

Kimbell cites Martin, from the Design of Business (2009) describing design thinking as having:

something important to offer managers, enabling them to shift from choosing between alternatives to helping them generate entirely new concepts.

Designer and writer Aiden Kenny (Notes and Thoughts from the 'Designing Growth' Event 2013) proposes that it may lie in ‘collaborations between business strategists and strategically-minded designers’. This all suggests a particular application for design thinking as a methodology for re-framing problems that society is having great difficulty addressing. But, just as it appears there may be a consensus developing Nussbaum appears to change his mind. In 2011 he writes that:

The decade of Design Thinking is ending and I, for one, am moving on to another conceptual framework: Creative Intelligence, or CQ.

A cynical response might be that his conversion is simply a strategy to support his new book, Creative Intelligence (2013). But, in fact, he attributes it to the failure of CEOs to understand and implement design thinking correctly and opportunistic designers misusing it to increase business. He reports a conversation with IDEO’s Tim Brown and quotes his analysis:

Design consultancies that promoted Design Thinking were, in effect, hoping that a process trick would produce significant cultural and organizational change. From the beginning, the process of Design Thinking was a scaffolding for the real deliverable: creativity. But in order to appeal to the business culture of process, it was denuded of the mess, the conflict, failure, emotions, and looping circularity that is part and parcel of the creative process.

The ability to live with mess, with uncertainty, and with the looping circularity of creativity is something that John Cleese (The Origin of Creativity 2009) talks about also. He acknowledges the instinctive urge to move from uncertainty to decision and argues that it limits creativity. The longer one is willing to live with the discomfort and continue exploring solutions the better the ultimate result.

It seems that some of Nussbaum’s motivation in describing creative intelligence is to move away from the preconceptions he believes have limited the potential he, and others, saw in design thinking. He recognises that the wicked problems have not gone away and they require attention – as a matter of urgency. By changing the context in which they are addressed participation in the search for solutions is opened up to everyone. No single profession, design included, can claim ownership of the creative process so perhaps the new terminology will support the framing of problems in new ways that lead to the development original solutions.

Steve Jobs and Apple

On the day Apple launches iOS7 and with the approach of the second anniversary of the death of the company's visionary leader it seems an appropriate opportunity to republish an article I wrote about Steve Jobs for the November 2011 edition of Irish Printer.

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It is quite extraordinary that an organisation in corporate America widely renowned as a world leader would use its global shop window to display an obituary photograph rather than promoting its most recently introduced product. And yet that is exactly what Apple did after launching the iPhone 4S. Steve Jobs died the following day and his photograph opened the website for almost two weeks. This, more than any other act, demonstrated the reverence in which the innovative leader of Apple Inc is held. 

The man who co-founded the world's most valuable consumer-facing brand [note 1] has been eulogised since his death at the early age of fifty-six. Articles across the world’s media have claimed he changed the world as we know it by developing the standard graphical user interface now familiar to all users of personal computers, perfecting the mouse for the marketplace, introducing the most accessible personal computer while also inventing the iPod, iPhone and iPad. Along the way he also revolutionised the design and print industries, the digital music industry and the mobile phone industry [note 2]. Not a bad legacy for a self-proclaimed college dropout [note 3].

My first inkling of the genius of Jobs came in the latter part of the 1980s when my design company invested in our first Apple Macintosh II computer and laser printer. They were so expensive that a five-year loan was required for the purchase, which then remained unused in the corner of the studio for six months. We didn’t dare start a job on the Mac for fear we wouldn’t be able to produce camera-ready artwork suitable for print. No one knew how to migrate from the familiar world of professional computer typesetting and pasted-up artwork to the intangibility and uncertainty of the digital wysiwyg world. In the high-pressure atmosphere of a busy design studio there was little time to spare learning an untried and untested approach. Nevertheless, gradually the Mac was drawn into service – originally as a typesetting machine – and thus began the inevitable development of an entirely digital workflow.

In 1989 I was contracted to advise the London based Brompton Group advertising agency on the introduction of a Mac system for the design and production of corporate literature for its biggest client, Lloyds Bank. It is difficult now to imagine just how difficult this task was at that time. The Mac was still largely untested in the design and print sector. Typographers in particular were fearful (rightly, as it turned out) for their jobs and so proclaimed loudly (and incorrectly) that type set on a Mac was grossly inferior to photosetting and computer set type. Art Directors refused to go near the keyboard and continued producing traditional scamps and rough layouts for the ‘Mac operator’ to work up. The Finished Art department could not even contemplate laying down their scalpels and letraset. Just as in any revolution many continued in denial until the inevitability of progress removed them from the scene. Those that couldn’t adapt were forced out.

My career, on the other hand, was at a good stage to benefit from the change. Having originally trained in a quintessentially traditional studio established outside Bradford by a designer who learned his craft at Lund Humphries with Herbert Spencer I went on to study for a degree in visual communication in Dublin. By the time I established a design practice in 1985 I had wide experience working in letterpress, offset litho and silkscreen. Layouts were produced in pencil with accurate specifications for print reproduction. I could render ten-point type with a high degree of precision after a year doing so for full-page newspaper ads. This was a crucial skill due to the cost of typesetting – mistakes often meant the difference between profit and loss on a job. But for young designers filled with the enthusiasm to experiment and go beyond the traditional typographic conventions the need for our work to be mediated by craftsmen could be frustrating. Busy typesetters with conventional training in this traditional craft were not always sympathetic to our motivations and generally wanted to get a job typeset, delivered and billed. My co-founder at Information Design, Ron Hamilton, once described the experience as being akin to learning to ice skate with one hand tied behind his back.

The Mac, once we rescued it from the dark corner of the studio and figured out how to use it, abolished those restrictions forever. It liberated type and allowed designers complete freedom to improvise and experiment. This period resulted in some incredibly exciting and inspiring work particularly by designers like April Greiman and David Carson in the US and Octavo Design, Vaughan Oliver and Neville Brody in the UK. It also inspired a review of the work of the early modern pioneers of typography such as El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Apollinaire's "figurative poetry” along with the influence of Futurist, Dada and de Stijl movements on graphic design.

While designers were enjoying their new found freedom the Mac was having an altogether different impact on the wider print sector. Typesetting houses began to disappear as word processing took over. Some companies managed to reinvent themselves as bureaus for outputting the bromides and film that were replacing pasted-up camera-ready artwork. The trade of the typesetter soon disappeared and the art of setting readable type suffered frequently at the hands of those untrained for the task.

The capabilities of the Mac expanded with the development of software applications such as Adobe Photoshop and significant improvements in the quality of desktop scanners. Origination companies with large investments in drum scanners began to feel the pressure and eventually all but disappeared. At the time few outside the trade realised the significance of the knowledge base and wealth of experience that could not be replaced easily or replicated by a computer. The skill and expertise of an originator who manages the conversion of an image from continuous tone transparency (made up of millions of colours) to reproduction in cyan, yellow, magenta and black ink included a high level of subjective judgement honed over years of practice. Part of the price to be paid for the convenience brought by the Mac has been an increase in poor quality reproduction.

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In the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century there were a number of high profile inventors who changed society with great rapidity. Edison is widely regarded as being the first to develop the industrial research laboratory [note 4] in a facility that occupied two city blocks by the 1880s. He registered over a thousand patents and is particularly remembered for perfecting the electric light bulb which had incalculable impact. It could be argued, however, that his real ingenuity was the development of the infrastructure to deliver electric power at an affordable price enabling every home to acquire this resource [note 5].

Similarly, Jobs will be remembered for his ability to harness the supply chain or, more often, to develop a completely new supply chain to deliver Apple's innovative services. He also demonstrated an astounding ability to perfect existing technology and develop completely new processes for the consumer to access it. It was this ability to provide a fully integrated and reliable user experience that continually set Apple apart and resulted in a customer base with exceptional devotion to its brand [note 6].

When competing products in the marketplace are virtually the same it is difficult to maintain differentiation and a competitive edge. Jobs clearly understood that design was central to innovation and reliability and built a company whose design philosophy makes it unique. In a very real sense Apple is the biggest design company in the world. Through this lens the product line might be seen as somewhat incidental, emerging from the design process to fulfill previously unimagined consumer desires and needs. The reshaping of how we consume popular music demonstrates this strategy. To harness the power of downloading music online Apple developed an entirely new shop-front with the iTunes Store and facilitated consumers with the iPod. Purchasing music is now a seamless process from the moment of hearing a tune to acquiring it – with Apple at the centre.

The positioning of design at the heart of Apple’s strategy has resulted in a range of premium products that are not particularly price sensitive. Margins are significantly greater therefore generating a higher return on investment than competitors. This focus on systems and processes that respond to (and sometimes prompt) changes in society is the fundamental reason for Apple’s phenomenal success. Steve Jobs recognised this from early on and it is clear that on his return to the helm in 1997 his focus was on implementing this strategy. The subsequent success of Apple in the marketplace led to his iconic status as a visionary and charismatic businessman, not only in the eyes of his own employees and customers but also among his direct competitors and in the wider business community.