All Nippon Airways (ANA), Japan’s largest airline, operates in a highly competitive industry that has not witnessed any radical innovations for years. To make the situation more challenging, the company is based in Japan – a country characterized by risk-avoiding organizations and decades of nearly zero growth. Despite all these hurdles, ANA is focused on creating and experimenting with concepts that one day might re-imagine the company or the industry in general. While on a global scale this might not be novel per se, ANA is now utilizing its “ANA Digital Design Lab” (DDL) as an interface towards Japan’s startup ecosystem contributing to it and bringing in new ideas.

One core element in ANA’s DNA has always been the spirit of yanchasa – Japanese for being rebellious – and DDL is one of its manifestations. Already from the start ANA has been a privately owned company, a rare sight in an industry predominantly controlled by state-backed enterprises. Considering the context – an inert aviation industry and traditional Japanese society – standing out from the crowd by taking risks is not seen as a textbook approach to running a company in Japan. It is therefore worthwhile to take a closer look at DDL, as it might offer us a glimpse of how companies in Japan or the aviation industry could look like in the future.

The DDL has a core team and ambassadors throughout the company.

Currently, the DDL consists of five core team members as well as approximately twenty ambassadors throughout the company. Kevin Kajitani, one of the founding members of DDL, described the team as spanning various disciplines as well as generations: baby boomers and millennials; engineers, corporate planners as well as people with a background in hospitality. But instead of just being ‘out there’, DDL is also supported by the aforementioned ambassadors that serve a dual role. Firstly, they feed internal insights into DDL’s processes. Secondly – and perhaps more importantly – they help DDL in spreading their outputs throughout the organization. In doing so, they not only serve as ‘antennas’ for DDL in identifying best practices and current challenges across the organization, but they are also regularly brought together by DDL to help with disseminating knowledge and ideas between DDL’s broader stakeholder network. This indwelling, in fact, has traditionally characterized Japanese companies: employees from all responsibility levels are encouraged to intervene whenever they encounter processes that do not work. However, DDL’s focus goes beyond optimizing the present by mostly focusing on the future.

The Wonderfly Platform

Institutionally speaking, the DDL is still relatively young. Regardless, it has established a collaboration with the technological development NPO XPRIZE ) and created WonderFLY, a crowdfunding platform that supports innovators and provides ANA’s loyal customers with products never seen before. Based on the ideas submitted to WonderFLY, ANA provides the creators with funding for the prototype, after which a crowdfunding campaign is launched in the platform.

On Wonderfly, ANA is opening up its customer base to external innovators. Individuals and teams get the chance to test their ideas and receive funding.

What makes WonderFLY stand out in the jungle of crowdfunding sites is the way in which ANA is both opening up its customer base to external innovators as well as providing them with funding and resources without any equity expected in return. The WonderFLY platform provides individuals and teams with an opportunity to see if their idea has potential among ANA’s loyal customers: Japanese consumers are known to be both demanding and eager to try new things, and ANA’s customers are no exception here. The idea was initially pitched as a crowdfunding platform, but the DDL looked at current market failures in Japan and decided to radically alter the prevailing crowdfunding design. The first iteration of the concept was met with harsh critique both externally and internally, and for DDL this was a good sign: if it is seen as crazy or impossible, there must be something of value there. Thus, pushing the criticism aside for a while, DDL envisioned a scenario where WonderFLY existed, and from there they identified a starting point for realizing the idea, and a first WonderFLY event was organized in Tokyo in fall 2016.

In addition to this, the aim is also to indirectly contribute to Japan’s startup ecosystem by partnering with organizations such as Slush Asia. Thus, although on a surface level WonderFLY is basically a crowdfunding platform, on a deeper level its design proposal is to advance the entrepreneurial climate in Japan as well as gather new ideas on what ANA could become.

While the platform does not directly transform the aviation industry or ANA itself, it is nonetheless one of the first steps towards doing so, as no one really knows what else will emerge out of DDL. Thus, for ANA and DDL, design thinking amplifies the company’s DNA: ANA has always been the rebel at heart. The DDL and its application of design thinking now provide the company with the tools and methods to make their (historical) essence explicit through concrete, yet experimental, initiatives such as the WonderFLY platform.

At this stage, WonderFLY is living through its infancy, so it is somewhat difficult to analyze how it has changed or will change ANA as a company and whether it contributes to Japan’s startup scene. However, what makes this story interesting is that it takes place at the intersection of aviation industry and Japan. As mentioned in the beginning, both are seen as rather stagnant contexts, which is why DDL and WonderFLY should be seen as designerly informed propositions on how things could be organized. What is more, especially in Japan many companies seem to be embracing design thinking on a surface level, meaning that their focus is on copying and following the process, thus facing the danger of neglecting their initial competitive advantages. Above, however, we have described an initiative that is connecting design thinking with yanchasa – one of ANA’s guiding principles.

The Challenge

Experts agree: simply improving staff  hand-washing habits could prevent these needless infections. While hospitals have plenty of communal sinks and hand-sanitizing dispensers, time-strapped caregivers simply don’t use them, and handwashing monitoring is still done manually with pen and paper. To figure out why compliance is so low, Northwestern University graduates Mert Iseri and Yuri Malina spent weeks observing staff at North Shore University Health System. They noticed medical staff wiped their hands on their scrubs, which led to an important insight for brainstorming possible solutions. In 2012 they founded SwipeSense, Inc. with the goal of incentivizing good hand-hygiene via smart, wearable gel dispensers and a web-based monitoring platform.

The Approach

SwipeSense partnered with the innovation consultancy IDEO to prototype alternative products and approaches in both the physical and digital realm. The team worked together to test more than 70 design iterations. While the goal remained the same – eliminate hospital acquired infections – the scope of their project shifted and changed with each iteration. Beyond simply the hand sanitizer device itself, the team examined how providing more data about hand sanitization could provide added value to SwipeSense’s business, and the healthcare system at large.

Slider Image Sources: © IDEO / McCormick University / Northwestern Memorial Hospital

Why Iteration Was Important

Mert outlined SwipeSense’s four stages of iteration: The first step was recognizing a common habit: People wipe their hands on their pants to “clean” them. So Iseri and Malina came up with the idea of building upon that natural habit for a hand-sanitization solution. The team needed a quick, easy way to get the idea out of their minds into a tangible form, so for their first prototype, they chopped of the top of a deodorant stick and adhered it to their pants to wipe their hands. Then, they considered their users, the people who work in hospitals, and watched them engage with various prototypes to understand what worked and what didn’t work.

“It’s a process of going back and forth. You need to be humble enough to know that your first idea is probably a crappy idea,” Mert says and adds, “Only build as much as you need to get it out there, and not so much to and an answer but to ask to a better question.”

From observing users interact with their prototype, the team moved in a direction that was predicated on the action “swipe to squeeze.” They then designed the system around creating a gel dispenser with a function that provides sanitization data. At each stage, the questions changed and the scope of the project changed as well. Ultimately, the project wasn’t only about hand sanitization, but about the medical community at large.

As they continue to iterate prototypes, they continue designing toward the goal of something that’s viable, reliable, and commercially desirable. But as Mert insisted, “the job is not over until you’ve solved the problem. There’s no moment where there’s a  final version because the universe is ever-changing, and we’ll always have to make our product more valuable.” While SwipeSense released a patent-pending system in 2013–a user- friendly design that clips easily onto hospital scrubs and records when users disinfect their hands–the team knows they’ll continue iterating. Their eventual goal: to save 100,000 lives lost each year.

SwipeSense Today

As of 2016, SwipeSense is a software-as-service subscription model. Hospitals pay an annual fee for the hardware and the data it creates.

Over the past 10 years, the hospital’s managers have transformed their institution from the usual, grim, human-repair shop into a bright and comforting place. By incorporating design thinking and design principles into their planning process, the hospital’s executives, supported by external designers, have turned the hospital into a showplace that has won a number of safety, quality, and design awards — including a nomination for the prestigious Dutch Design Award. Even more important to the not-for-profit organization: patient intake rose 47%.

They started with patient-first thinking. The first step in any design-thinking process is to understand the end-user’s experience. In this case, a team of the Rotterdam Eye Hospital’s CEO, CFO, managers, staff, and doctors wanted to understand how their patients felt when they entered the hospital and what could be done to improve their experience. The hospital board directors realized that most of their patients felt afraid of going blind. Thus their primary goal should be to reduce patients’ fears.

To do that, the team next looked inside and outside the health care for ideas about how to improve the hospital’s service. For example, they learned about scheduling from the just-in-time practices of the upscale Dutch supermarket chain Albert Heijn and KLM, the Netherlands’ flagship airline. They also gained important insights about operational excellence from two eye hospital organizations founded by Rotterdam Eye Hospital: the World Association of Eye Hospitals and the European Association of Eye Hospitals.

At this point, teams of caregivers at the hospital began designing experiments based on the most promising concepts the Rotterdam Eye Hospital innovation hunters had brought back with them. Such experiments were crucial to the program’s success: proponents of the methodology insist that because it’s impossible to know in advance what impact an idea will actually have, making small-scale experiments is a crucial part of refining the concepts and winning the support of senior managers.

These small experiments were somewhat informal. They were not run like a clinical trial with a formal reckoning at their conclusion. Instead, the transition to formal adoption tended to be more gradual. If an idea worked, sooner or later other groups would ask if they could try it too, and the best ideas spread organically.

One reason the hospital could be so flexible was that most of the ideas eventually adopted were fairly inexpensive. From the start, planners kept a tight rein on costs, in part because the hospital worked with no outside consultants or high-priced designers. When designers were needed, the planners usually found up-and-coming external designers who saw a commission from the hospital as a way to gain experience and exposure.

A good example of a small but powerful change to improve the institution’s information and communication structure involved the children’s hospital. The hospital sends beautiful T-shirts with a specific animal print to children in advance of their stay. The consulting ophthalmologists wear a button with the same animal during the appointment, which gives them a way to immediately connect with the children and to create a feeling of community.

Appointment Animals (Illustrations: Ropvanmierlo Studio)

An example of a more complex change to the hospital’s operations is the newly created culture and training program called “Eye Care Air.” Inspired by the safety and training programs of airlines, Eye Care Air trains all caregivers in fear reduction, teamwork, and safety. The program addresses such topics such as: How openly should I talk to patients, doctors, and other colleagues? How do I speak frankly to a patient without triggering panic?

Clever architectural and interior ideas also contributed to reducing patients’ fears. For instance, the children’s department got a face-lift to make it less frightening and more fun, with such imaginative new features as stepping stones at service counters that allow kids to communicate eye to eye with the hospital staff.

Some impressions of the new children’s department

Not every idea worked. One concept, to pick patients up directly from their homes in a taxi, didn’t reduce their fears at all. When a pilot didn’t catch on, the hospital planners would analyze the experiment and try to understand why. In the case of the taxi service, patients’ fears weren’t reduced because the taxi ended up in the same traffic jams as patients would have encountered if they had used their own cars.

Other ideas, such as the EyePad, an iPad app that made it possible for an individual patient to track his or her progress through a procedure, took more time to sell to the staff than to the patients. In that case, planners had to persuade employees that the idea behind an electronic checklist was to reduce patient anxiety and improve service quality, not “blame and shame.”

Making the Rotterdam Eye Hospital a more pleasant environment has had a number of positive effects. Patients heal faster now and have a more positive experience overall. The hospital staff can now conduct 95% of all procedures without an overnight stay and the hospital itself scores 8.6 (out of 10) on its customer satisfaction surveys. Employees are also happier. One staff members says, “Because the Rotterdam Eye Hospital is so small, lines are short and I can deeply focus on my profession. There is room for new ideas.”

Design thinking has also earned the hospital a reputation as an innovator. Even people outside health care are talking about the hospital now, largely because of its creative approach. (The hospital’s art collection is even included in the city’s annual museum night.)

Over time, as many of these experiments succeeded, internal scepticism about the value of design declined. Employees can see that better design had a positive effect not only on the patients but also on themselves.

Vlisco reacted to these changes in the West African market by introducing design thinking within the company to come up with a new vision and strategy. Vlisco produces fabrics since 1846, and is unlike other European fashion businesses, as Niels Verhart, Digital Innovation Manager, explains. “The product is not ready-to-wear, it’s fabric. It’s a semi-finished product. The Fabrics are produced in the Netherlands and sold on West African markets, where customers bring them to their tailors to have their outfit made.”

“Vlisco has been around for 170 years with a quite steady business development, but recently the African context is changing dramatically and fast,” says Betty van Breemaat, Consumer Insights and Brand Innovation Manager. “We are confronted with severe Chinese competition which has put Vlisco’s business under pressure. Technology has also been a market disruptor”, Betty explains. “Consumers are changing the way they shop, due to the rise of social media, formal retail and e-commerce.” Within the African youth boom, Vlisco recognized the necessity to transform from a traditional trade oriented business into a value adding business.

In 2010, Vlisco decided to build an innovation team within the company. Betty van Breemaat was one of the first to join this newly established group, “a very small team – out of 2300 people working at Vlisco, we started with two persons.” In the beginning, the team seemed like a start-up inside Vlisco: “We were trying to find our way within the existing organization. It was a rough period: explaining our purpose and the situation Vlisco was in at that moment, but our consumer-centric approach did find its way in the company. Gradually, our team grew with experts on consumer research, digital marketing, social media and content marketing,” Betty explains.

The new team actively started reaching out to their colleagues, inviting them to participate in different workshops and letting them profit from the team’s expertise on innovation and design thinking. The team’s core group is consistent, but for every project or project phase, they pull different people out of other departments to merge them into the team and profit from their expertise. “We are breaking all these silos, get people enthusiastic about a problem and start working on it,“ Niels says.

Mapping Consumer Journeys

The Vlisco Innovation Team started to map out consumer journeys of African Consumers. “We did a lot, and I really mean a lot of ethnographic research,” Betty says. “Not only quantitative research, but also a lot of qualitative research. We spent a lot of time with our actual consumers, talking to them, understanding their problems and filming everything. Something that hadn’t been done before within Vlisco.”

Based on this data, the team members developed thorough personas that covered their consumers’ fashion styles, needs and core values – from independent, ambitious businesswomen to global fashionistas or traditional mothers of five. “Our business was about transaction. Consumers bought our product and that’s where it stopped, as far as our part was concerned,“ Betty explains.

Through ethnographic research and customer journeys, the team found out about their users’ need to have customized clothing. “The process between buying the fabric and the end result of the garment is very frustrating and time-consuming“. Vlisco sells fabrics to consumers, who take them to their local tailors. “And then, one of the first difficulties in the journey is to explain what kind of style he or she wants to make with this fabric,“ Betty explains. The tailors struggle as well: “They don’t know how to convert the wishes into an actual garment. There are many frustrations and frictions in the after-purchase phase. We tried to figure out how we can be a facilitator in this process, by helping both our consumers and our business partners in the tailoring industry and the fashion designer industry. This was, on a high level, our starting point for ideation“. The team developed ideas which were polished into concepts and proceeded to involve other departments for prototyping and iteration. Then, to pitch ideas and test their prototypes, the team members traveled to their points-of-sale in Central and Western Africa.

Prototype I: Vlisco Prêt à Couture

Based on the consumer research and insights the Innovation Team developed a new service for Vlisco stores in Africa.

The resulting service, Prêt-à-Couture, is a one-stop-shopping experience. Customers pick a fabric to their liking and choose from a range of different garments. A professional tailor takes the customer’s body measurements in the store; the garment is made in an atelier and delivered back to the store for fittings, where Vlisco takes responsibility for quality and timing. Thereby, Vlisco offers the processing of the fabric, which the customers needed to seek elsewhere up to this point.

The concept was prototyped and tested with 24 loyal consumers, six store staff members, six tailors and two pattern makers and subsequently implemented in the Vlisco store in Accra, Ghana, in August 2014. Vlisco plans to expand the service to other Vlisco stores in Africa.

Prototype II: Vlisco Style Configurator

The Vlisco Innovation Team developed another concept that covered the post-purchase phase of the consumer: While the customer shops in the store, he or she gets to test a desired fabric in a mix and match app. By choosing from a library of silhouettes, the customer can preview the fabric within a garment and send the preview to their smartphone. After testing the prototype with store personnel and consumers, the team received valuable feedback. They started developing the business case, worked on features and interaction design and are now preparing to launch the first version into the Vlisco store in Lagos, Nigeria.

Consumer-centric and Colleague-centric

Vlisco’s headquarters are located in the south of the Netherlands and thus 6000 kilometres away from their markets and African colleagues. “This gap makes it hard to understand our consumers and it makes it hard to work closely with our African colleagues,” Betty remarks. “By using design thinking and creating multidisciplinary teams together with African colleagues we get first-hand information and empower the local organisation to come up with solutions. We are not only developing service concepts for our consumers, it’s also serving the company itself. I think that’s the beauty of it.”

During the testing phase of the ‘Style Configurator’ prototype, the team used simple tools like mobile phones and video cameras to record user feedback. “We conducted tests on different levels; conceptual, usability and interaction,” Niels explains, “basically by talking to the customer and filming everything.” Showing well-cut, informative videos instead of presentation slides is one of their cultural “hacks” to make their process more visible in a flexible way and spread results within Vlisco. “We try to not only be consumer-centric, but also to be colleague-centric – so we always emphasize with our colleagues to see where they are coming from and what they need to understand the relevance of this way of working,” Betty says. For the Innovation Team, this means to convince their colleagues on the run: “We show what we are doing and prove that it works and then, gradually, take people along on the journey. Nobody knew about these projects that we’ve been working on for the past few years, but now some people start seeing the relevance and ask questions like ‚Why didn’t you tell us before?‘. That’s a really interesting process. It’s starting to change, we can feel it.”

Adding Value to Service Expansion

Innovations like the Tailoring Service and the Style Configurator expand Vlisco’s services beyond fabric production and sales. Vlisco’s innovation team hopes to add value to this expansion by creating jobs locally and facilitating the local fashion industry, whether it’s tailors, fashion designers or trim suppliers – while simultaneously growing Vlisco’s business. Innovating their brand is crucial, as Betty explains: “By adding value to our product and embracing the African fashion industry, Vlisco secures its future. Africa is changing and we need to change as well, it’s the only way.”

„I first came into contact with design thinking when I needed an idea”, Itai Ben-Jacob explains. In 2015, he intended to explore one of innogy’s innovation focus areas, ‘urban mobility.’ Together with fellow innovation hub members he organized a series of design thinking workshops to wade through the expansive topic of urban concepts – one of them focusing on mobility: “We wanted to understand urban mobility – what does it actually entail? What type of business should we start?“

Itai Ben-Jacob and a colleague, a trained design thinking coach, prepared and facilitated the workshops. Participants came from different backgrounds – the team consisted of Innogy employees as well as external experts from mobility businesses, researchers, representatives of the municipality, and external start ups. Together, the participants attempted to work out the scope of “urban mobility”: “We tried to understand which blocks this topic consists of, and which problems lie within these blocks. For example public transport – which problems exist here? How big are they? Who suffers from these problems?”

In this problem definition phase, they approached the potential customer base: “We had experts who brought their experience in, and we spread surveys through our channels”, Itai Ben-Jacob explains. “We got good responses there”, he says, but his personal ‘Aha moment’ happened during the problem redefinition: When they “dissected problem areas into smaller ingredients and identified which internal resources we have. For me, something just clicked in that moment: On the one hand there’s a huge problem, on the other hand we have resources that are underutilized, and we can use them to solve this problem – and now we need to find a solution that connects all the dots.” The problem? The ‘chicken and egg’ dilemma of eMobility. Energy providers don’t develop the charging stations network further because there are not enough e-cars. On the other side, car manufacturers don’t produce e-cars because there are not enough charging stations. By linking the existing – but underutilized – innogy charging stations network to the problem, Itai Ben-Jacob and his colleague Christian Uhlich developed the solution of eCar Sharing: A project in which innogy provides local communities, local businesses and citizens access to flexible, electric mobility solutions. Users can book eCars on the internet and pick them up at the innogy charging stations – an offer that’s especially attractive for municipalities or companies that wish to provide their employees with eco-friendly eCars but are unwilling or unable to maintain their own vehicle fleet.

Launching the innogy eCarSharing project: Christian Uhlich, Itai Ben-Jacob and Pavel Tomíček. (from left to right).

In the next nine months, Itai Ben-Jacob went from pitching the idea to assembling a team to developing a minimal proof of concept (minimum viable product), which was „the moment we got someone to pay for this“, he explains. The team went back to the innovation hub management with this result: „It exists, it works, somebody pays for it – now we need the resources to scale it up and integrate it into the company.“ Being closely connected to existing resources in innogy, the eCarSharing project was established internally rather than being split up into a separate company. In mid-2017, innogy’s eCarSharing operates in four German communities with more than 12 eCars and already saved more than 1,5 tons of CO2 emissions. The team, now also including eMobility expert Pavel Tomicek, finished the proof of concept stage and prepares for scaling up.

Innogy’s Innovation Hub

Innogy established their innovation hub in the second half of 2015, with the mission to „create a sustainable energy system for new generations to live in a world worth having“. Believing that an organization cannot support the mainstream customers and push for disruptive technology at the same time, innogy launched the innovation hub as an independent body within the company. Thereby, the hub could be embedded among emerging customers in need of disruptive technology.

There are two ways to develop a business in the Innogy innovation hub: Venture developers either look for start-ups that work within their innovation focus areas, or come up with their own startup business model. Before long, on both of these paths the developers have to pitch in front of the innovation hub management – which either dismisses or approves the plan with proposals for improvements and milestone expectations. The goal of these developments is either to spin the startup off into a separate company or build it up internally.

Spreading Design Thinking Within Innogy

For Itai Ben-Jacob, design thinking is „a creative way to find solution ideas for problems that are worth solving, in a very efficient way. Otherwise you wouldn’t probably get to this kind of idea.“

While working with creative methods is the common mode in the innovation hub, employees in other parts of innogy are new to design thinking. They may explore the method through trainings, for example by booking workshops with LRN LAB (learn lab), a business unit within the in-house consultancy of innogy. Founded internally in the beginning of 2017, LRN LAB consults innogy employees as well as external customers in the context of digital transformation with the help of different methods and tools. “Design thinking isn’t the only method we do trainings on, it is one of several”, senior consultant Nadja Krombach explains. Agile, Scrum and Lean Startup are further topics that employees are eager to explore, for example in the innogy departments of IT, Human Resources, and Retail.

“On the one hand, we do ‘train the trainer’ settings, where we train the innogy colleagues so they transport their knowledge into the company”, Nadja Krombach says, “and on the other hand we do workshops where we apply design thinking with a real case.” The LRN LAB crew aims to solve concrete business challenges with DT in these workshops, but the setting also depends on the time frame of the customer.

“We want to initiate a cultural change in the company”, project lead Jumana Marji explains, who understands design thinking more as an attitude than a method. “With an attitude of design thinking we push towards enabling a cultural transformation, towards a company that is more agile and has less hierarchies.”

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Matthes Derdack had a clear goal in mind when he introduced design thinking into his company. He wanted to redesign a specific feature (the planning of on-call duty) of his company’s overall software product. The project started well. The management was convinced of the method, which also seemed a good match with the mindset and the already existing manner of operation at Derdack. In addition, management received support from an external coach and had a clear vision of the project’s objectives.

Madel, Derdack’s first Design Thinking Coach

Obstacles and Challenges: The First Design Thinking Project

The team picked up design thinking enthusiastically when they saw how quickly it led to rich and helpful user insights. Despite these successes, the project turned out to be far more demanding than previously imagined. Design thinking was often perceived as something on top of the normal daily work. Being forced to work in a new way in non-hierarchical and heterogeneous teams sometimes caused additional discomfort.

Derdack also experienced a wide gap between the idea as a raw invention and the product as an implemented innovation. The gap was even harder to overcome because it coincided with the end of the phase when the external coach was present at the company: after three month the team had to work on the project without the facilitation of a coach. Additionally, the project did not take the estimated 3 months to implement, but rather nearly 9 months were required until the product was on the market.

Learning and Expanding: Implementing Design Thinking 

Overcoming the obstacles created by this gap made it clear how serious Derdack was about design thinking. Market feedback justified the company’s faith in the method – as Matthes Derdack, CEO of Derdack describes:
“Last year was a great year for us. I don´t know if that was because of design thinking, but I’m sure the method had a definite effect on the results. If this year is as good again, I give a large amount of the credit to design thinking.”

As long as the impact of design thinking could not be measured with their usual KPIs (turnover, net operating margin, customer acquisition, …), management used feedback from their customers as a yardstick of performance. The overall positive feedback from the beginning, helped management to stick to design thinking: “Customers love to participate. Their feedback to design thinking is extremely positive,” says Matthes Derdack.
For Derdack, the key to scale design thinking from an idea generator to a driving force of organizational change was to customize design thinking to the specific requirements of the company and adapt goals and resources appropriate to the given scope of application. Mixing more experienced design thinkers with newbies in design thinking projects helped to spread the method throughout the organization after the first project.

Walk the Talk: How to Change an Organization with Design Thinking

Matthes Derdack, CEO of Derdack

The first project at Derdack reflected a spirit of freedom and experimentation, but also generated a lot of friction due to the unclear structure and organization of the project. From that experience the company changed how design thinking is managed today. Reflecting this process are the four most important pieces of advice on how to implement organizational change based on design thinking:

1. Hire specialists.
When the coach left after three months the team had problems to organize itself. Derdack therefore hired a design thinking specialist to facilitate design thinking in the company. The areas of focus were: planning and organizing work-sessions, setting up customer interviews and co-working sessions and, most importantly, keeping track of parallel projects and pushing the teams to work on them.

2. Create a space.
Derdack redesigned the office space collaboratively. Having a special design thinking room proved to be very beneficial. The room was established at the beginning of the first project and exists until today. The specific space and environment there helps to work with the method by putting it into a physical and mental setting.

3. Adapt design thinking to your needs.
One important change in using design thinking on a regular basis was to break down the design thinking sessions from whole days once a week into one or two sessions from 2 to 4 hours per week. These sessions could be integrated more easily into everyday work and felt more ‘natural’ to the participants. In this way the design thinking sessions became part of bigger projects and today can be planned just one or two weeks in advance. Changing the timeslots for design thinking every week is useful to fill gaps in the calendars – as long as enough time is available for the entire session.

4. Keep the team united.
When starting new projects, Derdack carefully pays attention to make sure that every team member can contribute to the team during the complete project. Keeping the team united is essential even if this means suspending the project while someone is on vacation or only working in the mornings to fit another member’s schedule who works part-time for family reasons.

Background

Diagnostic imaging procedures are cutting-edge technology, but at the same time they are an unpleasant experience for patients – and even more for pediatric patients. Doug Dietz is an industrial designer, working for GE healthcare since more than 20 years. He remembered the first time when he saw a little girl who was crying on her way to a scanner that was designed by him. Doug suddenly saw the situation with the eyes of the girl. “The room itself is kind of dark and has those flickering fluorescent lights”, he remembers in his TED talk. He adds “that machine that I had designed basically looked like a brick with a hole in it.”

Challenge

A new challenge was born. How could one create a scanner experience that children would love?

Approach / Insight

In their book on Creative Confidence the brothers Tom and David Kelley recall how Doug Dietz tried to find new inspiration for this project by trying out design thinking. He went to Stanford’s d.school for a workshop.

“The workshop offered Doug new tools that ignited his creative confidence: He learned about a human-centered approach to design and innovation. […] Going through the human-centered design process with people in diverse industries and roles—from management to human resources to finance—struck a chord in him. “I started to imagine how powerful this tool could be if I brought it back and got cross-functional teams to work together.”

[…] He started by observing and gaining empathy for young children at a day care center. He talked to child life specialists to understand what pediatric patients went through. He reached out for help from people around him, including a small volunteer team from GE, experts from a local children’s museum, and doctors and staff from two hospitals. Next, he created the first prototype of what would become the “Adventure Series” scanner and was able to get it installed as a pilot program in the children’s hospital at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.”

(Cited from )

Implementation

This is what Doug Dietz invented after his user research:

GE-Adventure Series – The Pirate Room

“In the Pirate Adventure, a visual transformation of the equipment that was available before, patients are on a dock. There is a shipwreck and some sand castles in the corner. Children then work on the plank to be scanned.  The Coral City Adventure in the emergency room gives children an underwater experience. It has a disco ball that makes light like bubbles around the room; children get into a yellow submarine and listen to the sound of harps whilst the procedure takes place.  The Cozy Camp gives children the chance to be scanned in a specialized sleeping bag, under a starry sky in an impressive camp setting.”

(Cited from the Newsroom of GE Healthcare)

Impact

Some positive impacts derive from Doug Dietz’ Adventure Series. First of all, the patient satisfaction scores went up 90 percent. Children do not suffer of anxiety anymore. Instead some of them even ask their parents if they can come back tomorrow. It makes it easier for children to hold still during the procedure what in turn prevents the doctors from having to repeat the scan. This less need for anaesthesiologists meant more patients could get scanned each day, which heavily impacts the financial side of the equation.

The experience of joy and play during the scan also took away the fear from parents. As Doug Dietz puts it: “If you got the child you got the parent, and if you got the parent, you got the child.” He now trains other GE employees to use design thinking and innovation methods in their teams.

Design thinking has oftentimes been described as a cultural change. Companies integrating design thinking typically aim at building a “design culture”. What does this actually mean? There are some normative claims. A culture of design thinking should focus on cross-disciplinary collaboration, and employees are able to challenge the status quo. Design thinking changes the “social structure” of a company. But even if we know how IDEO and other famous design agencies keep their creative culture alive, many questions still remain open about how a company with a genuinely different working culture can transform itself into a design thinking culture.

Siemens is a company that aims to be a trendsetter in all its business sectors, and to shape its technologies with a clear focus on delivering tangible and valuable benefits to customers and stakeholders for their sustainable growth. With diverse market needs and customers who are willing to try new things, China is an ideal place to develop world-class innovations. Siemens has been increasing investment to enhance R&D capabilities in China, which is one of the most important R&D bases for the company. Siemens looks back on a long history. Nearly 170 years of corporate development have naturally formed certain traditions and behaviours. Additionally, the question must be raised as to how a global player like Siemens can take into consideration the different mentalities of the staff in its global branches.

In order to find some answers, we talked to Dr. Bettina Maisch who works as a design thinking expert at Siemens Corporate Technology (CT) in Bejing. Bettina was hired in 2012 by Dr. Arding Hsu, former Senior Vice President and Head of Corporate Technology of Siemens in China, to set up a design thinking program within the company.

In order for Siemens to keep its competitive advantage in the unique environment of China, Dr. Hsu had the strategic goal to develop innovative technical solutions on the basis of the unique needs of the Chinese market and to speed up the innovation process through fast iterations of ideating, prototyping and testing. In order to generate a long-term impact for Siemens in China, an internal program has been initiated that trains R&D managers to become innovation catalysts for market-driven innovation through design thinking. From the beginning on, the teams were trained and coached along the execution of “real world” projects in pursuit of added business value. The launch started with four projects in parallel. Three of them were coached by IDEO and three by a team of the Center for Design Research at Stanford University. The idea was to test and compare different approaches from a design/innovation company and academia within the corporate environment of Siemens.

Three levels of cultural challenges

Applying design thinking from IDEO and Stanford at Siemens CT China revealed the particular challenges that arise from three cultural aspects: company culture, educational culture and national culture.

As already mentioned, Siemens is a multinational B2B and technology-driven company. The size of the company, the organizational structure, its well defined and established processes and responsibilities make it difficult to apply an innovation approach that is so different to its status quo. In order to deal with this issue, strong support by the upper management as well as identification of supporters in the middle management was crucial to build up the necessary framework to conduct project in a need-driven approach and to foster the cultural change.

The second cultural challenge is the educational background of the teams. All the project team members have been engineers specialized in a certain discipline, and they are trained to perform certain job functions. They are proficient in what they do and they are good at it – so why to change it?

Most of them were used to working individually on specific tasks given to them and concentrating on the technical demands of a product. This technical mindset was the first cultural hurdle to design thinking, which focuses in great part on what is called the “human factor.” The “human factor” means to have a deep empathy with the users, care about their emotions and their experiences. In short, the engineers saw the technology, but oftentimes not the social context. Bettina saw this as a challenge she needed to address. “We needed to make them see and feel,” she states.

How to achieve this? The i.DT coaches supported the team members during the needfinding phase through joint preparation of observation and interviews, they went onsite with the teams and remind them to broaden their attention and carefully record the context of technology applications. After the field study, the coaches helped to extract and synthesize the collected data from the field in order to identify insights and opportunity areas for new solutions. For example in a fashion shop lighting project, the experts were used to focusing on which technology and how a certain technology is installed. With the guidance of coaches, it still took the experts significant time and effort before they started discovering how people react and interact with the light and finding out the reasons behind user behaviours.

What can be learned from this? Not everybody goes to the field and automatically learns the “right” things about the user. It comes as no surprise that not every employee is able to see at first glance what is important in a certain user scenario: A long-standing tradition has shaped the company and affects the working style and mindsets of its employees.

The third cultural challenge arose from the national background of people working with and working for. In the case of the projects at Siemens CT China, almost all team members and their customers are Chinese. Born, raised and mostly educated in China (some of them got their PhD degrees in the U.S. or Europe) and deeply rooted with the cultural DNA of the country. This brings in some issues in regards to mentalities and customs. A deep understanding and respect for the Chinese culture was needed in order to create the special Siemens way of design thinking in China. Among other things, Bettina told us that “Chinese colleagues are oftentimes very timid, for example during the brainstorming phase. It’s extremely important that the supervisor is not in the brainstorming session, otherwise everything will have a totally different dynamics.”

The aspect of losing one’s face is much more problematic than in western cultures. Bettina and her colleagues had to react to this. Consequently, design thinking coaches at Siemens try to conduct discussions solely with the member of the team present and none of the supervisors and put a lot of effort to build up a trustful working atmosphere. This expresses the aim of “industrial Design Thinking in China”: It is innovation from Chinese employees for China. Sensitivity and attention to the specific characteristics of employees is needed by design thinking facilitators.

Not only a company culture: the need for flexibility in design thinking

What started in 2012 ago was actually not only a design thinking initiative. The program “industrial Design Thinking in China” – as the term already indicates – is a special adjustment of design thinking for the needs of a company like Siemens in a country like China. Not only do a company’s culture and its employees need to react and change, design thinking itself has to be introduced in a creative and flexible way, sensitive to the environment in which it is implemented.

Siemens China: Workshop Situation 03

Siemens China: Workshop Situation 02

Siemens China: Workshop Situation 01

The AirBnB user base is quite diverse. Sometimes the situation arises that a request does not match the host’s lifestyle or expectations of what a »proper guest« may look and behave like (just think of young Berlin party tourists trying to book the quiet apartment of an elderly couple). In such or similar occasions the likelihood of hosts rejecting or not responding is relatively high. Even though one might feel sympathetic to the host’s decision, the user experience for the guest breaks. Especially inexperienced first time users are unlikely to come back. AirBnB knows exactly, that running a multi-sided platform model entails the mediation and facilitation of user relations. It therefore has to find ways to resolve or prevent such conflicts, e.g. by adequately matching certain user profiles. In order to do that however it first had to know why hosts reject, i.e. what are reasons that aren’t understood yet and how may they be addressed?

The resulting and still ongoing »Why Hosts Reject« initiative is a good present example for AirBnB’s devotion to deliver the best user experience possible. They made it a focus area and formed a team to conduct an in-depth foundational research in which Insights and Analytics teams work closely together. Data from 100 quantitative surveys (closed and open-ended) with hosts who recently said »no« was triangulated with insights from analytics as well as with one-to-one interview follow-ups with selected respondents. They found a myriad of often emotional and logistical problems and reasons, e.g. merely insufficient information on the guest’s background, weirdly worded messages with lots of scribal errors or inaccurate representations of availability in the hosts calendar, to name but a few. After data analysis and synthesis the team ended up with a tree-structure-like taxonomy of reasons why hosts say no.

Unfortunately we are not allowed to share detailed contents of the taxonomy here, as similarly to the »Snow White« project this is handled as classified information. Nonetheless we can say, that it emerged as an elaborated visual representation during the synthesis sessions: “Even the fact that we took the time to beautifully communicate this, is a definitive example of [the design thinking posture] here, which is pretty special. You might say it’s not that important. But it helps to communicate to a large audience in here”, Sasha Lubomirsky, AirBnB’s Head of User Research, rapturously points out. “We now have our own map with the top categories of the taxonomy and we’re working through them right now” she continues. This is done by using existing host and guest personas as a lens to approach problem areas from the taxonomy. Some personas act more as property mangers whereas others are more concerned about personal relations to the guest they are renting out to.

Sasha Lubomirsky, Head of User Research at AirBnB

The team now focuses on situations, where those problem fields and personas are involved, which might have the biggest impacts when they get resolved. This is done by small experiments on the platform, e.g. making hosts more comfortable by providing them with more custom-tailored information about their guests. Sasha is very clear on the fact that it was “the taxonomy that helped us to formulate those very well-informed hypotheses. […] When you understand the problem, the solution is way more straightforward. If you understand the problem, the ideas follow!” The »Rejection Taxonomy« therefore stands as one good example for AirBnB’s lived design thinking practice, which values the user experience above everything else, even if the company is growing fast.

Host rejection taxonomy: This is #designthinking at @airbnb. What's your story?
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Many design thinking advocates like David Kelley argue that it is a tool that enables people to experience creative confidence . Creativity is not a domain of only a chosen few. Do creative companies actually teach their employees to be creative? To answer this question, we went to a firm that became famous for its creative software. Autodesk is the leading software developer for computer-aided-design (CAD) and computer animation. It has a noteworthy association with design thinking: its shows at the Autodesk Gallery in San Francisco are said to be a must see for design thinkers. We talked to CEO Carl Bass, who is known as being a “maker king”, and Maurice Conti, the Director of Strategic Innovation at Autodesk.

Carl Bass

We were eager to learn if companies such as Autodesk use something like the design thinking process or specific methods. But while talking to Carl Bass we soon realized that we were barking up the wrong tree. Bass is convinced that “innovation initiatives” generally don’t produce innovative results. In his view, a basketball player without talent will never be a Michael Jordan, “you can’t train everybody to be good at everything. Sometimes we make the mistake of trying to take people who don’t have the necessary talent. They can improve marginally, but our ability to change people’s potential is relatively small.” Educating each person in an organization to be a creative Design Thinker? Carl prefers hiring talented people rather than training the masses.

Carl Bass

But how can companies hire the “best people?” Basically, Carl gives two pieces of advice. First, provide a climate of great people and encourage risk taking—which sometimes results in failure. He explains: “Look at the people who are solving your problems, and then look at the culture you provide. We encourage our employees to take risks. We give people the freedom to experiment. The freedom to question. And we allow them to fail. We treat them with respect and dignity. And then we encourage them to solve the problem in their own way. We have failures all the time.”

The willingness to take risks and accept failures is an important point. Most companies work to minimize deviation from the norm. They tell their staff to always do the same thing and not to take risks.

Carl Bass’ Take on Risk

Video from McKinsey Insights article “How big companies can innovate”

Freedom and failure

Maurice Conti, the director of strategic innovation, gave us some examples of how the design mentality at Autodesk is formed. Above all he suggests not to “home-grow” everything. Half of the work is done in collaboration with outsiders. But in order to do this, employees need to be allowed to go outside of the norm. At Autodesk, a small group of employees attends
 the Burning Man  Festival every year. “We actually go there for work”, Maurice points out. At the desert festival Autodesk designers find what they are searching for. It is an extremely constrained context, the environment is pretty harsh. And there are volunteers everywhere. Here they can figure out what their users really need.

Last year an Autodesk team created an art piece that they brought to Burning Man. The piece could be modified and generated by the crowd. It was an experiment to see what would happen if you integrate the user more in the design process. “In order to innovate, by definition you have to go outside the box”, Maurice Conti sums up.

The notion that everybody can be trained to be a Design Thinker like Kelley supports it – at Autodesk we find the counter-model. The creativity is already there. But where is it found? According to CEO Carl Bass the creativity is originates in the hiring, and providing a context where people can gain insights from the outside and are allowed to fail.

Hiring talent w/ the right attitude is better than retraining people in #designthinking.
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Intuit is a well-known and widely documented example of a company, which successfully incorporated design thinking in its transition to a more customer-centric corporate culture. Design thinking’s impact is perceptible throughout the organization. No one questions its meaning or value. Managers from other organizations though, especially those unfamiliar to design-driven innovation approaches, often ask for »proof« that it »will work«, or even demand upfront metrics to evaluate outcomes. On that score and knowing that the use of existing financial metrics for excursions into the unknown falls short of the mark, we decided to ask Intuit’s Kaaren Hanson (Vice President of Design Innovation, 2011-2014) and Wendy Castleman (Innovation Catalyst Leader) how they tackled the problem of evaluating their innovation program’s outcomes over the past seven years.

Background

One of Intuit’s main metrics has always been the NPS (Net Promoter Score). It actually was the very cause of the company’s engagement with design thinking. For many years the software company had focused on »ease« in order to increase NPS and drive revenue growth. It turned out however that ever such efforts changed nothing in the market. »Ease« was no suitable focus for differentiation anymore. Baseline experiences with direct competitors were basically the same, and more importantly, customer’s expectation levels regarding software had risen tremendously. Interactions with pace-setting companies like Google, Amazon or Apple were just more »delightful«. In this situation usability and ease were seen as a given and “Intuit was just no more amazing” as Kaaren Hanson admits.

Challenge

Against this backdrop and inspired by the successes of other design-driven companies the »Design for Delight« (D4D) initiative – a massive change program – was launched. Its goal was to develop and foster innovation capabilities, which allow Intuit to develop unique experiences, which can compete with best in class across industries just like. The program started in 2007 and changed, as Kaaren emphasizes, basically everything about the organization ranging from renewed passion about customers, ways of working, to layouts of buildings and many other things.

Right from the beginning Kaaren and her team had top-management commitment without reservation. But running such a massive change process requires at least some metrics, outcome evaluations and justifications of actions, doesn’t it?

Wendy Castleman is quiet clear on the minimum prerequisites to even start discussing such matters: „People ask about our innovation program and design thinking all the time. Often they are just interested in the innovations. They want things that are going to be successful, which brings »them« to a new level but if they don’t actually care about their customer experience it isn’t gonna work. Before you go doing that you [have to agree on that, but] also have to understand what your company culture values and make sure you align to that first!”

From her experience it is important to be clear about these factors first. Otherwise it becomes hard to construct appropriate mechanisms of evaluation. She also points out that the financial impact of design thinking usually does not reveal itself immediately as it requires significant upfront investments too.

This is why the Catalyst team had to be both, pragmatic and opportunistic. Pragmatic in terms of using the very simple initial measure activity, which just asked how many people across functional and business units are practicing design thinking already. Opportunistic in terms of attentively listening to what the company cares about, or as Wendy put it: “I don’t think there is any particular metric. If your company merely cares about commercial innovation to increase attraction on some marketing webpages that’s your metric to begin with.” This however, she also added, requires that you help them reframing the metrics alongside the design challenge at hand.

Problem framing = Metrics Reframing?

The first teams often started with the intention to use design thinking for merely changing marketing messages or tweaking value proposition dialectics without touching the core of the product and service experience. Even though this is too simplistic for Kaaren and Wendy, the catalysts had to start somewhere at least. They knew that during design thinking processes, repeatedly initial innovation intents change anyhow, so that metrics, which really matter, will emerge. Karen adds: “Often people want a measure from you that you can’t provide them with. But you can give them something else.” In her opinion it is important to give teams those useful surrogates that you are able to provide and explain why they are more meaningful. Such an approach takes into account that design thinking frequently is about detours. Although teams surprisingly often end up in improving the initial metric they have to be prepared for shifting the initial focus somewhere completely different but more relevant, which may render starter metrics obsolete. For an exemplary case see the box below.

Managers and teams at Intuit therefore had to realize that when coming up with something new, there is no »structured« way of knowing what will happen or what adequate measures will be. Knowing valid metrics before is hard to impossible. This may be bad news for justifying decisions with superiors but for Kaaren this is rather a matter of good leadership and an understanding of innovation processes itself: “Executives are fine hearing that. If you say [upfront] I’m going save you $38 million, they will say: Oh, you just made that up!” Nevertheless Intuit’s management does care about metrics quite a lot and surprisingly the whole Catalyst team even loves them. How come?

From Stories and Metrics

Intuits approach is surprisingly simple, yet effective. Whereas most people (besides management and finance) don’t get very »emotional« about plain numbers, basically everyone in the organization enjoys a lived culture of company-wide appreciation and celebration of success and smart failures. People are naturally interested in other people. And it is humans who move metrics. This is why Wendy Castleman compiles a yearly »Innovation Catalysts Book« which showcases all the major success stories which had a significant financial impact. “Stories need metrics” she says “and we look at all the usual ones the company cares about: revenue, cost, profit, employee and customer engagement. But when you’re trying to pair it with design thinking it is important to show how you got here. Basically all stories are about that!”

When constructing the stories, she emphasizes, it thus is important to present and judge them in the in the context of their accruement. In other words, some stories may verifiably lead up to important key metrics like NPS but there are too many factors confounding the latter. Therefore it is up to the innovation catalysts to decide what makes sense to them once a story gets compiled. Both Kaaren and Wendy emphasize that basically all of them ladder up to high NPS and revenue at last. But linking them back to design thinking in an isolated manner is nearly impossible, said Kaaren: “You can’t separate it out and measure it per se. Once design thinking became part of the company’s DNA it’s even much harder to separate it out and say this caused that. It was easier in the beginning when there were just design thinking sessions where you could see the clear difference between people practicing it and those who don’t. But now it’s in the culture.”

She also explicitly emphasizes the fact that the permeation of a design-driven innovation practice never comes alone. At Intuit it was accompanied by the introduction of unstructured time, changes in building layouts, a new CEO and many more factors, which heavily influenced its likelihood of success.

Intuit’s stock performance in comparison to major indices (2009-2014)

“In the end,” she sums up, “you can’t just trace back design thinking’s dedicated impact on financial performance. You have to tell these contextualized stories because ultimately there are these long contributing factors in it.”

In her opinion it is more important that the narratives reflect the new Intuit way of doings things:
1) Having deep customer empathy;
2) going broad before going narrow, and
3) experimenting with customers.

It is this very design-driven culture that helps Intuit’s people in driving any metric they care about and measure – not the other way around. At the end of our interview both prod to first »evidence« which indicates that a design ethos in general may indeed have a profound impact on the bottom line – not only in their case. A recent study – which included Intuit in its sample – reported a stock performance advantage of »design-centric« companies of 228 percent over 10 years compared to the S&P index. This is great news, but for Kaaren and Wendy that is not as important as the empowerment of their people. For them it is just the logical consequence of the stories they produce and share.

This is how #designthinking gets measured at @intuit. #innovation #kpi
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Some Intuit Impressions

One of the first particularities that catch your attention when entering the AirBnB office space in San Francisco are the life-sized replicas of gorgeous host spaces from all over the world. On first sight they may only serve as meeting rooms as they are filled with people working on all sorts of stuff. At second glance however it becomes clear that every room and every theme – all are located in office areas street-named after famous AirBnB destinations – serves two purposes: To gain empathy for AirBnB’s users by immersing into their contexts and to inhale the spirit of a company, were experience design and the strive for intentional delight are daily business.

The Silicon-Valley start-up is heavily associated with design thinking as two of its early founders both have industrial design backgrounds. The AirBnB story so far is therefore full of myths and stories were an early »designpreneurial behavior« marked important milestones, which either saved the company or catalyzed its success. We visited Sasha Lubomirsky, AirBnB’s Head of User Research (2012-2014), as we wanted to know which role design thinking is playing nowadays, when the company is still growing and now has 200 people working for it.

According to Sasha, who had prior work experiences in more tech-oriented companies like Google, it especially is the small details that make a difference when it comes to a design thinking culture at AirBnB. She worries about the widespread association of the methodology with creativity techniques. This is why she chose to illustrate AirBnB’s design thinking practice on basis of one of its apparently »simple« elements: Brainstorming. Sasha often experienced it being prepared poorly elsewhere as it seems easy to do, “but the only thing, which is easy about it, is to do it wrong”, she says. Compared to her prior experiences, ideation sessions at AirBnB get pre-planned meticulously by a brainstorming host, which is often a person from the leadership team (producer). Usually this happens in close coordination with a design researcher from the Insights team. A preceding rigorous primary and secondary research as well as a preparation of different directions of reframing alongside with the respective pre-construction of possible HMW questions goes without saying, she reports.

Extensive preparations and follow-ups can take a long time though. Managers often don’t get, that »out of the box« ideation without guidance might lead nowhere and rather discount it as a fast thing. It therefore needs a deep understanding for the creative work process by the management to provide teams with sufficient access to resources and a facilitator who is already prepared with a repertoire of frames (HMW’s) to guide the sessions in an efficient manner. “Luckily” she concludes, “having designer founders and being design-centered from day one makes you [as an organization] pay attention to those details. … A lot of design thinking is about being creative [but it is also] about looking at what we know and triangulating information that we have and having that inspire creativity.” It is this widespread organizational understanding how data-driven creative processes work, which sets AirBnB apart from the other tech-companies she has been with.

She further adds: ”Our qualitative team therefore works closely with analytics and we always try to train colleagues as much as we can.” So, in contrast to her former employers AirBnB does not only rely on (big) data analytics and A/B testing alone but on people’s ability to synthesize and make sense of data from all sources. People who are uncomfortable with the qualitative and »soft« research methods of social sciences are therefore rarely part of AirBnB’s teams: “There are engineers who care about their engineering problems and maybe the users are less relevant. We just don’t hire these kind of engineers here. Every engineer cares about the user and has a respect for design”, she assures us.

But the broadly allowed creativity at AirBnB should not detract from the fact that brainstorming does not necessarily imply a through and through »democratic« process. Instead of settling to group compromises, teams at AirBnB often leave it to their leadership to prioritize, which directions to pursue after the ideation is done: “Not everyone has context on the business requirements and those kinds of things. So that’s a smaller conversation.”, Sasha concludes.

However, also the follow-up choices by management are guided by decision criteria based on data-driven insights and experience design principles. Above tabs in the info-box display some exemplary measures AirBnB implemented to diffuse empathy and knowledge throughout the organization. The information distilled within these initiatives heavily influences above-mentioned management decisions. Equipped with such an spatial and organizational environment, design research and synthesis may still be hard work, but Sasha happily concludes: “[T]he freedom given to us is great – to think really big and really ambitious about what can be done and which problems to solve. Working here has opened up how I think about problems.”

The link of design research and brainstorming: This is #designthinking at @airbnb.
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We talked to a former Oticon employee who decided to go to Denmark in 2007. At first it was difficult for him to find a job there. Even with a degree in mechanical engineering from one of the best universities in the US and a lot of work experience with his own consulting company it seemed difficult to get hired. Then a recruiter took a special interest in him, and the result was a job offer at Oticon, one of the world’s leading hearing aid manufacturers. They made a surprising proposal: “We’re just starting a new group called Centre for Design Thinking (CDT). You would be perfect for it.”

At that time, Oticon was taking a courageous step in a new direction. The top management decided to invest in a completely new group with an uncertain outcome a group that would “invent things.” The leader of this innovation group decided to embrace a relatively unorthodox idea called design thinking, and top management soon came to support the philosophy.

New Working Styles

Our interviewee’s first day at work was CDT’s first day as a department at Oticon. The Centre consisted of a multidisciplinary team with people from business, audiology and engineering. Our engineer was the only new employee in the team, as everybody else was chosen from within the organization. How did the team proceed?

“The manager of CDT gave us the freedom to work in our own way, which was quite unusual at Oticon or any other company.” Everybody could work with everybody. The big advantage of this was that after a very short time our interview partner got to know the products, people and processes at Oticon very well.

The job of the CDT team was to create insights about both the users and the people who sell hearing aids. It would of course be necessary to figure out how these insights could lead to new products and services. Directly talking to users was a novel approach at Oticon, as was bringing in external knowledge: “We also worked with different consultants. That was something my manager as well as I did. It was important for him to bring in external expertise, whether from other companies, universities, or other places.”

A Fresh & Simple Perspective

When the CDT team talked to users they heard a lot of complaints. These rumblings of displeasure were not fully known in the organization. One thing CDT members heard was that the speaker units that go inside in the ear canal in receiver-in-the-ear-canal (RITE) hearing devices were not very comfortable. CDT set out to measure ear canal geometry from many people and provided the rest of the organization with guidelines for more ergonomically shaped speaker units.

Our interviewee recalls: “As an engineer, if you develop a smartphone chances are you are the user yourself. But as a hearing aid developer you are most likely to be very far away from the concrete experience of actually wearing a hearing aid. That’s why it was not surprising that a lot of people we talked to complained about it. Based on simple things like listening to people who said it wasn’t comfortable and doing measurements we were able to show that the design could be improved. The hearing aid was then actually redesigned and works much better now.” 

Lack of Respect

Unfortunately, members of the CDT often felt that they were not taken seriously by other departments. The situation grew more serious when the management was also not able to understand the group’s contribution to the company.

Our interviewee remembers: “We had a lot of problems convincing people that we were doing useful work. People in other parts of the organization even laughed at the name ‘design thinking.’ There were so many jokes with ‘thinking,’ such as, ‘Oh, are you guys the ones who do all the thinking?’”

Unfortunately, for too many other stakeholders they became perceived as a threat more than a help – e.g. within marketing and sales. They very often stumbled into that barrier.

Clouds on the Horizon

The team had a “terrible time” trying to spread their insight to the rest of the organization. But even when people listened to them, it was often already too late: “People would say something like, ’decisions have already been made.’ There was always an excuse for why our work could not be incorporated into the design. That was frustrating.”

Our interviewee tells us that even physical space became the source of trouble. As a Scandinavian company, Oticon placed a high emphasis on order and neatness. “Things had to look really nice and clean. There was no culture of being messy and creative.” But when you are doing design work the process is often messy. “You might have drawings or half completed prototypes or post-its, sketches, or just about anything else,” the former CDT member explains. “But at that time it was forbidden to have anything that looked remotely messy. There was no space.”

The team ended up buying whiteboards with wheels, which they could wheel into a corner for the sake of neatness. Nevertheless, the CDT team felt as if they just did not fit into the rest of the organization. Soon people perceived them as a disruptive factor.

These physical space problems combined with the lack of awareness about the team’s achievements led to final decisions being made concerning the CDT in 2010.

Dissolution of Design Thinking

After three years, the decision to dissolve CDT came from the very top. There was the financial crisis of 2008-2009, and there was this CDT-group that was perceived as “just sitting around, talking to other people and hiring experts” without bringing in money in a visible way.

One day in 2010 the then head of R & D came into a CDT meeting. He said that he had looked at the organizational chart, “and CDT is not on it.” Our interview partner recalls: “That was his way of telling us that we had been closed down. His second sentence was: ‘Your boss is no longer an employee of the company.’ We were shocked.”

Within one year the mantra went from “innovation and efficiency” into “quality and efficiency”. While many will agree that in difficult times you should sharpen your innovative abilities, in daily operation it became increasingly difficult to defend this position, resulting in an organization chart without the CDT.

Shortly after this, four members of the CDT team left the company for new assignments. It took the management and the R & D department years to understand the value of CDT.

Afterwards, the CDT team’s job of talking to the user and getting new insights was shifted to marketing. Our interviewee remembers: “I just thought, this is a disaster. The marketing guys are trained to sell stuff; they’re not trained to listen to customers and identify unmet user needs.”

His intuition was right. The marketing employees still just kept reading press releases of other companies instead of talking to hearing aid users.

Oticon learned from their mistakes. Today they have a “discovery team”, basically doing the job of the CDT but doing projects in collaboration with numerous internal stakeholders. “Hopefully they are guys who are more integrated into the company,” says our interview partner.

Perhaps CDT’s most notable contribution was their study and suggestions related to dispensers (the audiologists and other professionals that actually sell the hearing aids). The people of CDT can take full credit for Oticon’s strategy on engaging with dispensers, which ironically was launched by marketing in the weeks after CDT was closed down.

What Oticon has learned from the #failure of its skunk works #designthinking #innovation unit.
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What was the situation? The process of applying for an Employment Pass used to be a laborious 13-step procedure with long waiting times for both employers and foreigners. Process re-engineering efforts in 1996 and 2002 were geared towards reducing processing times, since it was believed customers most desired speed in their applications. It was also easier to derive indicators for efficiency.

In 2009, the Work Pass Division collaborated with IDEO. Design thinking methods were applied for the first time. Instead of looking at Employment Pass services as a series of functional processes, Work Pass Division (WPD) began to consider them through the eyes of their users — the employers, employment agencies and foreign workers. The Work Pass application transaction was recast as an experience — applicants were not units to be moved from point to point in the process but instead were individuals with aspirations, preferences and relationships.

The new orientation made clear that Singapore’s demand for their contributions was as important as their desire to have a pleasant experience living and working in the city. The service redesign process required a better understanding of the decision points of both users and non-users. This involved taking a closer look at the opportunities and difficulties facing users, including those who had succeeded and failed within it, or had encountered problems or avoided it.

Challenge: The two Key Service Touchpoints

The Employment Pass service involves two critical touchpoints: the Employment Pass OnLine (EPOL) system which applicants first encounter while still in their home countries, and the Employment Pass Services Centre (EPSC) where applicants visit Singapore to submit documents for verification, register biometric data and complete their application.

The EPOL was first offered in 2002 but it had limited functions. Fewer than 20% of applications were submitted through the system, leaving some 25,000 hardcopy applications to be received and manually processed each month. Applicants had little information on how applications were evaluated.

Between 2005 and 2009, the EPOL was enhanced and redesigned to increase the information flow to users of the system. This has helped to shift the perception of WPD from an opaque and high-handed regulator to that of a responsive and transparent facilitator of employment. An Employment Pass Self Assessment Tool was introduced to help employers and applicants determine the likelihood that their applications would be approved, minimizing efforts wasted on clearly non-qualifying applications. In this collaborative spirit, employers of EP applicants take ownership of the process by ensuring that their background checks on candidate employees meet the stipulated guidelines.

The new EPOL serves two critical functions: it is an information portal for applicants, accessible to anyone any where in the world who may be considering taking up employment in Singapore. It is also a direct channel of communication between applicants and the WPD; applicants can submit or cancel applications, check their eligibility and application status, or seek clarifications through email from WPD officers.

Prototypes and Field Observations

Using design thinking methodology, the EPSC was reconceived as a space where user experience would determine how its various service transactions flowed. Space design insights and ideas were derived from field observation of the way users navigated existing systems. Trial solutions were then visualized and translated into quick, rough, life-sized prototypes of the new Centre, and tested for feasibility. WPD staff, employers and current users were invited to try out the prototypes, and their feedback helped to further refine EPSC design, production and operation.

Field observation was preferred over surveys and focus groups because it could give clues to instinctive, non- verbal behaviors, which users might not have been able to articulate in a formal manner. Special attention was paid to outlier and extreme users of services, because these exceptions could lead to radical new insights or solutions.

Insights and Solutions

One of these insights was that users appreciate certainty in their application — such as waiting times, outcomes, or even whether their applications have been received. As a result, visits to the EPSC are now appointment-based, ensuring that applicants would be served at their selected date and time.

A chronology of the work pass division’s business process re-engineering

The form and function of the Centre were redrawn to create the desired user- centred experience. The space was divided into three areas according to their distinctive roles: the arrival lobby, the waiting area, and the enrolment bar.

The new arrival lobby has been kept uncluttered as a space for guests to step away from the hustle and bustle of the streets when entering the Centre. Customer service staff, known as service ambassadors, greet visitors at the arrival lobby at once and guide them in using the Centre. These ambassadors replace unwieldy counter queues, complicated signage and awkward navigation, reducing the chances of disorientation during a user’s first visit.

Within the waiting area, a main service counter occupies the center of the room (which by convention would have been taken up by rows of hard-backed chairs and numeric queue prompters). This brings the service experience to the fore and closer to users. Wall-to-wall counters have been replaced by purpose- built modular service counters; no longer do counters appear frustratingly unmanned if service staff step away from their posts. Waiting areas recede against the perimeter of the room, with clear window views overlooking the Singapore River and the city skyline, offering a pleasant waiting environment. Adding to the sense of personalized service, a single- row display for names has replaced the old, large numeric queue number displays.

Child’s Play – Cheerful cabanas at the Manpower Ministry’s Employment Pass Services Centre serve the parents while their children are occupied by toys. – Picture from Ministry of Manpower

The new enrollment bars are sites for recording applicants’ biometric data, photo-images and verifying submitted documents. The name is a deliberate move away from the clinical notion of a fingerprinting “service desk” and reinforces its envisioned role, which is to assist in the enrollment of a foreigner into the workforce. Different service points cater to users with special needs, such as those with families in tow or physical difficulties. Some of these points are family cabamanforcenas and play corners to occupy young children as they wait with their parents to be served. The interior design and layout are inspired by those of banks, restaurants, airport lounges and shopping malls; there are café-styled booths to create a relaxed atmosphere while documentation and other procedures are taking place.

Design Thinking in the Public Sector – a Future Model?

While design thinking has gained currency in the private sector, it has yet to become widespread in the public sector. There are several reasons why this might be so.

1. Such an approach may appear irrational, abstract or even extravagant with outcomes that may not be directly measurable or tangible and hence at odds with the quantitative indicators that customarily account for public spending.
2. Design is often regarded, at best, as a good-to-have element in support of other key public roles instead of being itself a strategic function of operational planning.
3. Most public agencies are the sole providers of unique and often mandated services; there is inherently no strong impetus to radically reinvent their services and operations, and little comparative basis with which to make changes.

Three factors can determine a public organization’s success in using design thinking to transform service provision: a design thinking mindset, appropriate methodologies, and the infusion of design thinking into the organization’s culture and core competency.

Design thinking does not encourage thinking out of the box; it is about recognizing that there is no box. It draws attention to the need to imagine a new space and establish fresh parameters in order to generate the right experience and potentially transform the perception and meaning of public service. The challenge many public organizations will face is how to reconcile the use of abstract and intangible elements in the creation of the absolute and the concrete; how to bridge the gap between utility and experience, in order to anticipate new needs, environments and futures.

This post is a modified version of an article that appeared in Ethos, Issue 8, August 2010.

What is the universe made of? What is dark matter? Is there a theory of everything that could explain the fundamental laws of nature? These scientific questions relate to peculiarities in sub-atomic particles and have very little to do with human factors. Might there still be an interesting setting to use design thinking in the process of exploring them? Or do these questions contradict with the vital aspect of human centeredness in the design thinking approach?

We talked to Harri Toivonen, a Project associate at CERN and Coordinator at the Aalto University Design Factory. He is part of the development team for CERN Ideasquare. Ideasquare started two years ago as a pilot project bringing together physicists, engineers, industrial partners, researchers and cross-disciplinary teams of students to work together on LHC detector upgrade projects.

Design thinking as enabler for knowledge transfer?

The challenge at CERN is that researchers might not have resources or capabilities to look at how their results could be utilized outside the high-energy physics research context. In order to find new ways in which basic research advancement can positively affect our everyday lives, new ways of working need to be piloted and tested.

Harri states: “Development work is shifting from traditional researcher-developer-manufacturer relationships to collaboration to co-creation in order to compact development time and minimize risks involved.” Therefore one of Ideasquare’s intentions is to test and see whether design thinking could augment the already existing ways of doing research and knowledge transfer at CERN.

CERN stands for the European Organization for Nuclear Research. At CERN, physicists and engineers work with highly complex scientific instruments to make particles collide together nearly at the speed of light to study the basic constituents of matter – the fundamental particles. The process gives the physicists clues about how the particles interact, and provides insights into the fundamental laws of nature. Scientific knowledge generated for a specific purpose like this is at times challenging to use in societal issues driven ambits outside CERN. But are there ways that could make it possible to convey the value of basic research in other scenarios? How can one distill information that is highly technical into an actionable format?

Ideasquare

The Ideasquare (first: IdeaLab) was set up as an experiment. To allow the researchers at CERN to discover fresh ideas and to collaborate with people from other backgrounds, Ideasquare is seeking for new ways of cooperation between research teams, companies and students.

The physical space for Ideasquare was developed into an old assembly hall that was already standing on the demolition list. The newly renovated space allows people to come together and experiment. One of the first insights has been that prototyping plays a central role in everything that happens in Ideasquare. “We believe that value of ideas stemming from basic research is easier to build upon when they are realized in tangible format”, explains Harri.

Inauguration of the Ideasquare, CERN

What exactly happens at Ideasquare? At the moment it hosts two detection and imaging R&D projects, a master-level student innovation course, and multiple types of workshops and hackathons.

The R&D projects are called Edusafe ITN and Talent ITN. ITN stands for Initial Training Network, a specific type of project funded by the 7th Framework Programme by the European Commission, focusing on technology advancement and career development of young researchers within specific technology areas.

For Edusafe ITN, the motivator for the project is work safety: Because radiation increases in the realm of accelerators and detectors in the upcoming years, the duration which people spend in such environments need to be minimized and special monitoring, guidance and safety equipment needs to be developed. Talent ITN focuses on piloting new state-of-the-art technologies for a new precision pixel detector, improving the measurement accuracy of the Atlas experiment in the LHC.

Cern Ideasquare

The master-level student innovation course, called Challenge Based Innovation (CBI) is highly inspired by Stanford’s ME 310 and Aalto University’s Product Development Project (PDP) courses. The CBI course collaborates currently with 8 universities worldwide. For courses like the CBI, CERN can provide the physical space to work in and the contacts to researchers and engineers working on the cutting edge of technology. Until now, design thinking workshops have been held for master-level students only. Workshops for CERN staff are not planned yet. But there is an interest for inspirational lectures on design thinking and entrepreneurial activities. “There’s no pressure to use design thinking, we are testing what additional points-of-view could help the researchers in their work”, Harri emphasizes.

In the two pilot versions of Challenge Based Innovation course, the CBI student teams have been working on various design challenges. Examples from the first pilot include a team developing a tool called CMPRSSD, that records team meetings, transforms them into text and filters out the key content. The team recently formed a start-up from their idea.

Another team created a game-like learning tool for autistic children. The CERN researchers who attended the work of the students grew very interested in the topic: “They really got passionate about it”, Harri says. “After the student’s project finished the early stage researchers devoted their own free time and developed an improved prototype version for the learning tool, with machine vision based hand gesture recognition, in collaboration with the university and NGO that were coaching the master-level student teams.”

In the recently concluded second CBI pilot student teams were working on topics including for an example helping blind people to navigate their surroundings better, controlling and reducing food waste, and helping elderly people to mitigate the dangers of falling down in slippery conditions. Time will tell what will become of the student team prototypes in the near future.

When the building is not fully occupied by research projects and master-level student teams, Ideasquare also hosts “Hackathons“. These are typically one to three day dedicated innovation events during which selected teams work to construct a prototype, respecting a tight deadline and challenge-driven assignments. Employees can organize such “hacks” when they want.

From universe to society

From the experience with Ideasquare projects, there are already multiple takeaways, Harri says. “It has been interesting to see how the more experienced researchers have been inspired by younger generations and fresh ideas – and on the other hand, how early stage researchers and master level students have been able utilize the experienced researchers expertise in contexts far from high energy physics.” For an example the project for autistic children showed that new collaboration models have potential: the accumulated knowledge developing complex scientific instruments can be applied in more human-focused contexts by passionate student and researcher teams.

Video: Autism Teaching Tool

We talked with Erik Chang from Ericsson to learn about their multilayer approach to innovation, which they call Innova. Innova aims at setting free an entrepreneurial spirit amongst Ericsson’s employees. Now, after its third year, the Innova platform has 6.000 users. More than 4.000 ideas were submitted to the platform, with more than 450 ideas receiving first round funding and 45 receiving second round funding. We were interested in how design thinking contributes to the Innova system. One of the most interesting things we found was that Innova doesn’t use design thinking as a first step to develop initial ideas. Instead, they apply design thinking to assess existing ideas and turn them into marketable concepts.

Instant messaging (IM) services like Facebook’s “WhatsApp”, Microsoft’s “Skype”, or “WeChat” (market leader in east Asia) grow at rates that were unseen before. In September 2015 WhatsApp registered over 900 million monthly active users. This means they were processing 50% more messages each day than the world’s combined mobile text message traffic. These impressive numbers create turbulence in the market segments of traditional telecom operators and eventually in the entire economy. One of the biggest providers of infrastructure, software and services for telecom operators is Ericsson. Some 40 percent of the global mobile traffic runs through networks provided by the Swedish corporation.

Innova: Ericsson’s Multilayer Innovation System

With these market changes in mind, Ericsson’s CEO Hans Vastberg introduced in 2010 a company wide transformational initiative to enter new market segments in the ICT sector before 2020. Now, after the first half of this initiative, we were interested in the steps Ericsson took, and in particular, if and how their actions are related to design thinking. To find answers, we got the opportunity to speak with Erik Chang. Erik is head of strategy & operational development in Ericsson North East Asia R&D. First, he introduced us to their systemic approach to innovation, which they call Innova, an internal program, which got inspired by the way venture capital investments are run. It essentially functions like a startup incubator within the company. Interestingly, the initiative itself began like a startup.

Erik Chang

Initially, Innova was developed in and for product development units in San Jose. A first test run went well and got buy-in from management, which led to the internal investment the Innova team needed. Today the Innova system consists of several elements, which are:

• VC funding model
• the innova squad -a team of internal innovation consultants
• an incubation process to advance ideas into products
• an innovation ecosystem to collaborate with partners and universities
• “Innova method”, which is based on design thinking.

Now, after its third year, the platform holds 6.000 users, more than 4.000 ideas were submitted, with more than 450 ideas receiving first round funding and another 45, receiving second round funding. From the 4.000 ideas submitted, five ideas advanced to real products so far.

How does design thinking contribute to Innova?

Once we learned about Innova, we were interested to learn about the role of design thinking. Due to some initial consulting work they did with IDEO and their focus on customer needs, we can clearly see the influence of design thinking on the Innova system.

First off, the process of the first funding round is short – only 40 hours total – and is all about experimentation and validating the initial assumptions regarding customer behavior. Once the funding is set up, the project gets support from the Innova squad, a team whose methodology explicitly mentions design thinking. This squad supports the people whose ideas were chosen for six to twelve weeks, after the second round of funding. The main goal of the squad is to get ideas on the road. To get to this point, the squad members assemble multidisciplinary teams, establish connections to company partners and customers, and organize workshops. The methodological foundation for the workshops and coaching is their own Innova method, which incorporates design thinking principles and the process model.

Having examined the Innova system, our most surprising insight was that design thinking explicitly comes into play after an idea or a set of ideas has been evaluated as promising. In this case, the Innova method, which is basically derived from design thinking, is applied to amplify already existing ideas and transform them into marketable concepts. For people familiar with design thinking, this might sound counter-intuitive, since the methodology is usually associated with finding the right problem first. However, in this case Ericsson consciously chose to use design thinking to pursue existing ideas. We think that this unusual constellation can be seen as a statement itself. The point of Innova’s incubation process is to take further and realize what employees have formulated so far. Particularly learnings regarding team- and team-coach relations, which stem from design thinking education, are contributing here. Erik also told us that it is difficult for R&D employees to align design thinking with their current idea generation practice. Although design thinking workshops are in general perceived as exciting and insightful, many R&D employees were hesitant when it came to confronting customers with low-definition prototypes. This is another reason, why design thinking activities within the Innova system aim towards idea realization rather than early concept generation.

Our interpretation of this case is that companies apply design thinking different and not as “holistic” as it is taught at (d-)schools. While some aspects (e.g. confronting customers with low-definition prototypes) do not fit into the context in which the company operates, other aspects (e.g. knowledge in the field of team- and team-coach relations) are used to treat a specific part within a bigger innovation process. Although the relation and interplay of different design thinking elements (e.g. Place – Process – People) is recognized by practitioners in companies (the setup of the Innova system reflects that) the term Design thinking leaves enough space for interpretation and selection of standalone “sub-terms”.

This article was co-authored by Shui Linlin (Communication University of China in Beijing, China) and Axel Menning (HPI School of Design Thinking, Potsdam, Germany)

Confrontation with customer’s new perception

For any financial service provider like MLP, customer proximity is the single most important aspect in daily business – especially as financial consultancy services require lots of trust. But with the hit of the financial crisis the perception of financial services changed drastically. For many people the financial sector is lacking transparency and being perceived as confusingly complex. As part of this development MLP had to acknowledge that also they had the task to explain their services and its USPs (Unique Selling Proposition) better. They knew they had to adapt their marketing communication to match customer’s demand.

Compiling a mission statement with the help of design thinking?

We talked to Jan Berg, division manager for communication, politic and investor relations and Thomas Freese, division manager for marketing, at MLP. Both decision makers were responsible for creating a new positioning and mission statement, as a major part of measures taken, which MLP thought to be appropriate to react to the situation at hand. They decided to give design thinking a try with this particular challenge: “At first, we were reserved if design thinking was the appropriate method for our issue,” says Jan Berg. “Especially because our project was not dealing with something haptic or olfactory,” adds Thomas Freese.

“Taking off the tie”

But there was no doubt left after getting in touch with their first users. The project team members went outside to test several Lego prototypes and self-made posters on a university campus and in public places like a train station. The fact that they did so in their casual outfit grew really important for them. “We found out that not being a typical financial services provider with suit and tie already helps reducing prejudice or negative connotation,” Freese says. “Also, the testing of the rough prototype helped to loosen up a conversational situation.”

Addressing people in such a direct manner was a big learning for them. Berg remembers, “I had to learn to ask open questions instead of trying to sell my prototype as I already had become a fan of it. I had to distance myself from ‘I want to convince you’ to ‘Is my idea of any interest to you'”.

Example prototypes for testing with users (Source: MLP)

Design thinking as an initial spark for a new mission statement

The project team quickly realized that in the past they often emphasized topics in their communication materials and consultations, which were of no significance to their customers: “We always used to speak to the customers about the goals they want to achieve. But they do not want to commit to a certain goal, as they often do not know themselves what that is. Rather they want to talk about their ideas as it is more open and flexible regarding their financial planning,” says Freese.

“Nevertheless design thinking is not a blue print,” emphasizes Freese, “one of the main challenges was to put the new ideas into the real world in order to not become detached from MLP”. After creating several concepts the team had to embed them into the company’s context and strategy. For that they used traditional market research tools, e.g. by creating a verbal concept for the new mission statement and testing it via focus group interviews.

Immersing into the life of the younger generation

Its first design thinking experiences were also one impulse for MLP to open the so-called ‘Finanz-WG’ Heidelberg. Following the way of life of most students in flat-sharing communities (German translation: Wohngemeinschaft, short: WG) ‘Finanz-WG’ is a space with a student atmosphere in which an online editorial team and online marketing managers from MLP work on social media/ web topics and product solutions for students.

The Finanz-WG is located in a student district and thus provides a close proximity to their potential users. This strongpoint helps MLP to continue understanding the language of their most important future customers.

Tragically, another young life has been lost in an alleged one-punch assault, this time in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley.

These assaults are frightening occurrences in themselves, but also they pose much deeper questions regarding our approach to some very complex societal problems. So far, debate has centred on state liquor law reform but that’s only half the story. Queensland MPs may also draw some lessons from a recent project by the Designing Out Crime research centre that aimed to tackle similar problems in Sydney’s Kings Cross district.

A fresh approach to an old problem

Sydney’s Kings Cross is historically renowned for its vivid nightlife and, more recently, for its alcohol-fuelled violence. Over the years, the local and state governments have attempted to reduce this violence by ever-tightening regulations and increasing the police presence in the area. As a consequence, revellers are treated like (potential) criminals rather than young partygoers seeking a good time.

These law and order solutions solve some problems but create others. NSW’s 2014 lockout laws were successful in reducing inner city violence but have led to the closure of many of Sydney’s treasured venues. Residents of other suburbs report fear that lockouts just displace the problem.

In 2012, focus on the precinct intensified after 18-year-old Thomas Kelly was killed by an intoxicated stranger in a one-punch assault. After that incident, designers at the Designing Out Crime research centre, alongside the City of Sydney, took up the challenge of decrypting the Kings Cross nightlife to devise solutions to minimise violence in the area.

Imagine the Big Day Out – Every Weekend in Kings Cross

The design team approached the problem by imagining Kings Cross as a music festival. The aim was to identify areas of improvement that would create a safer environment while keeping partygoers happy.

Imagining Kings Cross as a festival: The designer tried to approach the night life of the district as an event attracting thousands of partygoers.

A music festival is an organised event that attracts tens of thousands of attendees to a central location to have a good time. Music festivals provide revellers with access to amenities, transportation to and from the event, support and continuous entertainment, while allowing them the necessary freedom to choose activities, socialise and express themselves. This metaphor for an “organised” approach to Kings Cross paved the way for suggested areas for improvement.

The researchers focused their design exploration on two themes: distraction and extraction.

Distraction

It was clear that every night in Kings Cross, pubs and clubs were emptying vast numbers of intoxicated patrons onto the main strip at roughly the same time. Footpaths became congested, retinas were battered with an assault of neon stimuli, patrons were forced to transition quickly from a fun indoor environment to an outdoor “void” atmosphere where there was nothing to do, and nowhere to sit down and sober up. It was a recipe for tension … They needed distraction.

So the researchers suggested softer outdoor lighting and, on weekend evenings, closing a main street in the Cross to allow patrons to walk on the road and alleviate footpath congestion. We suggested food stalls along this street, new sitting areas and outdoor entertainment in the form of street performers and interactive games. The idea was to promote a process of “unconscious sobering”.

Extraction

On Friday and Saturday nights, Kings Cross was attracting a peak influx of young people arriving at 1am, with the last train leaving shortly thereafter. Revellers were all but stuck in the area, or else waiting in an hour-long queue for an expensive taxi ride.

This fuelled frustration and impatience, paving the way for physical and verbal assaults. Access to toilets was sparse and did not meet demand. In contrast, music festivals are well equipped with portable toilets and access to public transport.

As a result, night buses were improved, amenities added, and volunteer guides were present at peak times to ensure partygoers were well informed and feeling safe. The Safe Space initiative came into fruition to provide support to those who required first aid, a charged phone, transport home or a comfortable place to wait for friends.

Some of the implemented solutions are still in place today, although the legislative measures imposed since have transformed Kings Cross into a less active area.

Lessons for Other Cities

Sydney and Kings Cross are not alone in facing these issues.

When faced with complex social issues, it is important that time is spent understanding the core of the problem from multiple perspectives before devising solutions.

It is easier said than done, but we need to think away from knee-jerk reactions – where branding an incident as “alcohol-related violence” naturally puts the focus on policies around alcohol service restriction. There is so much more that can be done to keep young people safe at night.

This story was originally published on The Conversation by Kees Dorst (Director, Designing Out Crime Research Centre, University of Technology Sydney).

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