Design Thinking: Integrating Innovation, Customer Experience, and Brand Value Paperback – November 10, 2009

I have read a few of the mainstream books on design thinking. Without exception I've found them to portray a shallow rearrangement of common sense and common techniques as a revolution of sorts. This is the first book I've found that invites the reader to transform their basic concept of imagining, developing and launching a new product. It's ironic that the author states in the forward that when he was asked to create a book on design thinking, his first question was "Hasn't that already been done?" Thomas Lockwood has succeeded in doing for innovative thinkers what the authors of all the other books failed at: He provides a cogent thought-scape that allows products to exceed the baseless fairy tale beginnings in the imaginations of innovators, and to disrupt and transform their target markets, even blossoming in markets not yet imagined when the spark of their existence came to life in the minds of their creators.The book provides a living landscape for innovators. It's up to us to understand and respect the tenets set forth on the book, and leverage them in our attempts to make the world a better place. Because we're working with a living landscape, we should also dedicate ourselves to nurturing and enhancing the concepts presented, and to mentoring others in their use.

I liked the book but the fact it is a collection of articles by several authors is good and bad. It is good because allows the reader to get in touch with different points of view. And it is bad because articles vary in quality and relevance. all in all, i recommend it to all who want to better understand how design evolved and gained relevance in the business world.

If you are creating products and services without a design process that produces innovative solutions; if you operate in a world of products and services where best in class is a must; if you are looking for real world methods for delivering break through content; if you want to hear from design professionals wired with design thinking; if you have heard colleagues and clients refer to "design thinking" and want to learn about it with the hopes of implementing it into your business then this book is invaluable. After reading many other books that touch on the design thinking concept; here is a book that provides a wealth of in depth information that examines design thinking from a number of perspectives. In my company we need to be both attune to our client's approach to design and integrating ourselves into their process while maintaining our own design disciplines internally. This book provides insights to these sorts of design challenges as well as more traditional ones such as building a design thinking process and the culture of design in a company. Great information and interesting to read as well. Very much enjoyed it.

This book leaves me with mixed feelings. The background: recently industry designers have been trying to break out of their confinement which held them captive to the whims of fickle marketeers. They've moved on from styling consumer products to more strategic briefings: designing experiences, services and even business models. The ambitions reach beyond the corporate sphere, leading designers to confront the systemic, "wicked problems" of our age: climate change, rapid urbanisation, obesity ... The basic logic underpinning this strategic upframing is "Design Thinking". According to Thomas Lockwood, President of the Design Management Institute and editor of this volume, this "is essentially a human-centered innovation process that emphasizes observation, collaboration, fast learning, visualization of ideas, rapid concept prototyping, and concurrent business analysis, which ultimately influences innovation and business strategy." So, design thinking is a new way of thinking that builds on careful mapping of consumer needs, collaborative visualization of alternative solutions and rapid prototyping of emerging concepts, with the ultimate aim to generate more compelling customer experiences and toncontribute to businesses' top line growth. And the approach seems to work even when dealing with the big societal problems, which "don't need necessarily big solutions" (says Lockwood) but just a complete "reframing". Sounds good. However, I feel that this book overstretches in its ambition to sell the concept of design thinking.First, although it starts with a grandiloquent dedication to the design thinkers of today who contribute to the need for social, economic and environmental improvement "with a spirit of goodness", there is precious little evidence in this volume of designers' ability to tackle the big issues and the associated dilemmas. The book consists of 23 short essays, grouped in four sections. The first section is devoted to more general issues of design culture and design management. Paradoxically, despite the grand ambitions designers have been under increasing pressure to justify the value they bring to the business. Hence the need for creating a culture that is sympathetic to design and to develop tools to manage a design organisation and to visualise its value-added. This is for me the most interesting part of the book, with valuable contributions from key people in the design community (Brigitte Borja de Mozota, Rachel Cooper and Heather Fraser). The latter part of the book focuses on "Building Brands", "Service Design" and "Customer Experiences" respectively. Most of the stuff discussed here by design and brand consultants squarely belongs to the remit of traditional, commercially-driven design. For those wanting a compendium of contemporary design practices in these realms, the book may offer a few interesting nuggets. But in my opinion reading about how the re-introduction of the colour yellow in Coke's visual identity re-energised the brand is a disappointing contrast with the lofty ambition to reframe some of the big issues of our time.Furthermore, I am not convinced that design thinking by definition translates in the ability to fundamentally reframe strategic challenges. The toolbox is rich in observational and visualisation tools but rather light on the more conceptual side of the practice. Designers are only just coming to grips with sophisticated instruments such as future scenarios and systems analysis. These are tools that talented strategists have been using for decades (for example, Richard Normann's "Reframing Business" and Ramirez and Normann's "Designing Interactive Strategy" ought to be part of each design thinker's curriculum). If design wants to steer away from the anecdotal and really wants to come to grips with the systemic, it will have to build on systems thinking and strategy development as rich and venerable disciplines in their own right.Finally, it seems to me the scope of design thinking ought to be fundamentally critical. When design simply parrots the brainless hyperbole that is so distinctive of much of the management literature it becomes bland and superfluous. When it succumbs to capitalist orthodoxy it becomes just another clever way of social engineering. The stakes introduced by design thinking are of an altogether different order. In Bruce Mau's seminal "Life Style", Sanford Kwinter argued that design's mission was "to free life of routine, to place it into syncopation so that it can find new, entirely unexpected patterns of unfolding." Hence, "what is most beautiful about it, in fact, might well be its potential to magnify risk". This is as antithetical to controlling, risk-averse corporate logic as you can get. For me, design thinking is an ethos rather than "a process". It is basically about adopting a voluntaristic, pragmatically utopian stance. Design thinking is the desire to flee fatalism, "analysis by paralysis", the straightjacket of the bottom-line and "death by committee" by taking on an almost Nietzschean, heroically-affirmative position. To authentically defend that position from within a discipline that is to a large extent legitimised by the corporate world and provides global capitalism with its "lingua franca" (products, images) comes with interesting paradoxes and dilemmas. Bruce Mau, in his "Life Style", wrestled openly with those issues. However, Lockwood's "Design Thinking" does not, which is why ultimately the argument is much less compelling than it could have been. 3 stars.

Great read with many useful tools. I'm using design thinking concepts to expand my way of approaching program and executive development processes. These ideas are transforming the way I think about the learning process!Dr. Terrence E. MaltbiaFaculty Director, Columbia Coaching Certification ProgramTeachers College, Columbia UniversityNYC | USA

Great collection of thoughts on the design process and how design thinking can be applied and make a difference in any organization.

The diversity of opinion and application is almost recursive in elaborating the value of collaboration and breadth of perspective in applying design thinking.

The book has water damaged and isn’t the newest edition