The Truth About Design Thinking

There’s something to the adage that the more things change the more they stay the same. I stepped away from the practice of architecture almost twenty-five years ago when a great source of consternation among the professionals I knew was how to realize the commercial value of their work.

Over the past two and a half decades in which I have pursued a career outside of architecture, I have stayed involved with the profession through a combination of academic and board activities. Yet as we know, the “value” conversation has not changed all that much in the intervening years. 

Why is that?

My perspective on this question has been greatly informed by my alternative career path.  I earned an MBA back in the day when it was an odd thing for a designer to do.  I used that education to shift my focus to product design, first as a management consultant developing new product strategies and then on the design consulting side learning to better integrate business and design decisions to launch innovative products and services.  As a leader with the design consultancy IDEO I spent ten years developing new ways to expand the reach of design tools, methods, and yes, design-thinking.  I worked primarily with organizations that delivered services, not manufactured goods, and spent an additional ten years post-IDEO working inside of those same kinds of organizations to develop their own capacity for innovation.

What I’ve discovered about how to unlock value is both simple and complex, because it begins and ends with an appreciation of human needs. For architects, this will require a shift in the rhetoric around sources of value. 

To illustrate what I mean, I led a classroom discussion last year for graduate students at the Yale School of Architecture.  They were exploring various ways to convey the true value of an architect’s services. The topic under consideration in class that day was “innovation”, specifically focused on new businesses and business models for the profession. 

Innovation is, in fact, the very definition of value creation. Innovative products and services generally add delight or ease to our lives, or likewise eliminate pain or struggle. People are often happy to part with a great deal of money to realize either or both of these results.

But the achievement of producing something innovative is challenging because innovation requires the alignment of three disparate components – human desirability, technical feasibility, and economic viability.  The key is understanding which of these is the driver, and this was my provocation to the students at Yale. 

Although new technologies get the headlines, all breakthrough innovations – those that deliver true, sustainable value – are often inspired by an unmet or poorly-addressed human need.  An innovative solution to those needs may ultimately be realized by a technical platform or process and a competitive business model. But technical feasibility and business model viability are the enablers, not the drivers of innovation. And this is the essence of design thinking: innovation that is guided by an exploration of the human condition throughout the entire design process. 

It is this particular philosophy of problem solving that defines design thinking. I like to say that “innovation is something new that creates value”; without value that new thing is merely an invention. In reviewing the Yale students’ projects, we inquired as to what problem their concept was solving, and more importantly for whom. The inability to articulate either of these is a sign that the effort is not (yet) innovative because it is not addressing a true human need.  Being consistently human-centered is a core principle of the design-thinking philosophy, and it can be a powerful tool for architects to more fully embrace.