Original subtitles

[Music]

[Music]

I'd like to talk a little bit this

morning about what happens if we move

from

design to design

thinking now this rather old photo up

there is actually the first project I

was ever hired to do something like 25

years ago it's a woodworking machine or

at least a piece of one and my task was

to make this thing a little bit more

modern a little bit easier to use I

thought at the time I I did a pretty

good job unfortunately not very long

afterwards the company went out of

business this is the second project that

I did it's a fax machine I put an

attractive shell around some new

technology again 18 months later the

product was

Obsolete and now of course the whole

technology is

obsolete now I'm a fairly slow learner

but eventually it occurred to me that uh

maybe what passed for design wasn't all

that

important making things more attractive

making them a bit easier to use making

them more

marketable by focusing on a design maybe

just a single product I was being

incremental and uh not having much of an

impact but I think this small view of

design is a relatively recent phenomena

and in fact really emerged in the latter

half of the 20th century as design

became a tool of

consumerism so when we talk about design

today and particularly when we read

about it in the popular press we're

often talking about products like these

amusing yes desirable maybe important

not so very but this wasn't always the

way and I'd like to suggest that if we

take a different view of design and

focus Less on the object and more on

design thinking as an approach that we

actually might see the result in a

bigger

impact now this gentleman ismar Kingdom

Brunell designed many great things in

his career in the 19th century including

the Clifton suspension bridge in Bristol

and the uh temp's tunnel at rivee both

uh great designs and actually very

Innovative

too his greatest creation runs actually

right through here in Oxford it's called

the Great Western Railway

and uh as a kid I grew up very close to

here and uh one of my favorite things to

do was to cycle Along by the side of the

Railway waiting for the great big

Express trains to Roar past you can see

it represented here in jmw Turner's

painting rain Steam and

speed now what Brunell said that he

wanted to achieve for his passengers was

the experience of floating across the

country side now this was back in the

19th century and to do that meant

creating the flattest gradients that

ever yet been made which meant building

long viaducts across river valleys this

is actually the vict across the Temps at

Maiden head and long tunnels uh such as

the one at box in

Wiltshire but he didn't stop there he

didn't stop with just trying to design

the best Railway

Journey he imagined an integrated

transportation system in which it would

be possible for a passenger to embark on

a train in

London and disembark Ark from a ship in

New York one Journey from London to New

York this is the SS great Weston that he

built to take care of the second half of

that

Journey now Brunell was working a

hundred years before the emergence of

the design

profession but I think he was using

design thinking to solve problems and to

create world changing

Innovations now design thinking begins

with what Roger Martin the business

school professor at the University of

Toronto calls integrative thinking and

that's the ability to exploit opposing

ideas and opposing constraints to create

new

Solutions in the case of design that

means balancing

desirability what humans need with

technical feasibility and economic

viability with uh Innovations like the

Great Western we can stretch that

balance to the absolute

limit so somehow we went from this

to

this systems thinkers who were

Reinventing the world to a priesthood of

folks in Black turtlenecks and designer

glasses working on small things as our

industrial society matured so design

became a profession and it focused on an

Ever smaller canvas until it came to

stand for Aesthetics image and fashion

now I'm not trying to throw stones here

I'm a fully paid up member of that

priesthood and somewhere in here I have

my designer glasses there we

go but I do think that perhaps design is

getting big again and that's happening

through the application of design

thinking to new kinds of problems to

global warming to Education Health Care

security clean water whatever and as we

see this reemergence of design thinking

and we see it beginning to tackle new

kinds of problems there are some basic

ideas that I think we can observe that

are useful and I'd like to talk about

some of those just for the next few

minutes the first of those is that

design is human centered it may

integrate technology and economics but

it starts with what humans need or might

need what makes life easier more

enjoyable what makes technology useful

and

usable but that's more than Simply Good

ergonomics putting the buttons in the

right place

it's often about understanding culture

and context before we even know where to

start to have ideas so when a team was

working on a new vision screening

program in India they wanted to

understand what the aspirations and

motivations were of these school

children to understand how they might

play a role in screening their

parents conversion sound has developed a

high quality Ultra lowc cost digital

hearing aid for the developing world

now in the west we rely on highly

trained technicians to fit these hearing

aids in places like India those

technicians simply don't

exist so it took a team working in India

with patients and community health

workers to understand how a PDA and an

application on a PDA might replace those

technicians in a fitting and diagnostic

service instead of starting with

technology the team started with people

and

culture so if human need is the place to

start then design thinking rapidly moves

on to learning by making instead of

thinking about what to build building in

order to

think now prototypes speed up the

process of innovation because it's only

when we put our ideas out into the world

that we really start to understand their

strengths and weaknesses and the faster

we do that the faster our ideas

evolve now much has been said and

written about the aravind ey Institute

in M India they do an incredible job of

serving very poor patients by taking the

revenues from those who can afford to

pay to cross subsidize those who

cannot now they are very efficient but

they're also very

Innovative when I visited them a few

years ago what what really impressed me

was their willingness to prototype their

ideas very early this is the

manufacturing facility for one of their

biggest cost breakthroughs they make

their own intraocular lenses these are

the lenses that replace those that are

damaged by

cataracts and I think it's partly their

prototyping mentality that really

allowed them to achieve the Breakthrough

because they brought the cost down from

$200 a pair down to just $4 a

pair partly they did this by instead of

building a fancy new Factory um they

they used the basement of one of their

hospitals and instead of installing the

large scale machines used by Western

producers they use lowcost cadcam

prototyping technology they're now the

biggest manufacturer of these lenses in

the developing world and have recently

moved into a custom

Factory so if human need is the place to

start and prototyping a vehicle for

Progress then there are also some

questions to ask about the

destination instead of seeing its

primary objective as

consumption uh design thinking is

beginning to explore the potential of

participation the shift from a passive

relationship between consumer and

producer to the active engagement of

everyone in experiences that are

meaningful productive um and

profitable so I'd like to take the idea

that Rory Sutherland talked about um

this notion that intangibles things are

worth perhaps More Than Physical things

and take that a little bit further and

say that um I think the design of

participatory systems in which uh many

more forms of value Beyond simply cash

are both created and measured is going

to be the major theme not only for

design um but also for our economy as we

go

forward so William beverage when he

wrote the first of his famous reports in

1942 created what became Britain's

welfare state in which he hoped that

every citizen would be an active

participant in their own social

well-being by the time he wrote his

third report he confessed that he had

failed and instead had created the

Society of welfare

consumers Hillary cotum Charlie Leed

better and Hugo manesa of participle

have taken this idea of participation

and in their Manifesto entitled beverage

4.0 they are suggesting a framework for

Reinventing uh the welfare state so in

one of their projects called sou Circle

um they worked with residents in sou

South London and a small team of

designers to develop um a new membership

organization to help help the elderly

with uh household tasks designs were

refined um and and developed with 150

older people uh and their families

before the service was launched earlier

this

year we can take this idea of

participation perhaps to its logical

conclusion and say that design may have

its greatest impact when it's taken out

of the hands of designers and put into

the hands of

everyone nurses and practitioners at us

Healthcare System Kaiser Permanente

studied the topic of improving the

patient

experience

and particularly focused on the way that

they exchange knowledge and change

shift through a program of observational

research brainstorming new Solutions and

rapid prototyping they developed a

completely new way to change

shift they went from retreating to the

nurses station to discuss the various

States and needs of patients to

developing A system that happened on the

ward in front of patients using a simple

software tool by doing this they brought

the time that they were away from

patients down from 40 minutes to 12

minutes on average they increased

patient confidence and nurse happiness

when you multiply that by all the nurses

on all the wards in 40 hospitals in the

system it resulted actually in a pretty

big impact and this is just one of

thousands of opportunities in healthcare

alone so these are just some of the um

kind of basic ideas um around design

thinking and some of the kinds of uh you

know new kinds of projects that uh that

they're being applied to but I'd like to

go back to Brunell here and suggest a

connection that might explain why this

is this is happening now and maybe why

uh design thinking is a useful

tool and that connection is

change in times of change we need New

Alternatives new

ideas now brenell worked at the height

of the Industrial Revolution when all of

life and our economy was being

reinvented now the Industrial Systems of

brenell's time have run their course and

indeed you know they're part of the

problem today but again we're in the

midst of massive

change and that change is forcing us to

question quite fundamental aspects of

our society how we keep ourselves

healthy how we govern ourselves how we

educate ourselves how we keep keep

ourselves

secure and in these times of change we

need need these new choices because our

existing Solutions are simply becoming

obsolete so why design thinking because

it gives us a new way of tackling

problems instead of uh defaulting to our

normal convergent approach where we make

the best choice out of available

Alternatives it encourages us to take a

Divergent approach to explore New

Alternatives new Solutions new ideas

that have not existed

before but before we go through that

process of Divergence there's actually

quite an important first step and that's

what is the question that we're trying

to answer what's the design brief now

brenell may have asked a question like

this how do I take a train from London

to New

York but what are the kinds of questions

that we might ask

today so these are some that we've been

asked to think about

recently and one in particular is one

that we're working on with the Acumen

Fund in a project that's been funded by

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

how might we improve access to Safe

Drinking Water um for the world's

poorest people and at the same time

stimulate Innovation amongst local water

providers so instead of having a bunch

of American designers come up with new

ideas that may or may not have been

appropriate we took a sort of a more

open and collaborative and participative

approach we team designers and

investment experts up with 11 water

organizations across India and through

workshops they they they developed

Innovative new products services and

business models we hosted a competition

and then funded five of those

organizations um to develop their ideas

so they developed and iterated these

ideas and then idio and auman spent

several weeks working with them to help

design new uh social marketing campaigns

community outreach strategies business

models new water vessels for storing

water and carts for delivering

water some of those ideas are just

getting launched into the market and the

same process is just getting underway

with NOS in East

Africa so for me uh this project shows

kind of how far um we can go from uh

some of those sort of small things that

I was working on at the beginning of my

career that by focusing on the needs of

of of humans um by using prototypes uh

to move ideas along quickly by um

getting the process out of the hands of

designers and getting the active

participation of the community we can

tackle bigger and more interesting

questions and just like Brunell by

focusing on systems we can have a bigger

impact so that's one thing that we we've

been working on I'd actually be quite

interested and perhaps more interested

to know what this community thinks we

could work on uh what kinds of questions

do uh do we think you know design

thinking could be used to tackle and uh

if you've got any ideas then feel free

you can post them to Twitter um there's

a hashtag there that you can use uh CBD

q and uh the list looks something like

this a little while ago and of course

you can search to find the questions

that you're interested in by using the

same hash code so you know I'd like to

believe that design thinking actually

can make a difference that it can help

create new ideas um and new Innovations

uh beyond the latest High Street

products to do that I think we have to

take a more expansive view of design

more like Brunell less a domain of of a

professional

priesthood and the first step is to

start asking the right questions thank

you very much

[Applause]