AI and Design Thinking

Interesting point.   I say all systems, analytics, processes, management have a 'design problem', they need to be applied properly to provide value.     All statistical and analytical methods were not understood by decision makers,  but still effectively used.  Same with AI.  But do design their use well.

AI has become a design problem

By Mark Rolston, argodesign

Join executive leaders at the Data, Analytics, & Intelligent Automation Summit, presented by Accenture. Watch now!

AI is facing new calls for regulation now that it has emerged from the laboratory and is becoming more widely deployed across our daily lives. The public does not trust the technology. Nor should they. The problems are numerous, from understanding how the models actually work, controlling the data that feeds AI, and addressing growing distrust in those that wield this technology. Even companies themselves are unsure of how to safely and effectively use AI as part of their business.

The bulk of the discussion is currently centered on engineering. It’s understandable — artificial intelligence is a mysterious black box to many people, one assumed to be fixable only through lines of code and better data. But I want to argue that in order to truly understand and begin to master this technology, we must get better at seeing AI as a component of larger systems and design accordingly. Fundamentally, AI is not just a technology problem, it has become a design problem.   ... ' 

Design Thinking, Improv

Upcoming short free talk.

You are invited to attend:

ISSIP Service Design Speaker Series

Radical cross-collaboration at Cisco with Design Thinking & Improv
on Wednesday, February 26th 2020, 11:00 AM - 11.45 AM US Eastern Standard Time

Plants need nourishment from the soil, water, and sun. Humans need an authentic connection, empathy, understanding, being seen and heard, a sense of direction and understand what comes next. How Might We Achieve Radical Collaboration with Design Thinking & Improv?

Speaker:   Asli Ors – Cisco

About the speaker:

Asli Ors is a Design Thinker, Innovation Catalyst, Improviser and helps teams create empathic solutions built on intelligent networks that solve our customers’ challenges with design thinking. Believes, when Play and Work tangles magic happens. By magic, she means meeting the business goals by aligning on core requirements, design principles and project priorities in a timely manner.
Service Design Series Chaired by - Payal Vaidya and Daniela Sangiorgi

Zoom information provided on registration. 

Register

Design Thinking

The idea came late to our world, which was more 'analytical problems solving ...'

Two top designers debate the value of “design thinking”  in Fastcompany

Pentagram partner Natasha Jen and Adobe principal designer Khoi Vinh discuss the virtues and pitfalls of design thinking.

Natasha Jen: The idea of an operational process, without a philosophy or values, without a specific stance on how to look at the world, is highly problematic because every groundbreaking design has a philosophy behind it, good or bad.

Khoi Vinh: I’m certainly not at the top of the list of defenders of design thinking as a foolproof way of solving problems, but design thinking as a practice has been successful for companies that traditionally don’t have design in their DNA. ... " 

Designing Designs

Our one time connection point at MIT's Center of Bits and Atoms talks about design of designs.   And as he puts it 'Learning Representation'.   In the interim we can make things better by doing things faster,  making more of them, crowd sourcing solutions or by forcing some partial solution.  But the real learning is representation, or architecture ...  that can make things work.   - FAD

Morphogenesis for the Design of Design
A Talk By Neil Gershenfeld [7.31.19]

As we work on the self-reproducing assembler, and writing software that looks like hardware that respects geometry, they meet in morphogenesis. This is the thing I’m most excited about right now: the design of design. Your genome doesn’t store anywhere that you have five fingers. It stores a developmental program, and when you run it, you get five fingers. It’s one of the oldest parts of the genome. Hox genes are an example. It’s essentially the only part of the genome where the spatial order matters. It gets read off as a program, and the program never represents the physical thing it’s constructing. The morphogenes are a program that specifies morphogens that do things like climb gradients and symmetry break; it never represents the thing it’s constructing, but the morphogens then following the morphogenes give rise to you.

What’s going on in morphogenesis, in part, is compression. A billion bases can specify a trillion cells, but the more interesting thing that’s going on is almost anything you perturb in the genome is either inconsequential or fatal. The morphogenes are a curated search space where rearranging them is interesting—you go from gills to wings to flippers. The heart of success in machine learning, however you represent it, is function representation. The real progress in machine learning is learning representation. How you search hasn’t changed all that much, but how you represent search has.

These morphogenes are a beautiful way to represent design. Technology today doesn’t do it. Technology today generally doesn’t distinguish genotype and phenotype in the sense that you explicitly represent what you’re designing. In morphogenesis, you never represent the thing you’re designing; it's done in a beautifully abstract way. For these self-reproducing assemblers, what we’re building is morphogenesis for the design of design. Rather than a combinatorial search over billions of degrees of freedom, you search over these developmental programs. This is one of the core research questions we’re looking at. ..... "

NEIL GERSHENFELD is the director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms; founder of the global fab lab network; the author of FAB; and co-author (with Alan Gershenfeld & Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld) of Designing Reality. Neil Gershenfeld's Edge Bio Page

Design Thinking

Overview of the techniques involved at the link.

5 Innovative Ways To Design Thinking in CustomerThink   By Swarnendu De  

Businesses are now embracing the concept of design thinking, as its practitioners have experienced proven success records. Although “Design Thinking” dates back to 1969, until today, most of the companies are still struggling with the concept.

Those who succeed, of course, follow the best practices. Getting the right design achieved offers one with amazing rewards. Companies which strictly follow all the major stages of design thinking process are outperforming with their “Wow” design.

The necessity of designing is increasing gradually, as the consumers now have higher expectations. They want direct access to the marketplaces and grab the best and unique products/services. So, it has now become extremely difficult for entrepreneurs to stand out in the crowd.

So, What Is Design Thinking All About? :  ... "

Applying Design Thinking in the Organization

Good introduction to design thinking.  With pointers to lots of resources.

How to apply design thinking in your organization
Design thinking helps organizations grow, innovate, and improve financial performance.

By Jonathan Follett, Mary Treseler.   February 22, 2017

Design thinking is a process that uses design principles for solving complex problems. It helps organizations identify opportunities, unlock innovation, and improve their businesses.

Market leaders as varied as Apple, IBM, Intuit, Kaiser Permanente, and Nike have used design thinking to gain a competitive advantage, applying it to create innovative products and services. Within an organization, design thinking is a tool for unlocking cultural change. It makes companies more flexible, more responsive to their customers, and ultimately, more successful.

What are the elements of design thinking?

Although the name and number of its key principles may vary depending on how you apply them, the basic elements of design thinking always include some variation on the following: researching and defining the problem, ideating, and prototyping and iterating.  .... " 

Human Centered Design

Been a while since I have taken a look at the concept.  I like it, but I have seen accurate measurement ignored when design thinking was invoked.   Interesting view from O'Reilly.

 What is design thinking?

Human-centered design and the challenges of complex problem-solving.
By Jonathan Follett

" ... Design thinking is an abductive approach to complex problem solving that leverages the designer’s empathetic mindset in order to understand people’s unarticulated needs and identify opportunities for solutions. This is a human-centered innovation process that can be applied to a wide range of challenges: design thinking can be used to create everything from products and services to business models and processes. .... " 

Rethinking Design Thinking

Rethink Design Thinking
Published on May 20, 2016  by Subbu Iyer

Design Thinking is not a Problem Solving Tool.

Start believing that it is one of the most natural ways in which one can imagine growth. It is a method that generates Growth; Engineering Value, Integrating Intellectual and Human Capital. Growth that is Societal, Inclusive, Innovative in nature and Creates Wealth. One that ushers the New or in other words responsible for the process of Renewal through Creative Destruction.

Problems are the Cause of poor design in the first place. They also occur when there is a shift in the context in which the present operates from a previous design. The outcome of Design Thinking is always a Point of Departure from the Present into the Future. It obviates a problem by addressing the higher layers of Solution in terms of New Ideas / Concepts, New Opportunities, New Objectives and New Events.    ....  " 

Design Thinking, Risk, Innovation

Thoughtful piece in Gartner Blog , especially about integrating risk management.   At least that can be thought of quantitatively ....

Design Thinking Lies at the Corner of Risk Management and Innovation, by John A. Wheeler   
Right now, businesses of all shapes and sizes are struggling to find the next disruptive, digital idea that will lead to exponential growth and hefty profits. We all know how companies such as Uber, Airbnb and LinkedIn have used digital platforms to re-create the entire customer experience. However, what many people do not realize is that a whole new way of thinking helped drive these new innovations in digital business.  .... " 

Supermarket of the Future: Coop Italia

Akin to our own smart retail laboratory work.  Much more in the tabs below.  Quite a bit of detail and video:   This is from Microsoft:

The supermarket of the future: Designing for humans, Written by,Susanna Ray

Back to the future? More like forward to the past.

Italy’s biggest grocery cooperative is using futuristic technology to help shoppers return to the sociable days of open-air markets, when there were shopkeepers at every stall, ready to answer any question a customer might have about their wares. .... 

Coop Italia’s “supermarket of the future,” designed by Carlo Ratti, has won rave reviews, thanks to a digital design that created a more human shopping experience using a range of off-the-shelf technology. The concept, which debuted at Expo Milan last year and will be showcased at Microsoft’s Envision conference this week, replaces the typical grocery store’s rows of towering shelves with an airy layout, including easy-to-reach, tilted displays and informative screens suspended at eye level.... " 

Benefits of Design Thinking for Innovation

In Linkedin: 
" ... Design thinking is all about creating something from ground zero. You start with a clean slate, not with a baggage of  something that already exists. The benefits are enormous as it allows for a more exhaustive questioning of basics, giving more options. However, most people have to innovate over some existing product/service and not from ground zero.  So, how do they get the benefits of design thinking? ... " 

Microsoft Bets on Radical Design Thinking

In Fast Codesign;  A radical bet, looking at disabled communities.  Very interesting history of the concept that has led to a number of design innovations.  So not really that radical at all.

Caricatures

Nautil on Caricatures.  I remember seeing the MIT Caricature Generator at work during a visit.    I did not think it was very good, compared to human work.  But I liked its premise.  Take a person's image, and figure out how much it was different in certain measurements, from the average human face.  Then exaggerate those dimensions.  An engineers 'definition' of caricature.  A design artist, though, did much better.  Made me think more about the creativity in design, and moved me a bit from my engineers view of expertise.

Marketing and Design Thinking

Nicely thought out look at the idea.   Embed the consumer.

Marketing takeaways from design thinking  by Mandeep Grover  

As marketers, it's easy to get stuck in campaign cycles and budgets, which is why a design thinking mindset can offer new ways of combating marketing challenges.

At times we can lose track of the consumer and their ever-changing needs. This is why I believe marketers can learn a lot from the art of design thinking: the method of thinking in the design process.

Design thinking offers marketers an approach to generate a deeper understanding of the consumer based on the principles of ethnographic research, and puts the customer at the center. It's the first step in finding innovative solutions to a given problem.

So, what can marketers learn from this approach? A lot if you ask me. Here are a few points to get started. ... " 

Responsive Design

Was unaware of the precise definition of responsive design, but OK, worth thinking about:

10 Ways Responsive Design is Critical to the Customer Experience
by Melissa Thompson   

Responsive web design is defined as an approach to designing websites that remain constant across different devices used. Using responsive design is something you should consider if you are looking to improve your customer’s online experience. Whether you are building a website for your business or looking to improve an existing one, here are 10 ways in which responsive web design is critical to your customer experience .... " 

Designing for All Senses

In FastcoDesign:
" .. Our perceptions of the world are built on multiple senses. They interact to help us make sense of our surroundings, so a car will seem to be traveling faster if it makes a lot of noise. And whether we want to buy a sports car, or a vacuum cleaner, it’s our multi-sensory impression of a product or service that dictates how we feel about it. And why companies need to learn the skills to design for all five senses.

 Is Multi Sensorial Design a New Approach?
The concept of multi-sensory design has existed for more than a decade. But want I address the idea of multi-sensory design as it applies to brands. I believe that applying multi-sensory design to all the touchpoints (moments of contact with a user) allows a product or service to produce a more complete, and ultimately better brand experience.  ..... " 

Engineering Mindsets

A view of the book Applied Minds. by Guru Madhavan.   Here I would suggest that the engineering mindset has taken over vast realms of value over the last three decades. Yes, both scientific discovery and design methods are important components.  But at the end of the day engineering thinking makes it work and keeps it working.   Could it be applied?  It is being applied every day.

” Such a thought process could be applied to problems in our everyday lives, Jon writes, as “an organizing principle for personal or professional progress … Engineers translate the realm of ideas into practical reality; they not only make the world work, they make the world not break.”

Pepsi and Design Thinking: Pepsi Spire

From CGT: PepsiCo CEO Turns Design Thinking into Strategy
Indra Nooyi, PepsiCo's CEO, is ranked No. 15 on Forbes list of The 100 Most Powerful Women. In an interview this week, Nooyi speaks about making PepsiCo more design driven, the challenges in changing a culture, and her proudest achievement. .... " 

Let's take Pepsi Spire, our new touchscreen fountain machine. Other companies with dispensing machines have focused on adding a few more buttons and combinations of flavors. ... Our design guys essentially said that we're talking about a fundamentally different interaction between consumer and machine. ... We basically have a gigantic iPad on a futuristic machine that talks to you and invites you to interact with it. It tracks what you buy so that in the future, when you swipe your ID, it reminds you of the flavor combinations you tried last time and suggests new ones. It displays beautiful shots of the product, so when you add lime or cranberry, it actually shows those flavours being added; you experience the infusion of the flavour, as opposed to merely hitting a button and out comes the finished product   ... " 

Design Thinking Coming of Age

Part of my long term and broader look at the interaction of design thinking and engineering.  I come from the engineering side.  A piece and link to work by Jon Kolko.   " .... How should companies think about design centricity? For Jon Kolko, vice president of design at Blackboard, an education software company, design thinking can define the way an organization functions at the most basic levels—how it relates to users, how it prototypes products, how it assesses risk. In “Design Thinking Comes of Age,” Kolko says that companies today must contend with unprecedented technological and business complexity and that design can help simplify and humanize complex systems. ... " 

How Google Got Design

Interesting example of emergence of better design in Technology.  In FastCoDesign: " ... How Google Finally Got Design ... Google’s transformation into a company that creates beautiful software is the story of how tech itself has evolved in the mobile era. ... "