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Special Report on Design Thinking

Design Think Special Report cover imageA while back we published a special report on design thinking in which design luminaries such as Edward Tufte, Donald Norman, and Nancy Duarte and Garr Reynolds gave practical advice on how managers can do their jobs better by thinking like designers. Our interest in the topic didn’t end when we published the report; we still aim to keep up with the latest in thinking about design thinking and share it with you. Here are three new books pushing the field forward...

Articles on design thinking.

Youkilis prevailed on Skyline, the leading purveyor of Cincinnati chili, and a fast-food empire in Ohio, to ship a few cans to New York. In 2006, Edward’s started hosting occasional chili fests, but the public began demanding more. So Youkilis declared the last Monday of every month to be Cincinnati Night, featuring Skyline chili, ribs imported from the Montgomery Inn (another Queen City landmark), and ice cream from Graeter’s, a local chain that draws on the community’s German roots. On an average Monday, Youkilis serves about eighty dinners, but on Cincinnati Night the clientele doubles. (He also keeps a stash of chili on hand for his nephew Kevin, who often comes by with teammates when the Red Sox are in town.)

In contrast, design is often a “Trojan horse” for momentous ideas, maintains John Kao, a former academic, since it marries rigorous methods with more empathetic and intuitive ones, from lengthy anthropological studies of consumers to the production of experimental prototypes. With funding from Deloitte, a consultancy, he has set up the Institute for Large Scale Innovation, an outfit dedicated to “building the new innovation agenda necessary for tackling wicked global problems”.

WPA Cracker is a cloud cracking service for penetration testers and network auditors who need to check the security of WPA-PSK protected wireless networks. WPA-PSK networks are vulnerable to dictionary attacks, but running a respectable-sized dictionary over a WPA network handshake can take days or weeks. WPA Cracker gives you access to a 400CPU cluster that will run your network capture against a 135 million word dictionary created specifically for WPA passwords. While this job would take over 5 days on a contemporary dual-core PC, on our cluster it takes an average of 20 minutes, for only $17.

“Why am I meeting with you guys?" It was the spring of 2005, just three weeks into Mark Hurd's tenure as CEO of Hewlett-Packard, and product design was not at the top of his list of priorities. Hurd was consumed with the monumental task of restructuring a company with more than 150,000 employees in 170 countries and making operational efficiency a cornerstone of the tech giant's competitive strategy. The ponytailed Sam Lucente, who'd become HP's first-ever vice president of design two years earlier, was in the hot seat. He flashed a slide that showed dozens of HP logos, each created by a different team within the company. The next slide was of a single logo, crafted by his corporate design crew, that could be used everywhere. Lucente predicted that when 500 million of the new "jewel" logos were shipped, the company would have saved roughly $50 million in development and manufacturing costs. "Now," replied the boss, "you've got my attention."

The presumption of disclosure also means that agencies should take affirmative steps to make information public. They should not wait for specific requests from the public. All agencies should use modern technology to inform citizens about what is known and done by their Government. Disclosure should be timely. I direct the Attorney General to issue new guidelines governing the FOIA to the heads of executive departments and agencies, reaffirming the commitment to accountability and transparency, and to publish such guidelines in the Federal Register. In doing so, the Attorney General should review FOIA reports produced by the agencies under Executive Order 13392 of December 14, 2005. I also direct the Director of the Office of Management and Budget to update guidance to the agencies to increase and improve information dissemination to the public, including through the use of new technologies, and to publish such guidance in theFederal Register.

On his first full day in office, President Barack Obama said the “Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails.” Open-government groups cheered the Obama administration’s initial policy statements, but they’re waiting to see if change has really come to a government that grew opaque under the previous administration.