BOOK REVIEW

CHANGE BY DESIGN: HOW DESIGN THINKING TRANSFORMS

ORGANIZATIONS AND INSPIRES INNOVATION

TIM BROWN
ISBN-13:-9780061937736

Submitted as a part of audit course for M.com semester-1(CBCSS-2023

Admission) programme

MCM1A08

M.Com semester -1

UNIVERSITY OF CALICUT

SCHOOL OF DISTANCE EDUCATION

Submitted by

SAUBHAGYA V.N.
Register No: STAXDCM029
Enrolment No: 2373555
Course Duration:2023-2025
Book Review of: “Change by Design How Design Thinking Transforms
Organizationsand Inspires Innovation” by Tim Brown

Publisher:-Harper Collins, Pages:-276, ISBN-13:- 9780061937736

About the Author: Tim Brown is CEO and President of IDEO. He often talks about the
value of Design Thinking and innovation for entrepreneurs and designers around the world.
Brown attends the World Economic Forum in Davos (Switzerland). If you want to watch it,
your Serious Play and Change By Design lectures are available on TED.com. The author
works for senior executives and boards of fortune 100 companies.

In addition, he has conducted strategic relationships with companies such as Ford, Microsoft,
Steelcase, and Procter & Gamble. Brown writes with a winning combination of
thoughtfulness, pragmatism, and enthusiasm… He avoids the trap of presenting design
thinking as a panacea. Mr. Brown charts its failures as well as successes. Ranked
independently among the ten most innovative companies in the world, IDEO is the global
consultancy that contributed to such standard-setting innovations as the first mouse for Apple
and Palm V. Today IDEO applies its human- centered approach to drive innovation and
growth for the World’s leading businesses, as well as for government, education, health care,
and social sectors.

In this book to be a great overview of DT and recommended it to anyone unfamiliar with the
subject. I personally would’ve wished for the book to spend more time on specific techniques
and less on the broader trends and high-level concepts since most of those are already
familiar. The author Tim Brown explains in this book “Change by Design”, the operation of
the concept of innovation used by entrepreneurs, known as “Design Thinking”, which assists
in the development of products and ideas, and has the main objective of customer
satisfaction. The book “Change by Design”, released in 2019 by writer Tim Brown, cities the
role of design in the creation and development of organizations in businesses, communities,
and governments. This work is composed of a discreet and exciting approach to innovation
that inspires designers. This process is called Design Thinking. The Design Thinking
methodology covered in the book “Change by Design” is useful for both the creative industry
and others who want to produce and develop ideas in their companies. In addition, it can be
applied to problem-solving organizations.
If you are interested, Brown’s teachings will support you. Main ideas of the book for Design
thinking moves through inspiration, problem, and conception to execution; Observe what
people do, what they don’t do, and what they cannot explain; Design Thinking works through
four mental states; Create prototypes quickly; Stories are essential for projecting thought; The
distinction between products and services is increasingly blurred; Innovate and design for a
purpose.

Innovation is only seen as a process of creating new technology, but it’s more complex than
that. Defining innovation in this way is too simple. On the other hand, Design Thinking
provides a way to approach the innovation process and thus gain a more sophisticated
understanding of innovation itself. It encourages us to use a more integrated method. This
method contemplates three spaces through them a project can circulate several times, that is,
it is not a one-way method.

Abstract: The book contains 10 chapters, each with a special chapter title and various sub
headings within each chapter. The 10 chapters are spread on 276 pages. The book starts with
design thinking and about more than style for on chapter one. Thereafter, each chapter
addresses itself to the inspiration, ideation, and implementation of design thinking.
Chapter 1: Getting Under Your Skin, or How Design Thinking is About More Than
Style:-

Three spaces of innovation:

 Inspiration- the problem or opportunity that motivates the search for solutions.
 Ideation- the process of generating, developing, and testing ideas .
 Implementation- the path that leads from the project room to the market. Without
constraints design cannot happen, and the best design is often carried out within quite
severe constraints. The first stage of the design process is often about discovering
which constraints are important.

Constraints can best be visualised in terms of three overlapping criteria for successful ideas:

 Feasibility – what is functionally possible within the foreseeable future

 Viability – what is likely to become part of a sustainable business model
  Desirability – what makes sense to people and for people

Smart teams are “all of us are smarter than any of us”, -this is the key to unlocking the
creative power of any organisation. A creative organisation is constantly on the lookout for
people with the capacity and the disposition for collaboration across disciplines.
Chapter 2: Converting Need into Demand, or Putting People First:-

The job of the designer is “converting need into demand.” – Peter Ducker. The problem:
people are so ingenious at adapting to inconvenient situations that they are often not even
aware that they are doing so. Three mutually reinforcing elements of any successful design
program: insight, observation, and empathy.

 Insight :- learning from the lives of others go out and observe the actual
experiences of commuters, skateboarders, and registered nurses as they improvises
their way through their daily lives. Rarely will the everyday people who are the
consumers of our products, the consumers for our services tell us what to do. Their
actual behaviours, however, can provide us with invaluable clues about their range
of unmet needs.
 Observation: - watch what people do (and do not do) and listen to what they say
(and do not say).
 Empathy:- the mission of design thinking is to translate observations into
insights and insights into products and services that will improve lives. We build
these bridges of insight through empathy, the effort to see the world through the
eyes of others, understand the world through their experiences, and feel the world
through their emotions.
Chapter 3: A Mental Matrix or “These People Have No Process!”

Convergent and Divergent Thinking:-

 Convergent Thinking – a practical way of deciding among existing alternatives.

Not so good at: probing the future and creating new possibilities.
 Divergent Thinking –if the convergent phase of problem solving is what drives us
toward solutions, the objective of divergent thinking is to multiply options to create
choices.

“To have a good idea, you must first have lots of ideas” –Linus Pauling. Synthesis –the
act of extracting meaningful patterns from masses of raw information is a fundamentally
creative act. A creative team must be given the time, the space, and the budget to
make mistakes. What is called for is a judicious blend of bottom-up experimentation and
guidance fromabove.

The rules for this approach are as simple to state as they are challenging to apply:

 Whole organisational ecosystem must have room to experiment.

 Those most exposed to changing externalities (new technology, shifting consumer
base, strategic threats or opportunities) are the ones best placed to respond and most
motivated to do so.
 Ideas should not be favoured based on who creates them. On the importance of
deadlines –it takes judgment to determine when a team will reach a point where
management input, reflection, redirection, and selection are most likely to be
valuable.
Chapter 4: Building to Think, or The power of Prototyping:-

Since openness to experimentation is the lifeblood of any creative organisation, is the best
prototyping is the best evidence of experimentation. Prototyping –the willingness to go
ahead and try something by building it. Early prototypes should be fast, rough, and cheap.
The goal of prototyping is not to create a working model. It is to give form to an idea to
learn about its strengths and weakness and to identify new directions for the next
generation of more detailed, more refined prototypes.

The same rules apply when the challenge is a service, a virtual experience, or even an
organisational system. These include scenarios, a form of storytelling in which some
potential future situation or state is described using words and pictures. A simple scenario
structure useful in the development of new services is the “customer journey.” As the
project moves forward, the number of prototypes will go down while the resolution of
each one goesup, but the purpose remains the same.
Chapter 5: Returning to the Surface, or The Design of Experiences:-

When we sit on an airplane, shop for groceries, or check into a hotel, we are not only
carrying out a function but having an experience. The psychodynamics of affluence –
Daniel pink

argues that once our basic needs are met –as they already have been for most people in the
west-we tend to look for meaningful and emotionally satisfying experiences. The experience
economy-people shift from passive consumption to active participation.

The intrinsically human- centred nature of design thinking points to the next step: we can
use our empathy and understanding of people to design experiences that create opportunities
for active engagement and participation. Unlike manufactured product or a standardised
service,an experience comes to life when it feels personalised and customised. Most often it
comes from the ability of experience providers to add something special or appropriate at
just the right moment. Lessing uses the example of music to show how we are moving back
to active participation in our experiences from the passive consumption of the late
twentieth century.
Chapter 6: Spreading the Message, or The Importance of Storytelling:-

Mostly we rely on stories to put our ideas into context and give them meaning. Storyboards,
improvisation, and scenarios are among the many narrative techniques that help us
visualise an idea as it unfolds over time. At the heart of any good story is a central
narrative about the way an idea satisfies a need in some powerful way. Meme - a self-
propagating idea that changes behaviour perceptions, or attitudes.

In today’s noisy business environment, where top-down authority has become suspect and
centralised administration is no longer sufficient, a transformative idea needs to diffuse on
its own. If your employees or customers don’t understand where you are going, they will not
be able to help you get there.

Optimisers-people paralysed by the fear that if they only waited a little while longer or
searched a little harder, they could find what they think they want at the best possible price.
Storytelling needs to be in the tool kit of the design thinker-in the sense not of a tidy
beginning, middle, and end but of an ongoing, open-ended narrative that engages people and
encourages them to carry it forward and write their own conclusions.
Chapter 7: Design Thinking Meets the Corporation, or Teaching to Fish:-

Large companies are better positioned to look for breakthroughs from within their existing
markets, where technical virtuosity provides no assurance of success. By mapping
innovation efforts along a vertical axis representing existing to new offerings and a
horizontal axisrepresenting existing to new users, companies can get a good picture of the
balance of their innovation efforts.

In addition to incremental projects that secure a company’s base, it is vital to pursue

evolutionary projects that stretch that base in new directions. This more venturesome goal
can be reached either by extending existing offerings to solve the unmet needs of current
customers or adapting them to meet the needs of new customers or markets. And
though it may be tempting to focus on incremental projects in which business forecasts
are easy to make, this short sighted approach leaves companies vulnerable to the
unforeseeable events of the type that Nassim Nicholas Taleb dubbed the “Black Swan”.

The paired challenges facing most companies today:

 How to incorporate designer’s creative problem –solving skills into their larger
strategic initiative.
 How to engage a far greater percentage of their workforce in design thinking itself.
Chapter 8: The New Social Contract, or We’re All in This Together:-

If a company does a better job of understanding its customers, it will do a better job of
satisfying their needs. Past innovation is no guarantee of future performance. The guiding
principle for any large-scale system wide project is to ensure that the objectives of different
participants are aligned.

Every interaction in a product/service experience is a small opportunity to make that

exchange more valuable to and meaningful for all participants. The widespread shift, even
among traditional manufacturing companies, from a “product” orientation to a “service”
orientation is key to scaling up the tools of the design thinker to grapple with complex
systems on the order of airport security.
Chapter 9: Design Activism, or Inspiring Solutions with Global Potential:-

The most compelling insights often come from looking outward, to the edges of the
market. The objective is not so much to design for these marginal, outlying populations as to
gain inspiration from their passion, their knowledge, or simply the extremity of their
circumstances.

Thought it is praiseworthy to contribute our talents to the eradication relief, and rural
education, too often our instinct has been to think of these interventions as social acts that
are different from and superior to the practical concerns of business. They aren’t. IDEO has
a shared interest in using design thinking to balance business goals with philanthropic
objectives-led to an ongoing partnership with Acumen Fund. The initiatives examined here,
however, do not call for highly trained specialists to interrupt their careers but for them to
redirect them in ways that serve those in extreme need.

The main of design activism for:

 Designing for extreme needs

 Acumen fund
 Social enterprise
 Architecture humanity
Chapter 10:Designing Tomorrow-Today:-

Design thinkers observe how people behave, how the context of their experience affects
their reaction to products and services. Asking the right kinds of questions often determines
the success of a new product or service.

 Does it meet the needs of its target population?

 Does it create meaning as well as value?
 Does it inspire a new behaviour that will be forever associated with it?
 Does it create a tipping point?

Extreme users are often the key to inspirational insights. These are the specialists, the
aficionados, and the outright fanatics who experience the world in unexpected ways. They
force us to project our thinking to the edges of our existing customer base and expose
issue that would otherwise be disguised. Use digital tools to document your project
outcomes in a way that deepens the knowledge base of your organisation and allows
individuals to learnfrom it and to grow.

“Innovation begins with an Eye,” but I’d like to take this one step further. Good design
thinkers observe. Great design thinkers observe the ordinary. If you haven’t explored lots of
options, you haven’t diverged enough. Your ideas are like to be incremental or easy to copy.
Remember to document the process as it unfolds. Above all, think of life as a prototype.
We

can conduct experiments, make discoveries, and change our perspectives. We can look for
opportunities to turn processes into project that have tangible outcomes.

Today we have an opportunity to take their example and unleash the power of design
thinking as a means of exploring new possibilities, creating new choices, and bringing new
solutions to the world. In the process we may find that we have made our societies
healthier, our own lives richer, more impactful, and more meaningful.
Analysis, Evaluation and Critique

The key message in this book is producing the kinds of innovations that change the world
requires starting with the right design philosophy-one that emphasizes fluidity, brings
people together and keeps its focus on the real word applications and implications of an
idea. This book aims to although innovation is powerful it hasn’t exactly made our lives
better. What is needed to invent truly innovative products or services that make our
lives truly better is awhole different type of thinking called design thinking.

Main ideas of the book “change by design”:-

 Design thinking moves through inspiration, problem, and conception to execution;

 Observe what people do, what they don’t do, and what they cannot explain;
 Design thinking works through four mental states;
 Create prototype quickly;
 Stories are essential for projecting thought;
 The distinction between products and services is increasingly blurred;
 Innovate and design for a purpose.

Often, innovation is only seen as a process of creating new technology, but it’s more
complex than that. Designing innovation in this way is too simple. On the other hand, design
thinking provides a way to approach the innovation process under thus gain a more
sophisticated understanding of innovation itself. It encourages us to use a more integrated
method. This method contemplates three spaces. This method contemplates three spaces
through them a project can circulate several times, that is, it is not a one-way method.

Firstly, we have the inspiration. It consists in considering the problem or opportunity for the
purpose of solving it or taking advantage of it.

Second, we have the conception. At this point, we refine the ideas and theories and put
themto the test.

Finally, there is execution, which consists in exposing the idea to the market.
The author Tim Brown says in his book, “Change by Design”, that most innovations go
through each step several times, as this is part of the design thinking process. Of course at
the design stage, for example, the product you are developing could gain features that
exceed the initial resolution of the problem. For this reason, you may want to go through the
inspiration process, because by doing so, your product will be able to solve other types of
problems.
Therefore, an integrated solution has three balanced aspects:

 Practicality
 Feasibility
 Convenience

The other authors say about for; in “Inside Steve’s Brain”, the author Leander Kahn shows
us how the changes took place at Apple and how it became one of the largest companies in
the world. Steve was able to spread to passion to his employees by contributing their best
version with the idea of revolutionizing the world and building something great from
product creation.

We also have author Ashlee Vance’s “Elon Musk”, which deals with the importance of
thinking big, not worrying if the idea is crazy, because, after all, musk proved that any
madness can be practiced. Musk’s empire is made up of three major companies: Tesla,
Space x, and Solar City. These companies have great individual successes. Musk has always
had big plans and great ideas. Best of all, he put these ideas into practice through
revolutionary products. Finally, Ed Catmull, author of the book “Creativity Inc”, advices:
always give more preference to people than to ideas, because creative people create good
ideas, but good ideascan be destroyed by bad teams.

Design thinkers use stories to make a product closer to customers as if there was a
relationship between them. To make a good story a design thinker must consider the
source of the product and how the customer will make use of it. It’s noteworthy that the
story must involve the customer at all stages, even early in the product’s life. The most
important stories are the ones customers can write. By actively being part of a product
story, customers are more likely to use it.
How can apply this to my life?
Creating innovations that transform the world requires starting with the right Design
Thinking – one that focuses on fluidity, brings people together and preserves their focus
onthe real applications and implications of an idea. To help you become more flexible when
troubleshooting, ask yourself: why? For example, “why is the sky blue? Why don’t birds
fall off branches when they sleep?”.

According to the author Tim Brown, these questions should be asked once a day. In
addition, you may even find inspiration for creating other products and services.