TAKEAWAY: Today I write about another idea from Tim Brown’s Change by Design book which I find to have so many fascinating parallels to what we do. Also, continue to download all of Pure Design here.
Design Thinking and us
As I mentioned in one of my blog posts last week, I am enjoying Tim Brown’s book, Change by Design (How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation). Time after time, I see references and case studies drawn by Brown and correlate them to similar situations I face in my work—-which all of you are likely to identify with.
I have come across a reference by Brown to one of his projects involving Shimano, a leading Japanese manufacturer of bicycle components, which was experiencing flattening growth for its traditional high end road and mountain bike segments in the United States. It wanted to try something new. The team assembled to explore the project realized that it would probably be better to not focus on high end market for bikes. Instead, the project turned to the question: why is it that 90 percent of American adults don’t ride bikes—-despite the fact that 90% of them did as kids!
Why do people abandon bike riding as adults?
Sounds familiar: why do people abandon newspaper reading?
People had fond memories of owning and riding a bike, just like many people would tell you that they have good memories of reading and enjoying a newspaper along the way. In both cases, however, enjoyment IS NOT enough to guarantee consumption.
Everyone the bike project people talked to had a bike in the garage with a flat tire or broken cable. Many subscribers see their newspapers pile up on a kitchen table.
So, this exploration led to the believe that a new generation of bikes could reconnect with consumers. And, writes Brown, “a whole new category of bicycling might reconnect.”
The concept: “Coasting”, or getting people to be inspired by an activity that was simple, straightforward, healthy and fun. Coasting bikes would be built for pleasure more than sport. Appeal to a different audience, with different needs.
And, here is where I underlined the page twice:
Just like we media designers usually start thinking of the look of the product first, those in the bike project would have done the same. Instead, writes Brown, “the first problem the designers would have been expected to address—the look of the bikes—-was deferred to a late stage in the development process…..”
Within a year of the bike’s successful launch, seven more manufacturers had signed up to produce coasting bikes. “An exercise in design had become an exercise in design thinking,” Brown writes.
Bikes and newspapers: not so distant
For the past two years, I have seen my own work turn in this direction. We simply do not arrive at a first meeting with a client to discuss the look. We discuss the project, the goals, the entire operation and how it handles content and multimedia. Eventually, the look of the product(s) emerges naturally, organically, and led by the thinking that preceded it.
I am happy to realize that we, too, are involved in “design thinking”, where the thinking is the larger part of the process, making the design portion of it so much easier.
Pure Design: download the entire book here
Link here to download the entirety of Pure Design—222 pages at the final count!
You are are free to read it online or print it out—whichever suits you best. To print it out, please go to the following link: http://issuu.com/mariogarcia/docs/mario_garcia_pure_design.
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Jacky belongs to Frank Deville. The Luxembourg-based pooch is an “avid reader” of the German newspaper, Bild Am Sonntag. Every Sunday Jacky picks stories and interesting graphics in Bild Am Sonntag , the German newspaper.
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TheMarioBlog post #400