librarysushi's posterous

[Martial Arts' forms teach all the moves in the style in a systmatic way to create body knowledge realizing that in a fight only individual or a series of moves will be applicable.]

Friday we had Chris Pacione and Bill Lucas in from the LUMA institute. We were having a work session on one of current projects for fostering a 'culture of innovation'. The conversation arose Is innovation, specifically Human Centered Design (a.k.a. Design Thinking) a state of mind or is it a process? Chris and Bill take the position that the beauty of Human Centered Design is that it is not a process at all. It is a set of tools, techniques and approaches that can be woven together in any number of ways to come up with something that offers new value in the marketplace. They go further and show that these tools can be added into any current process, not in conflict but as an improvement. This may not seem radical, but think about it for a moment - everyone including myself wants to show this as a process. First you do step one - Frame the problem, then you need to do Observation in the field ....

[From a presentation we made to our Korean affiliate trying to explain Design Thinking - this was our 'process' map]

In real life it sometimes works that way - but often it does not follow that exact process. So why the picture of Karate katas or forms. Everyone knows that in the end the martial arts are about a state of mind, yet if you have ever been involved in taking a Karate or Kung-Fu class, you spend a good portion of your time practicing forms, over and over and over again, the same moves in the same sequence until you dream about them. I think of design thinking the same way. It is a state of mind, but to get there you have to know the tools and approaches and then you need to practice them.

[Picture of LUMA's rough draft library of techniques and possible 'katas' for specific types of problems]

So to compliment my friends at LUMA, they have started to set that up. Basically they have categorized nearly all the common tools, some 80+ tools often used in a Human Centered Design context, explained what they do and for specific types of problems or contexts give you a 'kata', or 'playlist' of tools to use. It's process without being process. So to answer the question is Design Thinking a state of mind or a process? The answer is Yes... or as my Kung-Fu teacher say: PRACTICE MORE.