Think like a designer
Design can be seen as a method: a method to join together separate ideas, information, emotions and organize them to develop a thought. None of the books listed below have any real examples of what is traditionally thought of as design. There are no glossy visuals or “concepts”. Instead these are books which develop a way of thinking, a method which realizes that what is made is only as good as the way an idea is framed. They provide different ways to help you see the world you live in and how to rearrange the complexity of that world in a way that makes sense of things.
Book 1 : What Customers Want - by Anthony Ulwick
"Why does traditional brainstorming often fail to produce breakthrough ideas?Most brainstorming and idea generation efforts yield poor and unactionable results for three key reasons. The first is because managers rarely know how or where to direct employee’s creative energy. The result is much wasted energy, hundreds of useless ideas, and unfortunately, few ideas that are truly worthy of of pursuit. Consider the typical pattern. In most firms, when employees are asked to come up with new ideas they are not directed to focus on specific outcomes; rather, they are asked for ideas to improve the company’s product in general (functions, ergonomics, fit and finish, distribution and packaging), leaving the direction for improvement open to interpretation. In the absence of a specific target, employees in turn focus on what they themselves want to improve rather than on what customers want to see improved."
Book 2 : Design Driven Innovation - by Roberto Verganti
"Alessi knows that if all his new products are successful, the company has been too conservative and has stayed away from the borderline. This is not good, because it opens the field to competitors. So the company periodically pursues more-radical projects. And even when these efforts apparently fail (proposing products that are too extreme-beyond the borderline), that failure is the revealing moment in which the firm finally sees where the borderline was and is in the best position to make a breakthrough with the next project, before and better than its competitors."
Book 3: A Technique for Producing Ideas - by James Young
"What is most valuable to know is not where to look for a particular idea, but how to train the mind in the method by which all ideas are produced and how to grasp the principles which are at the source of all ideas."
Book 4: How Designers Think - by Bryan Lawson
"Classifying design by its end product seems to be rather putting the cart before the horse, for the solution is something which is formed by the design process and has not existed in advance of it. The real reason for classifying design in this way has less to do with the design process but instead a reflection on our increasingly specialized technologies. Engineers are different from architects not just because they may use a different design process but more importantly because they understand about different materials and requirements. Unfortunately this sort of specialization can easily become a strait jacket for designers, directing their mental process toward a predefined goal. It is thus too easy for architects to assume that the solution to a client's problem is a new building. Often it is not!"
Book 5 : Designing Programmes - by Karl Gerstner
"To describe a problem is part of the solution. This implies: not to make creative decisions as promoted by feeling but by intellectual criteria. The more exact and complete these criteria are, the more creative the work becomes. The creative process is to be reduced to an act of selection. Designing means : to pick out determining elements and combining them."
