Category: Design Thinking

  • Are You a Design Thinker?

    Design thinking summarised by Lockwood is a human-centered innovation process, which with a help of observation, collaboration, fast learning, visualization of ideas, rapid concept prototyping and concurrent business analysis produces innovations and business opportunities. The keynotes that I learned from design thinking gurus Katja Tschimmel and Gijs van Wulfen was: Note 1: You cannot innovate…

  • Flight SID2014: Take-Off in the World of Design Thinker

    On 12th Sep, 2014 0900Hrs flight SID2014 took-off with my cloudy thoughts into the world of Design Thinking. With clear flight path, our Captains Katja Tschimmel and Gijs van Wulfen, introduced each other. I was surprised when Katja introduced Gijs and Gijs introduced Katja. But that is how I learn about “Collaboration principle in Design…

  • Design Thinking breeds Innovation Culture

    Design thinking breeds innovation mindset. In order for a team to co-create a successful and innovative product or service, design thinking and design tools are paramount in today’s cut-throat competitive environment. Design thinking acts as an interface between business, technology, products, services and consumers. Design thinking is a non-linear iterative process that helps us in…

  • Transform Your Business Through Design Thinking

    The postindustrial digital age and the emergence of the experience economy have fundamentally changed the requirements and the expectations how companies develop and deliver new services. Well-known brands like Airbnb, Mayo Clinic, Bank of America and HBO have all understood this shift and successfully utilized holistic design thinking approach to transform their business. They have…

  • Design Thinking: A Left-Brain Viewpoint

    Constraints foster creativity. In this case, my own limitations. At the core, I am an analyst, a conceptual thinker used to dealing with words rather than images. Most of my best service design work so far has furthermore been done using traditional survey methods rather than the kind of innovative methods promoted by designers like…

  • We Are the New Design Thinkers!

    “How many of you consider yourselves as design thinkers?” asked our guest lecturer Gijs van Wulfen (Innovation Consultant and founder of FORTH Innovation method) when our SID 2014 group started the Design Thinking course. Not so many hands rose at that point, I was certainly hesitating. However, we were soon about to learn what Design…

  • Design Thinking For Business Innovation

    Design Thinking For Business Innovation

    Innovation has always be seen as a myth, where genius is the main ingredient for it. Unfortunately this is not the reality! Innovation can be a systematic process. The key to successful innovations is to understand where the process starts. The process starts by first understanding the current needs, the current obstacles the target audience want to overcome and then formulating insights that can guide…

  • Behind the scenes – Tools in innovation designers’ sandbox Part 5/5

    Multidisciplinary teamwork, simple but effective tools, virtual work, visualization, prototyping, design thinking… There are tons of different tools designers can use in their work. This is my final blog post about the designer tools our innovation team uses in our everyday work here at the UNICEF Headquarters in New York. This time I’ll introduce two projects relating to…

  • Learning in Action – How We Won the Second Place in a Service Design Competition

    ”Could you send a female inspector?” This is how Jaakko started our pitch at Sitras’s Service Design competition on March 3, 2014. The competition was part of Sitra’s new security forum, and it intended to test how service design could help to improve public services and make them more user-centric. The actual design goal set…

  • Behind the scenes – Tools in innovation designers’ sandbox Part 1/5

    In my last blog post I talked about key principles behind successful innovations. This time I want to share some of the tools our innovation team uses in our daily work here at UNICEF Headquarters in New York to help envision and test successful innovations. Because the list is long, I will keep posting during…