Want to learn the ideas in Change By Design better than ever? Read the world’s #1 book summary of Change By Design by Tim Brown here.
Read a brief 1-Page Summary or watch video summaries curated by our expert team. Note: this book guide is not affiliated with or endorsed by the publisher or author, and we always encourage you to purchase and read the full book.
Video Summaries of Change By Design
We’ve scoured the Internet for the very best videos on Change By Design, from high-quality videos summaries to interviews or commentary by Tim Brown.
1-Page Summary of Change By Design
Overview
This book explores the cognitive psychology of good design. It looks at what makes a product that responds to users’ needs and how to bring user’s and technology closer together. The author talks about common barriers to good design, ways to reduce errors, and how we can use time travel in order to see what life was like before telephones were invented.
Obviously, our lives are different today than they were in the past. Advances in technology and agriculture have made living easier. However, innovation doesn’t always equal progress. In order to create truly innovative products or services that make our lives better, we need a whole new way of thinking called design thinking.
In this article, you’ll learn how to innovate more effectively by thinking less. You’ll also discover why communicating with your hands is better than speaking and why sharing stories inspires people to be charitable.
Big Idea #1: To be the most effective at design thinking, you need to take an integrative approach.
Many people think that innovation is just the process of inventing a new technology. However, innovation also involves implementing this technology in such a way that it creates value for others and improves their lives.
This is a very simplistic view. Design thinking offers us a method to approach innovation, and thus provides us with a more sophisticated understanding of it. It encourages an integrative approach that combines three overlapping spaces through which the project may cycle several times.
The first step in the design thinking process is inspiration. In this stage, we consider a problem or opportunity and think about what to do about it. The second step is ideation. Here, we develop our ideas and theories that could solve the problem or bring an opportunity to fruition. Last is implementation where we introduce our idea to the market.
For example, imagine that you’re creating a new product. You could start with the problem you initially wanted to solve and then build features that address it. However, if your solution has more potential than what you originally thought of, go back to the inspiration process and consider how this feature might be used in other ways as well.
In order to create a good solution, it is important to balance the three aspects of feasibility, viability and desirability. This means that all three must be considered when creating a solution. A designer may consider each aspect separately and then combine them into one final design, whereas a design thinker will think about how they fit together as part of the same whole.
The Nintendo Wii is an example of a design that balances the three elements of feasibility, viability and desirability. It was feasible because it used gestural control which at the time wasn’t cutting-edge but was still possible. The console had lower pricing than other consoles on the market while providing a more immersive experience for players, making it desirable for its target audience. In your own projects you should also strive to balance these three elements in order to create designs that will be successful.
Big Idea #2: Designers can come up with great ideas if they observe consumers and let them take the lead.
According to Peter Drucker, a designer’s job is to convert need into demand. How does one go about doing this?
Design thinking is a way of looking at life and solving problems in an entirely different way. Psychologist Jane Fulton Suri says that we don’t always realize the things that are right in front of us, so we need people who can observe those things and take a closer look to find solutions. Imagine a worker trying to label all his cables under his desk, but he doesn’t know where they’re all going or what each one does. He wouldn’t have thought up this solution if someone had asked him directly how to fix it.
