posted by Anna Fleet on August 25th, 2010
The Harvard Business Review recently featured an interview with Kaiser Permanente, of Kaiser Pemanente Innovation Consultancy about how human-centered design is used to engage front line staff (nurses and even patients) to improve the quality of care in our hospitals.
“We find the few folks early on who want to share their dreams, their desires, their pain points with us,” says Permanente. “Then we observe them in their expertise areas…and take them through the ideation phase where front line staff are inspired to release all of the great ideas inside of them.”
Permanente says he sees the power of design thinking when those low fidelity prototypes (or ideas) are put into action in a hospital within few weeks. “It’s truly powerful stuff,” he says.
Watch the interview and find out how engagement with frontline staff has been responsible for creating solutions for universal problems in health care— medication administration error, nurse shift handoff and pain management.
Tags: design thinking in hospitals, design thinking process, design thinking strategy, harvard business review, human centered design, kaiser permanente innovation consultancy, the power of design thinking
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posted by Anna Fleet on August 24th, 2010
If you’re a designer, you already familiar with how exploring the unknown through the design thinking process can be contagious! And how the ideas and energy that come out of creative team brainstorming sessions can lead to some incredible, new ways of solving problems for clients.
Elizabeth Johansen is the Director of Product Development at Design that Matters, a company that creates new products and services for the poor in developing countries. Johansen is passionate about creating positive social impact through design through an exercise she calls cultivating “the group mind”.
Now cultivating the “group mind” doesn’t mean that everyone involved thinks alike and follows each other like lemmings. No, it’s a collaborative experience where members of a group feel comfortable and free to be themselves as they meld individual ideas and personalities together to become a collective—opening new doors they would never have discovered without the help of everyone involved.
When it comes to forming a solid “group mind”, Johansen points to Truth in Comedy, the improv comedy bible. In it authors Charna Halpern, Del Close, and Kim Johnson claim that a “group mind” is formed “Once [a participant] puts his own ego out of the way…stops judging the ideas of others—instead, he considers them brilliant…pays close attention to each other, hearing and remembering everything, and respecting all that they hear. The goal…is to connect the information created out of the group ideas—so it’s easily capable of brilliance.”
The book also recommends a method known as the “yes, &…” approach, a concrete technique for cultivating “group mind”. Using the “yes, &…approach, “[Participants] agree with each other to the Nth degree. If one asks the other a question, the other must respond positively…answering “No” leads nowhere… Each new initiation furthers the last one, and the scene progresses. The acceptance of each other’s ideas brings the players together, and engenders a “group mind.”
Tags: cultivating group mind, design that matters agency, design thinking process, design thinking strategy, elizabeth johansen group mind, the power of design thinking
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posted by Anna Fleet on August 16th, 2010
You have to admit, clean drinking water is something we take for granted here in North America where clean water is plentiful right out of the tap. However, other parts of the world are not as fortunate.
However, a great example of how design thinking really can save the world has been provided by Nanotech researchers at South Africa’s Stellenbosch University, who have created a “tea bag” that sucks contaminants and bacteria right out of water to make it immediately clean for drinking.
These cheap filter sachets—each filter costs less than half a US penny—are made from the same materials used to manufacture the country’s popular rooibos tea bags. But these sachets contain ultra thin nanoscale fibers and bacteria-killing carbon grains—that kill all of the contaminants in the water and make it safe for drinking. The raw materials that are used to construct the tea-bag filter are non-toxic to humans. Check out the post and the video where Professor Eugene Cloete, the Dean of Faculty of Science at Stellenbosch, uses the technology to drink right from a nearby riverbed.
The scientists are hoping that the effectiveness and inexpensive cost of the filter sachets will have an immediate impact. “What is new about this idea is the combination of inexpensive raw materials in point-of-use water filter systems. The nanofibres will disintegrate in liquids after a few days and have no environmental impact,” says Microbiology Researcher Marelize Bote.
Tags: clean drinking water tea bags, design thinking strategy, design thinking will save the world, nanotech reasearch, stellenbosch university, the power of design thinking
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