Talk to any educator, parent, or policy maker and you will inevitably hear about the many problems that exist in education. It’s not for lack of trying—millions of people are working across the country to find new solutions for our schools. And yet we’re struggling to find new answers that make a real
difference.
The average American wastes enough food each month to feed another person for 19 days. Through a number of projects with The Rockefeller Foundation and other organizations, IDEO designers from across the U.S. devised novel ways to tackle food waste.
While this is not a case study as such, it sits in our case study section as it is an important piece of information from a consultancy that played a large part in popularizing Design Thinking. In their Journey to Mastery section, IDEO discuss and shine a light on the shortcomings of the design thinking term and how it has been applied.
In the early 2000s, Mayo Clinic physician Nicholas LaRusso asked himself a question: if we can test new drugs in clinical trials, can we in a similarly rigorous way test new kinds of doctor-patient interactions?
At the center of the room sat a new kind of prototype of a vehicle, which had been the focus of a startup-style development team made up of members of purchasing, HR, legal, design, accounting and more...
One of the most common misconceptions about prototyping is that you do it after you’ve determined your product or service. But this assumption goes against the true value of prototyping itself!
Prototyping should be a core part of your entire project’s life cycle, allowing you to test opportunities earlier on and gain confidence that the project is headed in the right direction.
Service design includes all the intangible aspects of how an organization seeks to build a relationship over time with its customers. And one goal of prototyping these service design experiences is to bring tangibility to these intangible experiences. Prototyping is such a powerful tool because you're organizing your service around the needs of the end consumer.
prototyping is an incredibly effective way to make ideas tangible, to learn through making, and to quickly get key feedback from the people you’re designing for. Rapid testing with real users can help you identify concepts that have potential for impact and spot ways to improve on early ideas. Prototyping isn’t about being precious.
How do you encourage new customers to open bank accounts? In 2004, Bank of America used the Design Thinking methodology to look at the problem from a human centered perspective when they assigned design agency IDEO to boost their enrollment numbers: a problem that at the time, lacked any user perspective on why it was so hard for customers to save.