What do the apple mouse, Infarm vertical farms and the pringle all have in common?
They were all designed by the extremely influential Silicone Valley design firm. IDEO shaped the practice of human-centred design thinking and made a name for itself by pushing the boundaries of creativity.
The firm capitalised on a key strategy for creating practical value: packaging its knowledge and expertise so that anyone can approach the world like a designer. (This is before Canva existed for all of us amateur designers - guilty 🤚🙊🙃🫠)
IDEO packages its design thinking methodology in many forms to share its concepts and strategies of human-centred design to catch on, including education, tools and publications.
📖 1. Education
In 2004 one of the co-founders, David Kelley, launched the d.school at Stanford to teach design thinking as a new approach to creating innovative solutions to solve complex problems. But these principles are not limited to ‘just design’, they have been applied across industries such as architecture, education and business.
Kelley packed his decades of experience and knowledge into courses and programmes to provide practical value to others. The intention was to foster ‘creative confidence’ through Kelley’s technique by unlocking everyone’s innate creativity. To instil creative confidence in his students, the d.school provides useful and practical information on how they can apply his design thinking methods like observation, empathy, brainstorming and experimentation in their field or workplace.
Almost 20 years later, the courses are still popular with 10% of all Stanford students across 7 campuses enrolling in at least 1 d.school programme. The good news for everyone else is that IDEO makes its courses publicly available on IDEOU, an online platform that offers courses and certifications on design thinking. IDEOU.org, the firm’s non-profit arm offers free classes in design thinking at Acumen Academy.
🛠️ 2. Tools
IDEO provides tools for prospective clients to run design thinking exercises in their own companies. The Human-Centred Design Toolkit turns news you can use into methods and guides to innovate new products and services. IDEO’s wide-ranging toolbox includes step-by-step tools for everything from planning journey maps to building a team to conducting customer interviews.
Crowd-funded on Kickstarter, the field guide was downloaded over 150,000x after its release in 2009. But IDEO offers more kinds of tools, in the form of playing cards that make it easy for users to brainstorm, ideate and structure conversations with others.
One of IDEO’s most famous exercises is the ‘Wallet Exercise’ - it gives teams a chance to start with empathy, generate new ideas and build rapid prototypes for a simple object in 90 minutes. Participants then pitch their new concepts to their peers, this gets students into the habit of tackling innovation challenges head-on.
A similar PR stunt showcased people redesigning a shopping cart and garnered millions of views, perfectly demonstrating how design thinking leads to genius results.
📰 3. Publications
Each founder of IDEO has authored books, all receiving positive reviews. In fact, 3 out of the 10 articles featured in the HBR On Design Thinking, are written by the founders of IDEO (highly recommend this series 📚).
Besides books, visitors can find case studies on the website that showcase successful client work in a business blog. Such case studies offer concrete design thinking perspectives that touch upon a wide range of strategic problems, from designing digital transformation in the manufacturing industry to crafting a purpose statement that unifies brands.
This mix of publications offers useful and shareable information to professionals facing similar challenges at their workplaces.
IDEO’s use of practical value creates brand awareness and generates referral traffic. On average, they get 4x more engagement across social platforms and 3x more referral traffic than competitors such as Frog Design or Huge Inc.
IDEO offer a few key learnings for brands who want to implement the strategy of Practical Value.
🔑 Demonstrate your expertise and package it in shareable forms. Both B2B and B2C firms can publish insights and case studies on how they improve the lives of their customers. IDEO regularly updates their web content to keep others informed about IDEO’s ideas and actions.
🔑 Create tools and frameworks that others can bring back to their companies. IDEO’s design kits, playing cards and exercises give others practical value while also spreading the firm’s philosophy - that everyone can approach the world like a designer. IDEO calls this open-source innovation. Users who bring these exercises to their teams introduce a new shared language in the company. The next time they might need a design consultancy, IDEO is top of mind.
🔑 Big changes can start with small words. Spearheading a shared language around human-centred design, IDEO reframes sentences like “We’ve always done it this way” or “Nobody does it like that”, to “Why?” and “How might we?”. Users, customers and students learn to use this language in IDEO’s workshops and exercises, they share IDEO’s ideas with others, ultimately resulting in referrals and word of mouth for the brand.
See you next week as we dive into part 6 of the series; Storytelling.
Have a contentful day 🌞
Emma