Nick Leon doesn’t like the term “design thinking”. The former business development director for IBM’s Global Services Division in Europe who is the new director of Design London, a multidisciplinary educational initiative launched recently by the Royal College of Art and Imperial College in London, prefers a term that is more serious and in his opinion better suited for boardrooms. He suggest the use of the phrase “design method”.

You have to talk about something with more rigor. ‘Design method’ is how you organize multidisciplinary teams, how you exploit technology or what processes and practices you might apply. These are all things that are as natural as breathing to a designer—but which aren’t regularly used in a business sense. To start talking about ‘design thinking’ in the boardroom or in the business school doesn’t seem strong enough. It seems a little conceptual—I want to get deeper than that.

I am able to relate that it might be difficult to convice executives to “think about design” when they would rather prefer to apply some “design method” to solve their problems. A “design method” also has the benefit that you can suddenly become really busy with planning projects, calculating business cases and setting milestones which is all very complicated when you are talking about something conceptual as “design thinking”.

Nevertheless it is essential to differentiate between actual design methods and the philosophy behind these methods: the way of identifying problems, seeing potential solutions and the focus on fulfilling customer needs. These are just some areas within design thinking and they can’t be substituted with design methods.

If the use of “design method” instead of “design thinking” is what it takes to spread the word, then this is what we should use. Yet we should not forget, that we have to “design think” as well and not just apply “design methods”.

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“Blogging is intellectual prototyping.”
Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto

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FORA, the Danish Authority for Enterprise and Construction’s Division for Research and Analysis, has published the study “Concept Design – How to solve complex challenges of our time” which focuses on how design can be utilised together with other disciplines to create new solutions to the global challenges faced by public and private sectors.

Companies are shifting from asking themselves how products should be designed, how they should be produced and how they should be marketed to asking more fundamental questions such as what should the company focus on or what problems should the company’s innovations solve. Concept design is the discipline of creating concepts that provide answers to these questions and solutions for the identified problems.

The study provides an analysis of Danish companies offering concept design services as well as an overview of other international concept design firms. Dinesh Godburdhun, Senior Team Lead at Gravity Tank shares his view about this new industry:

“I think that what this new industry has in common is that there are complex problems out there. And clients don’t know who they should call to get them solved. Normally they would call their advertising agency, market researcher, design house or what have you, and today a lot of these people are handed complex problems by clients because it’s not quite clear who should be doing them.”

All in all an interesting study, and if you ever wanted to catch a glimpse into the offices of concept designers, check out the pictures included in the study.

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