DESIGN THINKING IS HELPING organizations outpace the competition. A concept born in Silicon Valley, design thinking is an entirely differ-ent way to approach business strategy by prioritizing innovation, creativity, and wide perspectives to tackle challenges in product and service delivery.The Silicon Valley Business Journal, partnering with the law firm of Faegre Baker Daniels, recently invited de-sign thinking experts to talk about the process and how the techniques can be applied across business sectors, whether the stakeholders are external customers or in-house teams. David J.F. Gross, Faegre Baker Daniels partner, moderated the discussion with panelists Durell Coleman, founder and CEO of DC Design, and Enia Titova, legal designer at IDEO. The following are excerpts from the discussion, edited for space and clarity.

WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH DESIGN?

EVERYTHING

I N T E C H N O L O G Y WHO

Enia TitovaLegal Designer

IDEO

Durell ColemanFounder and CEO

DC Design

David J.F. GrossPartner, IP Litigation

Faegre Baker Daniels LLP

PANELISTPANELIST MODERATOR

FaegreBD.com

Faegre Baker Daniels presents

Q: What are the basics of design thinking?

Enia Titova: Before you start the process, you have to define a question or a challenge. Next is the inspiration stage. It consists of what we call “looking out” — to see how people in analogous industries or analogous sectors have started to address that question — and then “looking in”, where we start doing design research by talking to people who might be impacted by that particular issue to figure out exactly where the challenges are. Once we have this information, we start to synthesize it and develop prototypes and ideas to test with stakeholders.

Durell Coleman: There are different ways of framing this pro-cess. Human-centered design is the core. We’re observing hu-man beings and the systems that they live and work in.

Q: What’s the relationship between empathy and looking out?

Durell Coleman: Empathy is really this looking out concept and saying, we want to look at the human beings who are involved in a process and understand where they are and what their world looks like. One of the frameworks we use is: observe, engage, do. Observe is: Let’s just watch. Engage is: Let’s have conversations with people. Do is: How do I walk through some of what your life is like?

Q: Who is involved in this process?

Durell Coleman: The people we’re really serving. It’s impor-tant to look beyond the immediate person. Who are the other people who are affected by a certain problem or solution? Who else has control over what gets implemented? Those are all stakeholders in the process and they’re worth considering. If we leave them out, we risk creating solutions that don’t cater to their needs or that they reject.

Enia Titova: We focus on extreme users of all things and often that means accounting for people of all ability levels and differ-ent expertise in a particular area.

Q: Does design thinking work in the tech space?

Enia Titova: It’s particularly important in the tech space be-

cause we often have this idea that technology is separate from humans, whereas we build it and direct it to be what we want.

Q: What happens when there are many problems you could identify?

Enia Titova: We operate within three constraints: desirability, feasibility and viability. Design thinking in the intersection of those three areas is where innovation lives.

Durell Coleman: This is what the process is really useful for. You realize that there are all of these opportunities to create change. That’s fantastic. Now we need to determine the priorities.

Q: We hear a lot about rough prototype. Is it just for products?

Durell Coleman: It’s easy to think about prototypes being as-sociated with products, but you can prototype services and experiences as well. We use it all the time in service design.

Q: What does it mean to be iterative in design thinking?

Enia Titova: You’re constantly improving based on feedback from users. Even the design research phase can be iterative. Every time I talk to a new stakeholder, I augment what I’m go-ing to ask the next person because of insights that inform me as I do my research.

Durell Coleman: It comes down to changing the mentality around what testing and deploying something means. It's okay if we test with four or five different versions, as long as the time and money spent on them is minimal.

Q: How is the design thinking process different from market research with a focus group?

Enia Titova: A focus group is constrained. You’re putting people in an artificial environment. With design thinking, we’re starting from scratch and seeing how people actually use things before we come up with A or B to test.

Durell Coleman: A focus group doesn’t give the details need-ed to build the constraints for creating whatever it is that you want to create. That’s where this is different. The focus group is an artificial environment in many ways, though it can be a part of the empathy and design thinking processes.

WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH DESIGN?EVERYTHINGI N T E C H N O L O G Y

Faegre Baker Daniels presents

Q: What is converge, diverge, flare, and focus within design thinking?

Enia Titova: When a client comes to us with a question or a challenge, we of-ten find ourselves expanding to try to help them find the right solution. That’s when we begin looking out and find-

ing analogous situations that we can look at in conducting research. Then we synthesize. We’ll talk about the in-sights from our design research inter-views or other activities that we do with users. We boil them down to similarities that we’re hearing across stakeholder

subsets. At this point, we start looking at various solutions. We go through a brainstorming process where there are no bad ideas. You have to then figure out where your constraints are and that’s where you prototype and start testing in the field. Based on feed-back, you might diverge a little bit. You might bring back some of the features that you had previously discarded and start incorporating them into the next version of the product.

Q: Why does diversity in a brainstorming group matter?

Durell Coleman: It comes down to empa-thy. We all look at a problem and see it from a different perspective. We want those dif-ferent perspectives to be represented.

Enia Titova: Having diversity of perspec-tives in the brainstorming process is what allows you to serve and incorpo-

rate the whole range of concepts into your product.

Q: What are some tips for the person who’s not running everything, but wants to be a design thinker?

Durell Coleman: Ask why? What is the ul-timate goal? What are you really trying to achieve? Asking questions is something that anyone can do. Another way to em-phasize the process is to use it between people within the company itself.

Enia Titova: Everybody, regardless of their role in the organization, has something that they want to pass to somebody. Even if you have the small-est chunk of the development project, there’s a way that you can think about its role in the bigger product or strategy and pass it to the person who’s going to take it one step further and implement it in a way that makes sense.

THE DESIGN PROCESSHow to generate new solutions

1DISCOVER

3BUILD

2SYNTHESIZE

4TEST

5EVOLVE

We go through a brainstorming process where there are no bad ideas.

– Enia Titova

FaegreBD is excited to serve as an official Legal Design Lab Partner with Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design.

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