Just like innovation and artificial intelligence, design thinking is a buzzword. There is a cottage industry of practitioners who, with good intention or not, are hoping to get their pockets full from enterprises who want a step by step process that reduces the uncertainty behind innovation.
To many, design thinking is the answer.
Design thinking is powerful but misunderstood. I’ve written about these misunderstandings in the past:
- Putting their faith in a process and believing it will save them;
- Believing tools, not skills, makes anyone creative;
- Believing design thinking is the ONLY way to innovate.
This is a topic which resonates with design thinking practitioners like Sunil Malhotra. We’ve had back and forth conversations over Twitter and Facebook, and we felt the need to demystify design thinking for the benefit of businesses and the discipline itself.
Sunil is the co-founder and CEO of Ideafarms, a Design + Innovation company that pioneered using concepts and approaches of industrial design in the software industry. Belief in individual talent and the power of interdisciplinary teams provided the impetus for his founding Ideafarms – a business model based on the simple tenet that ‘everything produced by human beings is meant for use by other human beings’. Ideafarms’s user orientation drives its technology vision and not the other way around, making the company strikingly different from the norm. Today, Ideafarms is amongst India’s leading Design Thinking providers.
Connect with Sunil on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Watch our conversation below:
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Intro audio is by Arturo Arriaga, outro audio is Candyland by Guy J.
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Also published on Medium.
I think we touched upon several critical points in our informal chat. There are layers upon layers which start with deep-rooted beliefs and go on to conditioning, education and socio-cultural moorings, among other factors, that influence human behaviour. It’s understanding these with an open mind and then putting the insights we gain, into the context of the job at hand that will make a difference. Thanks again Jorge, for the provocation. Onward to part 2, 3, …
Agree. Let’s do it!
The “share” links on the top don’t seem to be working.