Change by Design, Revised and Updated

How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation

By: Tim Brown

Narrated by: Tim Brown, Tim Roberts

The subject of “design thinking” is the rage at business schools, throughout corporations, and increasingly in the popular press—due in large part to work of IDEO, a leading design firm, and its celebrated CEO, Tim Brown, who uses this book to show how the techniques and strategies of design belong at every level of business.

The myth of innovation is that brilliant ideas leap fully formed from the minds of geniuses. The reality is that most innovations come from a process of rigorous examination through which great ideas are identified and developed before being realized as new offerings and capabilities.

Change by Design explains design thinking, the collaborative process by which the designer’s sensibilities and methods are employed to match people’s needs, not only with what is technically feasible, but what is viable to the bottom line. Design thinking converts need into demand. It’s a human-centered approach to problem solving that helps people and organizations become more innovative and more creative.

Introduced a decade ago, the concept of design thinking remains popular at business schools, throughout corporations, and increasingly in the popular press—due in large part to work of IDEO, the undisputed world leading strategy, innovation, and design firm headed by Tim Brown. As he makes clear in this visionary guide—now updated with addition material, including new case studies, and a new introduction—design thinking is not just applicable to so-called creative industries or people who work in the design field. It’s a methodology that has been used by organizations such as Kaiser Permanente, to increase the quality of patient care by re-examining the ways that their nurses manage shift change, or Kraft, to rethink supply chain management.

Change by Design is not a book by designers for designers; it is a book for creative leaders seeking to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization, product, or service to drive new alternatives for business and society.

Ok, not great.

Glorifies graphic/UI/product designers and "design thinking" as literally the solution to all the world's problems.
Written in 2009, theoretically updated in 2019, but still sounds out of date.
My only takeaways: make sure to REALLY understand the customer. Prototype early and often.
Appreciate acknowledgement of the climate crisis.

loved this!

gave me a great understanding of design thinking. will give. me a great basis to continue my learning.

Review

Basic if you’ve already read or learned about many of the case studies but a nice contextualization and historical view. Interesting that the term design thinking is being used for things we used to call many other names and for projects that didn’t necessarily refer to themselves that way.

Meh

I listened to it and thought - so what?! I didn’t find it practical and I didn’t feel like I took much away from it. Might as well google the book summary and call it good. Quite disappointed.

Creativity is in everything

While I'd love to change jobs to become a design thinker, I do not think that is the path I am supposed to take but I enjoyed reading about the process of design and the components of design.