Will Oremus concludes his Slate piece with the inflammatory message that this persistent echo must end: when something is free, you are the product. You have no control over the system, so you throw your hands up in the air like a coward. You resign yourself to the role of product.
Oremus writes that a person should not do this. We are not people like that. He writes:
Design thinking is a way of working where you learn what you want to make by, um, just making something. Learning by creating. In small steps you go from sketch to final product. You start with an assumption, you experiment within that and you reflect on the results. Then you continue with that. Simple. That's how artists, architects and designers work.
In the meantime, this approach has been translated to all sectors of the business world. The book Design Thinking: radical change in small steps (aff.) is the result: it gives a clear overview of the creative process, which suddenly looks very orderly and structured.
It also puts an end to a widespread myth that the creative process is simply unpredictable, intuitive and therefore unstructured. The 'creation' of something new is therefore not a process in which – suddenly and unexpectedly – the magic happens , after which one can start executing the new idea. Creativity is the outcome of a process, nothing more and nothing less. It is therefore easy to organize, structure and fit into a business approach.
In the process that Guido Stompff outlines, everything starts with the right mindset. Surprisingly, to me, Stompff does not start from 'a problem' that needs to be solved for the future customer, user or buyer of the new product. He does not start from 'problems', because people may not experience the current state of affairs as problematic at all. They simply do not know any better. In the words of Steve Jobs:
It is not people's job to think about what they australia whatsapp number want, it is our job to think about it.
This realization creates space: you will try to make things better, nicer, more fun or easier, just because you can. This requires 'looking differently' at the starting point of the process. Instead of asking "What problem are you going to solve?" you can better ask the question: "How can we make the customer happier, make life easier and provide more luxury or convenience?" Thinking about something new becomes more fun if you are not stuck in the mindset of 'the problem'.
Example: graffiti
Such a frame , as Stompff calls it, gives good energy. It defines, limits the field of fire and gives a direction of thought. It is important to explore as many frames as possible at an early stage. As an example, Stompff mentions the nuisance caused by graffiti. A municipality wanted to take a hard line against that, with all kinds of ideas to get the graffitied walls of a bicycle tunnel clean again as quickly as possible and keep them that way.