🤔 What is Design? 🤯 What is Innovation?

Before we begin, I would like you to answer 2 questions.

What are the first 3 words that come to your mind when you see the word ‘Design’? What are the first 3 words that you associate with ‘Innovation’?

Take a minute or two to think about the words that came to your mind. Do you see some of the words you thought of appearing in these word cloud images?

Word cloud for “What is design?” by Codomo

Whenever we are asked to do a talk or a design workshop, we ask the same set of questions to various groups of audiences. Although each audience is from a different demographic group, you can clearly see that some of the common words are repeated across all 4. Words that appear biggest are the most frequently submitted words among the audience. Front and center, you see words such as innovation, creativity, and art.

How do these words compare to what Google says about Design? A Google image search on the word Design looks like this:

Google image search result of Design

Design, the word alone, through Google’s search algorithm is mostly associated with graphics and visual aesthetics, but is that really the case? As an education technology and design company, we readily disagree with this bias representation of Design.

Design is user-centric and that makes it universally applicable to any area of the human experience.

What we mean by this is that we should also see products, services, programs, learning, and complex systems appearing as the top image search results too. They are all intentionally designed to improve the human experience.

If we look at Innovation, the most commonly occurring word associated with Design, this is what we get:

Google image search result for innovation

This time around, the gist of ideas, mindset, and technology surfaces among the images. From the audience's responses, the words, new, creativity (again), and unique appeared the most. This is not too much of a disjoint between what the audience associates with it and the search results.

Word cloud for “What is innovation?” by Codomo

What happens when we combine the two words together? Considering that there is only one word added to it, the image search result for Design Innovation radically differs from what we see on both Design and Innovation individually.

Google image search result for Design Innovation

A recurring theme is seen across all the images that popped up is a Venn diagram with the words feasibility, viability, and desirability.

Design Innovation Framework Diagram

Design Innovation, as you can infer, is a process used to create innovation.

It focuses on addressing people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and devising a viable business strategy to derive value from this market opportunity.

This is the definition that we as individuals and as an Education Technology and Design startup subscribe to. It is something we practice daily, our mission is to empower the creative minds of students and educators with Design Innovation so that they are able to (teach children to) take on complex challenges of today and in the future.

🔁 The Process

Design Innovation is a unique blend of design thinking, computational thinking, maker culture, and business. They are repeatedly used throughout 4 main cycles which we call Gears of Design innovation, something we adapted from the Innovation Pipeline by Board of Innovation to enable younger age groups to understand the process to create successful products, services, or systems (PSS) that resonate with users.

Gears of Design Innovation

The 4 main gears span across the three grids of desirability, feasibility, and viability, evolving across the different stages of the innovation cycle.

Proof of Value (POV) — finding out what are the problems and what is of value to the users by co-creating with them. Proof of Concept (POC) — testing the effectiveness of the prototypes in delivering the value/eliminating problems. Proof of Market (POM) — ensuring the sustainability of solution as a business through iteration to achieve product-market fit. Proof of Impact (POI) — showing the potential to deliver impact to the masses through proven customer successes

All 4 of them work synergistically to produce the best results of creating value for users and for your business. Many of the large companies and startups across various industries managed to turn themselves around with Design Thinking.

The Double Diamond Design Framework (DDDF) is one that Codomo uses to engage children as young as 6 years old and working professionals of varying industries.

This framework encapsulates the first 3 cycles, Proof of Value, Proof of Concept, Proof of Market and transpires over 4 main stages: Discover, Define, Develop, and Deliver. The diamond shape is used to visually represent 2 main types of thinking at the different stages: divergent and convergent thinking.

Double Diamond Design Framework

💠💠 Proof of Value

In the Discover stage, we attempt to find out everything we can about our users and the problems they face. The idea here is to go broad so that we cover every aspect and not be blindsided by biases or assumptions. Both primary and secondary research will be conducted along with the other user-centric analysis methodologies. Meeting customers in the real world is the best way so that you experience the environment and empathize with their pain points. A lot can come out from doing this just for a day. This workshop conducted by Standford d.school to look at improving the patient experience through Design Thinking is a good example of the potential impact that can be derived just by emulating and talking to users. Look at some of the activities that are typically used in this stage below.

Activities that can be done in the Discover stage

The Define stage is where we make use of all the data collected and make sense of it. Analysis frameworks and methodologies that cross the fields of psychology, business, organization behavior such as Persona Development, Affinity Diagram, and How Might We, are conducted to prioritize user needs. The focus here is to make data-driven decisions to scope down a well-defined opportunity statement that allows room for the exploration of ideas. This UX designer did a great job of explaining his team’s design thinking process and the analyses they generated through many diagrams, maps, and illustrations. Their user needs research on the waiting experience in airports was well clear and informative. This makes the translation of needs into functional design requirements straightforward.

At this stage, we will use the Customer Segment map of the Value Proposition Canvas by Strategyzer to define the customers who will end up paying for the PSS. This ensures that teams fulfill the Desirability circle. Not every product has the same customer and user group.