[MUSIC] Today's topic is design thinking for social innovation. We are going to cover today how you might use tools and techniques from other creative sectors in the social sector to find and discover innovative approachs to public problems. Our work today is going to be broken into two parts. In the first section, we're going to talk about what does field of design thinking really is? How do we understand the generic contours and techniques of this field. And then the second part we're going to move into the question of how do we actually do this work? Why and how would you go out into the world to find solutions and what tools could you take with you. So let's get started with the basic question of what is innovation, and where do we find it? This is a deeply mysterious question. If we all knew where innovations lay, we'd be ahead of the game, but innovations often are uncovered. They require discovery. At the core of the design thinking approach is the idea that at the start of the process you want to go very broad. You want to start to generate as many possible ideas as you can, come up with as many possible versions and visions of value as possible. And only after you've laid out a large number of possibilities, then do you begin to narrow and constrain and make some choices about which ones are best. So the core idea of innovation is you don't search for innovation by going online and Googling new idea, innovation, fresh start, or some combination of words, and hope that the search engines are going to generate some ideas for you. We take a completely different approach here. Today, we're going to talk about innovation that something you can do. But it requires a lot of field work, hand work and deep spadework to uncover innovation. Let's think about the design process, this design thinking process as four parts. And we're really going to focus today on the first three. There's a first phase where you are listening, dreaming, taking in all types of input, thinking about all the possible ways in which you can solve a problem. The second part is when you start to analyze and think through. What do all these imputs really mean? How can I pull it all together? How do I understand the order and meaning of everything that's going all around me. In the third part you're going to start to test, prototype, experiment, try different approaches and see if they might work. And finally, once you've gotten past those first initial stages of Inspiration, Ideation, Iteration, then you'll move to the process of Implementing. But throughout this whole process, what we're talking about is a process of generating lots of ideas and then narrowing and tightening down on the ones that are most potentially valuable. So design thinking is already being applied in many of the creative sectors. Architects, artists, musicians, inventors all use some version of this process. It's only recently that this approach, is finding its way into the social sector and into social entrepreneurship. So let's take a look at a little bit of what this creative process looks like and then I'm going to make the argument that these techniques and tools, even though they may seem foreign, they may seem as if they belong in the creative sector, they actually have a place in the work of social entrepreneurs. So let's think about one of the greatest architects today. Frank Gehry. He is the man who designed Bilbao in Spain, the incredible curved titanium museum. He has designed the incredible Disney Center. He is one of the most creative architects in the world in the sense that he has visions that are completely counterintuitive and shocking. Interesting question is where does he come up with his ideas? How does he come up with these building designs that no one's ever thought of. And the answer is he comes up with them through a process of experimentation and iteration. He sits in his studio with cardboard, paper and scissors and starts crumpling up paper and mounding it up in the shape of a building. His buildings often have incredible contours and shapes. The reason he gets to those very clever moves and techniques is that he is experimenting in the studio with pieces of paper and tin foil, other things that he finds and he is just little by little accumulating ideas. Possibilities, range of possible architectural design moves that he could use, and only after he tries a lot of different small moves, will he slowly gravitate towards what he thinks is the highest and best use of the materials. Frank Gehry once said, there's some obvious things where the entrance should be, where the cars need to go in. And then you start to get the scale, you start to get the sense of how it's all going to fall into place. In the end, he says, you have to rise above these constraints. You have to solve problems, you have to bring an informed aesthetic to a visual problem. And so his approach involves starting very broad with a few fixed items, and then narrowly kind of tightening up the range of possibilities until he finds the highest and best design available. Other creative people like the film director, Tim Burton, starts out with a sketch book. He starts doodling. He starts drawing pictures, then he evolves them. And then he starts to get a sense of what his film, what his movie is going to look like. In the case of Alice in Wonderland, he had a vision of what this key character would look like. But it only came about after he iterated. He tried some sketches, he doodled, he came up with some possible visions, and then he enacted it in reality. Sketches are the moment where he starts to explore possibilities. And so what I want to get to is this idea that creativity and innovation doesn't come all at once. It comes through a process of bricolage, of trying little things here and there and eventually experiment until you find something that actually works well. Think about the musician Paul Simon, he doesn't sit down and write great music. He starts down by sitting out and sitting down and throwing out some words. Often they're cliches, often they're ones that he thinks are foolish. But he'll start somewhere, start with the melody, throw out some words, weave it together and then little by little he start to see a few interesting things. And he start to organize those interesting word and phases and eventually he gets powerful, incredible songs out of it. But he doesn't sit down and just write it from the start, he goes through a process of throwing out words, trying different combinations and eventually narrowing it down until he finds something that works. [MUSIC]
