 Welcome to another episode of The Creative Life, a collaborative production between the American Creativity Association Austin Global and Think Tech Hawaii. Joining us today from a dialysis center in Mission Viejo, California is consultant and university instructor Marty Wartenberg. Today we're going to be talking about design thinking and all of its related dimensions and with that I welcome you Marty and it's such a pleasure to see you looking well and we'll probably as we go along we'll weave in some of your story related to your location today and what you're going through is as we're talking. So I think probably the best place for us to start we have so much to talk about is for you to share with us why design thinking and a quick sketch of what design thinking is and then we'll just take it from there. You know creativity is a wonderful thing but basically people come up with creative ideas and they're basically hopes, dreams, desires, wishes but they're not real and the concept of design thinking and design sprints is to actually take these hopes and dreams and turn them into reality. So it's actually a process that allows you to take concepts that are in your brain and your mind and turn them into something that you could put down in your computer or on a piece of paper and actually come up with a solution which could turn into a product or a service and so that's the program that we're doing at the university with our international students and our domestic students. Design thinking is probably not necessarily a new term to those of us that study creativity but I think it's new to most of us in the way it is crafted and the way you've talked and are prepared to talk to us today and that is there's so many terms in there that are really appropriate and interesting and we're going to talk about wicked problems and design sprints and ideation and it's a business model and solutions focused. So I don't even know where to start but let's start with what is a design sprint? I love the name. I love it. Let's start with design thinking what it is just so everybody understands the basic concept. It's sometimes called human centered design and there's three major components to it. One is that you need to come up with a solution for a problem which could create a product or a service and the solution has to meet three criteria. Number one is it has to be technically feasible within the current technology available. Number two it has to make sense as a business that it's a viable financial situation and then the third is the people you're doing it for have to really want it and care about it. So that's the basic philosophy of human centered design. It's targeted towards specific groups of people who may become customers your products in your services. Design thinking is where you start and you come up with your ideas that you want to implement and then you put the concept of a design sprints which originally started with a company called Ideo in Palo Alto. Ideo was probably the world's most successful and famous product development company. They've developed ends of thousands of products not for themselves but for other companies. They developed the original mouse into the screen concepts for Apple computers. In fact they even designed the whale in Free Willy, the mechanical whale and they work on all kinds of things. Their specialty is developing concepts to solve problems and they came up with the concept of a design spread. They called it a deep dive into the problem that you're trying to solve and solutions and then a few years later Google borrowed their idea and created what is called the Google Sprints and there are several books by Google authors and it's basically it's a multi-step process and the way they've designed it, it's a week. You spend one week. On Monday you come up with a concept that you're trying to solve. What is the problem? Everything starts with a problem. Every new product, every service starts with somebody has a problem that needs solving. They come up with the first day you spend conceiving solutions. You go through all of the creative concepts, brainstorming, brainwriting, mind mapping and all of the other techniques and you come up with a whole bunch of concepts. The next step is to, that's what we call that divergence, which is the first step, concept creation. The next step is convergence. How do you take these hundreds of ideas on yellow stickies that are on the plaster on your wall from your team? How do you get it down to two or three or even one? And so the convergence uses some techniques, one of which we got it from Belgium, a company created what's called the COCD box and nobody knows what that stands for, but it's basically a Johari Windows where you have four boxes. You take all of these hundreds of ideas you've plastered on the wall and you put them into one of these four boxes. One box is wild and crazy ideas that are impossible, at least today, and you put crazy ideas in that box. Then there are ideas that are really simple, sometimes called low-hanging fruit, and you put all of those ideas into a different box. And then you have ideas that are feasible but not quite ready for the marketplace or technology or we don't have the money or the people for it, but you don't want to lose those, so you put them in a box. And finally we have what we call the wow box. And that's what we put ideas that are really cool, really great, and we think we can do them. And that's what we draw our ideas from, that box. So the next step is to walk through that and see which ones are feasible, and so as part of Convergence we teach our students how to do things like Nishikawa Diagram, sometimes called the Fishbone Diagram, which analyzes all of the possible causes of the problem you're trying to solve. What? Marty, where did that start? Such a great name. Nishikawa Diagram or Cause and Effect Diagram, and it looks like a fishbone, so sometimes it's called the Fishbone Diagram, and that's used to determine what are the root causes of the problem. It's very popular at business schools, and it's reused together with a Pareto chart. You remember the Pareto principle? Yes. What you do is you take your very complex Nishikawa Diagram, and you assign statistical values each of the causes, because you want to be sure that you're solving the real problem, not a symptom or not a secondary or a tertiary cause of the problem. So that gets you down to knowing that this solution really is solving the real problem, not a symptom. And then we put students through learning how to do a SWAT analysis, as you remember from Greg from the business school, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, and we have them addressed the weaknesses and threats, and are they solvable? Can you deal with the weaknesses, and can you deal with the external threats? So at that point, they have one or two possible solutions which can be turned into a product or a service. And then the sprint next step is to flesh out the design of what you try to build, whether it be an app, or a piece of hardware, or a piece of software, whatever it happens to be, and then you build a prototype. You model it, you could do it on a computer model, or with apps it's really easy, there's a lot of software out there that lets you build apps, so you could simulate it and you create a model, and the model could be anywhere from something really simple like pictures, some of our students were really creative, we'll do a walkthrough with, they'll actually act and use some kind of act to show how a service would be used, and we take them through that, and then they go out onto our campus and look for students to demonstrate their prototype to, they explain what the problem they're trying to solve, and then they demonstrate it to many, many students to get feedback, what do you think? Is it going to solve this problem? What could we add to it that would make it better? What could we take away from it? And then they get the feedback and they insert that into their solution, and basically that takes the idea, the hope and dream, into something realistic enough to take to the next step and actually build a business plan. And in our class, we actually have them demonstrated to people from the Cove, our Innovation Center, to get feedback on their ideas, feasibility, would it be funded? Oh, what do you have to change to make it more fundable? And so we take our students through that process in our classes, and it works really well. Our students have developed lots of new products and services that they take back to their home countries, will stay here in America, and actually create companies themselves. So it's been a lot of fun. So let's pick that up, let's not just stop there, but let me just stop you to just make a couple of comments. And for our viewers that are watching me, they're probably tired of me nagging about this question. So often, we find at the end of some kind of methodology that in trying to attempt to solve a problem, that we really haven't identified the correct problem. It seems to me as I listen to you and in preparing some of our conversation today that this methodology might seem to be a really good methodology to bring you closer to the correct problem to work on versus some of the other methodologies. And perhaps it's just because you're together for five days. Is five days, is five the magic number? For Google, that's what they think there's a five day. We stretch it out a little longer because we don't have them for the full day. So we actually do it over a 10 day period. But we simulate making believe it's only five days. So that's the Wharton-Burke model, is 10 days. We've made some changes to the Google version and the IDEO version to fit the international community, which is a little bit different. How are they adapting to this methodology? They're not as familiar as our local students with some of the tools, like the Chicago Diagram and Pareto Charting, building a SWAT analysis, doing a customer journey map. So there's a lot of tools that our graduate students already know. But when they come here from other countries, they need to give them the basics that they're not familiar with yet. So when this group is coming together for the five days, do they come with a prototype in mind or the five or 10 days? Is that going to bring them to a prototype? And is the prototype in this methodology, is it safe to assume that we know what a prototype is or is a little bit different in this? Well, we teach them about prototyping. But the way it starts is, again, they're coming from Asia, South America, Africa, Europe. And so we spend a little time for them to get to know each other a little better and form teams. And the method we use for them to come up with an idea is we pick some big, hairy, audacious goal, a B-ag, big, hairy, audacious goal. Ag and you're right. World peace, world hunger, crime, war. And we say, OK, I'm up with as many ideas where you and your five teammates can come up with a solution that'll help solve world peace, climate change, whatever it happens to be. And so that's where they get their ideas from. And we also did that with our program in Columbia, where they concentrated very heavily on climate change. How did that play out? It played out really well. They came out one of the groups, and we actually, well, they're all engineers. So their idea was to take a gym, where you're going to work out and electrify all of the machinery to generate electricity. And they calculated that how many people would be needed on the treadmills and working on the machines to generate enough electricity to provide all the lighting you would need. So you mean the power would become from walking on the treadmill, the spin bikes spinning on? Yeah, yeah, and actually walking on the floor. They actually put sensors on the floor that could be used to generate electricity. Just a friction of people's feet moving will generate enough electricity Wow, it doesn't seem like there's anything out. It's a good idea, then. Some of the teams worked on improving the water supply in some of the villages in Columbia. A couple of civil engineers, they came up with some ideas to make it easier to drill for water in some of the more remote areas of Columbia. So they come up with really interesting ideas that are kind of unique. A lot of our Asian students come up with, they love to do apps. They like to develop a new app. And their apps involve food, recreation, meeting people. One of the groups on a safety project looking at criminal activity and they develop an app. And actually I hadn't developed it where you can go to any country in the world and it'll tell you where are the dangerous places you shouldn't go and how to be safe and also connect up with the police department. Maybe develop an app that'll provide good safety features for you when you're traveling. Because apparently students like to go to really dangerous places. And stay in the poor parts of cities where the rent is cheaper. So then their imagination just goes wild and they come up with really good ideas. And many of them have turned these into actual money making operations for themselves. What are some examples, I was just about to ask you that. What is the productivity or the results after they leave you? Are they able to, are they coming to you from companies? No, no, they're coming, they're mostly graduates. They have their bachelor's degree and they come here to learn things that'll help improve their ability to make a lot of money in their home country. Getting a certificate or a degree from the United States adds a large amount of money to their salaries. So it's very worthwhile for them to do it. But many of them, especially those from Europe, particularly France and Italy, there aren't many jobs for young graduates, even people with engineering degrees. And so a lot of them just want to stay here and they try to create a business that will allow them to make a living in the United States. And they are driven to come up with viable business ideas. What are some of the other steps you mentioned that along the way that they go out and ask people for reactions to their prototypes or their proposed prototypes? What are some other ways that they can, I guess the right word, might be to market their prototype or test their prototype? Well, first, before we let them do that, we have them create what's called a one-page business plan called the Business Model Canvas. It's become very popular in most of the graduate business programs, most of the MBA programs in the United States. And we make them do that, which identifies things like channels of distribution, resources necessary, cash flow issues. So it's basically on one page, you have a business plan, we have them. Limited to just one page. Limited to just one page. And we have them present that to convince business people that we invite in or that are part of the Coal or Beale Business Center. Many of our graduate schools of management across the country, not just here in California, have they'll correct? I think it originally started at the Sloan School of Management at MIT and then Harvard picked up on it, then Stanford, and now all the UCs are using it called the Business Model Canvas. And now when they finish that, they have to prove to business people that you have a viable idea that this can be marketed and turned into a product. And a venture capitalist or an angel financer would provide funding. And we actually have them actually demonstrated the angel financers. And many of them do get funded. And so I would guess about 30% of the students actually create a new business that they actually start up and it becomes viable. 30% seems high to me. Is that, what do you think, would you anticipate more than 30% in the future? It was lower until we added the business side of it, but they actually prove it as a business. And the ones that actually can convince an angel financer or a venture capitalist to actually fund it, that besides giving me a little panache, it also, as a reality check, whether the idea is feasible from a business point of view. So our percentages will lower until we added that part into the program. With that government funding, do any succeed in getting, I'm thinking since I love the term B-Hags, it just is kind of funny, but those that are working with the B-Hags, the big problems like climate change and those others, are they able to get any government funding? Well, it's difficult because again, they're not American citizens. They're allowed to have an internship and they may be given permission to work for one year. They may be given permission to work for one year, but they can't access things like the small business administration loans, which would be an ideal place. Are domestic students taxed, but not are international students? You were sharing before we started some comments about the difference between international and our American students. Do you want to share something? How are they different or how are they similar and do they blend nicely? I'm talking if they're not real, but I can't put faces to them at this moment. Well, the other one thing is diversity. When you get students coming from China, Korea, mixing with students from Germany, France, Colombia, Brazil, you're getting a lot more educated differently. Their backgrounds are very different. So you get the benefits of a very diverse group of people. Also, in their own home countries, especially in Asia, they're restricted in terms of what they could say in a classroom. You have to listen to the lecture, you regurgitate it back, and your opinion doesn't matter. So when they come here to the United States, it's freedom. After they actually get exposed to our way of teaching, where students are allowed or encouraged to disagree, challenge, and look at other ways. It's almost like their brains are unleashed. And they really, really think, and they come up with fantastic ideas. What has been your most exciting idea that you've seen develop a student idea? But what sticks in your mind as I ask you that question? One of the ones I really like, see, there are ones from Colombia and one from group from Asia. In Colombia, it's very dangerous to take taxis. It's a good chance that you'll be taken to a deserted place and robbed or killed or kidnapped. And so what this team created was an app that was hooked up with reputable taxi companies, and they were able to use that to, no matter where they were running around Colombia, they could pick, and know they'll always get a reputable legal taxi cab. Because apparently in Colombia, there's a lot of illegal taxi cabs that are unregistered and are not controlled by the police. And so that was a serious problem in Bogota particularly. So they came up and they actually designed the app and were able to use it in Colombia. We've got other groups. One of the fun ones was a group of young women who came up with a clothing line, including shoes, that allows you to modify your dress or your shoes from what your work outfit and turn it into an evening outfit by taking things away or adding heel. Shoes are essential. They're very important to women. Their shoes are very important to women. What they designed was a shoe with three different size heels. One very high heels if you didn't go dancing, and then you unscrew it, and then you have a medium size heel for going to work. And then you have a short heel which turns into a sort of a sneaker. Oh, I like that. And they actually prototyped it and built a few shoes. We got them leather and a few other, and we took apart a whole bunch of shoes and gave them all the material. And they also did this with dresses, blouses, skirts, and created a whole clothing line that you could convert from suitable for social issues at work or to go out to a formal dance. They had a lot of fun with that. They also got the model in the class. How nice. Well, Marty, we've come to the end of our conversation today. There's never enough time. That was quick. It goes quickly. You made it go quickly. You have so much to share. And I thank you again as do our viewers for allowing us to be with you as you go through the process. You've been sitting there going through dialysis as we've been speaking with that big smile when we wish you well. And I look forward to talking to you after this chat that we've had and hope to have you back very soon. Thank you, Marty. I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you, darling. My pleasure. And at this time, I must thank our viewers for being with us and remind you that you have been watching Marty Wartenberg as he's talked to us about design thinking. And we welcome you to join us again in two weeks as we return with another episode of The Creative Life. With that, Aloha.