I see you

I see you.

The phrase made popular by ‘Avatar’ is apt for the core belief that drives the methodology of Design Thinking. Above all else, the innovation that emerges out of the stages of empathising, defining, ideating, prototyping and testing, is a child of the philosophy of ‘I see you’.

Vanessa Wong of Bloomberg Businessweek reports these three case studies about implementing Design Thinking in some of the biggest multinationals in the world.

1.      The focus on design-led innovation helped Philips Lighting to transform itself over the past decade from a company that simply pushed products into the market into one that designs them with customer desires in mind, says CEO Rudy Provoost. His business, for example, is no longer just about light bulbs, but about designing ambience for consumers. Provoost says the company hopes to provide the bulbs and software to enable consumers to be their own lighting designers.

2.      P&G operates offsite design thinking workshops that bring together employees from across the consumer-products giant, including R&D, market research, and purchasing, to use design methods such as visualization and prototyping to solve real problems for the company. The workshops, run around the world by volunteer employees called facilitators, last anywhere from a half-day to a week.

3.    For Lawrence Murphy, the chief engineer of global design for GE Healthcare who leads the sessions and helped start the program, the goal is to equip employees with new problem-solving tools to help the company evolve to "imagination at work" from its focus on operations efficiency tool Six Sigma.

I see you.

Does your organisation see not just the users of your products, but the human potential dispersed through every level of your organisation? Does it see how the innovation impacts the world in both positive and negative ways?

Will you reach your own realisations or will it need a Toruk Makto to come in to show the will of the people and the planet, ad their will be enforced?

See them, and reach the needs of your users through them. Innovation begins with the most basic human innovation methodology, Design Thinking.