Design Thinking is now established as a major approach for innovation, showing the value of challenging traditional approaches to problem solving. At the Thursday evening d.reception devoted to celebrating 10 years of Design Thinking at HPI, Hasso Plattner himself joins via video-link from Laguna Beach, California to deliver a keynote address.

Bringing Design Thinking to Potsdam

Before founding the HPI School of Design Thinking in 2007, Hasso Plattner admits he came across Design Thinking by accident in 2005 while flicking through a Businessweek magazine that featured an article on David Kelly of IDEO talking about the concept. His interest in the idea led him to funding the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University, where he spent two semesters helping to teach a Design Thinking class along with Stanford professors such as Terry Winograd. Hasso Plattner recalls he soon learnt at the American university that his role was to be a coach for the students rather than to feed them knowledge.

Thoroughly convinced of the potential of Design Thinking, Hasso Plattner quickly endeavored to bring it to Germany. But he explains the program received criticism on its arrival in Potsdam. With techniques used to free up the mind including dressing up with hats, critics called it “kindergarten for adults”. But Hasso Plattner suggests this focus on breaking out of the constraints of education systems means Design Thinkers can look beyond making “incremental improvements to problems” to instead solving them.

The importance of heterogeneous groups in Design Thinking is also a key theme of Hasso Plattner’s address. He says “design thinkers are considered equal” with no barriers based on ethnicity, sex or age to joining a Design Thinking team. Heterogeneous groups help stimulate free thinking, thus avoiding predefined partisan thought. Stemming from this effort to neutrally examine reality, Design Thinking allows you to focus, he suggests, on what you really want to achieve with a project.

Hasso Plattner believes the sister institutes in Stanford and Potsdam have now established Design Thinking as a serious discipline, citing its significant impact at SAP and its uptake at other companies. He says there is now a worldwide community of students and companies using Design Thinking. Hasso Plattner quotes a Stanford President, who once exclaimed that Design Thinking allows “students to trust that they can innovate themselves”. This, he says, is the power of Design Thinking. In fact, he suggests many more people could be innovating if they learnt to trust themselves not just those famous founders in Silicon Valley. However, he also emphasizes that Design Thinking drives innovation so effectively because it is centered on a team approach. This a different type of team work, which moves away from hierarchies.

Solving societal problems

To finish his speech Hasso Plattner examines two societal problems that could be addressed using a Design Thinking approach, highlighting the importance of focusing on benefits to end users.

The first is traffic. Cities are suffering from an overload of vehicles and current solutions are not working. Then where to start with a Design Thinking approach? Hasso Plattner suggests fact finding. We need to gather data on where vehicles are going, at what time, and using which routes. The we’d need to look at the streets being used and what their capacity is.

Importantly Hasso Plattner suggests we have to really analyze and define what the aim of the project would be, for example just allowing more people to get from A to B more quickly or also reducing emissions or freeing up parking. Then the end results of suggestions must be examined to understand which optimizations could be most effective.

The second project on Hasso Plattner’s mind is creating a digital health system. He states this would be a database where patients donate anonymous medical data to be used in research for clinics, universities and health insurers. He argues this would only work if the focus is on the patient through the design of a user-centric system. Hasso Plattner envisions that patients could donate data using their smartphone in the easiest possible way.

These projects are just two examples of how Design Thinking can be used. In fact, Hasso Plattner declares we don’t yet know exactly where Design Thinking can’t help. He ends his speech by telling the audience the success of the iPhone comes down to its design as a platform for extremely user-friendly applications. He suggests this success could be replicated by other projects if they make use of Design Thinking.