‘The Design’ of Innovation

“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this
veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what
we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
— Steve Jobs

I had opted for the course ‘Innovative Design’ or more specifically as it is known
worldwide ‘Design Thinking’ in my 6th semester of Chemical Engineering.

Surprised? Why Engineering Grads requires designing? Isn’t designing supposed to make
something visually pleasing?

These are the same questions which came to my mind after our professor has pointed
out these questions to us (you see I am not so bright a student so… just bear with me).
To be honest I just opted for the course because I didn’t wanted to go for the other
alternative.

So this is journey of my transformation from being too reluctant to being agile in my

thought process. So let’s tackle the question I asked initially one by one and explore the
stories behind it.

Innovative Design as the name suggests there is innovation and there is design these
two seemingly simple words from English dictionary when combined together has the
power to change the world. The world we see today us because of countless innovators
and thinkers who thought out of the box to make life easier for their fellow people.

As an engineer we are to come across numerous problem and we are expected to find
solutions (At least that’s what job description are). And the problem solving approach is
mostly as follows:

Identify the Problem  Find the source of abnormality  work toward the

solution.

Even for these seemingly simple steps a lot of hard-work and knowledge is required and
that’s what Design Thinking is all about. It’s about immersing in the problem statement
itself. When we get a new problem statement we have to unlearn the previous ones and
adapt to the new ones (Easier said than done).
Look at the following video; you will get a gist of it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0

Each time we have to start from 0 and work our path towards the heights.

So basically for making our brains to be more open and less monotonous we learn
design thinking (personal opinion of course). Engineers need Innovative Design for being
dynamic in problem identification and thus obtaining out of the box solutions.

Though the Design word in ‘Innovative Design’ is quite misleading as normal people will
get idea like making something look visually good – that’s where we go wrong design is
not just how it looks, its more than that, it’s about how it works, how it benefits the
society and individuals, how it affects the market and how it affects YOU.

However hard it is to believe but most of the innovators were common people who
faced a problem and had a unyielding determination to tackle it and those are the
people who changed the world.

A broad idea of Design thinking system is given in the following image.

So that’s it for today.

Prepare yourself and observe the surrounding, you might be the next world leader!