THE LOOP: A documentary on IBM design thinking

THE LOOP: A documentary on IBM design thinking

One of the things that have cropped up in my news feed recently was this: The Loop: A documentary on IBM Design Thinking. You'll need to handover the obligatory contact details to InVision see the full documentary, but a trailer is available.

The documentary talks about IBM‘s journey into , by evangelising the outcomes that Design Thinking provides. The video follows the of the IBM design language and applying at scale. It covers Phil Gilbert and Adam Cutler, some of the leading design authorities in IBM. The video shows how they've taken Design Thinking and moulded it to the IBM .

Rather than using a process that flows one way, through stages: Empathize, Understand, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. IBM chooses the Loop (in the shape of the symbol for , ∞). This uses three elements, Observe, Reflect, Make and repeating them one after the other. Using this loop prevents projects being stuck in one particular part of the phase. You move forward with what you know and iterate again. This fits with the continuous development model that they now adopt for software projects.

It covers the requirements needed to bring on new designers, many from University and getting them familiar with IBM. As well as adapting IBM to cope with these millennials and the design-thinking method.

So IBM has a Design Thinking education program, with the aim of making many in IBM aware of the Design Thinking processes and . IBM has focused their Design Thinking effort on the non-designers, the technical teams that need to deliver and support a solution, however well designed. This has meant team level collaboration, often integrating a new design person into existing teams. The designer is now not an outsider, but a team member, even if that team may already have had a picture of their user.

IBM Design Thinking has been around that loop a few times and probably has many more turns to go yet. But this is one way in which IBM is changing for the future.

Of course, Invision doesn't just want you to watch the video, they want you to take advantage of their apps that offer prototyping, collaboration and workflow tool following design thinking models.

John Dixon

John Dixon is the Principal Consultant of thirteen-ten nanometre networks Ltd, based in Wiltshire, United Kingdom. He has a wide range of experience, (including, but not limited to) operating, designing and optimizing systems and networks for customers from global to domestic in scale. He has worked with many international brands to implement both data centres and wide-area networks across a range of industries. He is currently supporting a major SD-WAN vendor on the implementation of an environment supporting a major global fast-food chain.

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