How organizations can use practices developed by expert designers to
solve today's open, complex, dynamic, and networked problems.
When organizations apply old methods of problem-solving to new kinds of
problems, they may accomplish only temporary fixes or some ineffectual
tinkering around the edges. Today's problems are a new breed--open,
complex, dynamic, and networked--and require a radically different
response. In this book, Kees Dorst describes a new, innovation-centered
approach to problem-solving in organizations: frame creation. It applies
"design thinking," but it goes beyond the borrowed tricks and techniques
that usually characterize that term. Frame creation focuses not on the
generation of solutions but on the ability to create new approaches to
the problem situation itself.
The strategies Dorst presents are drawn from the unique, sophisticated,
multilayered practices of top designers, and from insights that have
emerged from fifty years of design research. Dorst describes the nine
steps of the frame creation process and illustrates their application to
real-world problems with a series of varied case studies. He maps
innovative solutions that include rethinking a store layout so retail
spaces encourage purchasing rather than stealing, applying the frame of
a music festival to understand late-night problems of crime and
congestion in a club district, and creative ways to attract young
employees to a temporary staffing agency. Dorst provides tools and
methods for implementing frame creation, offering not so much a how-to
manual as a do-it-yourself handbook--a guide that will help
practitioners develop their own approaches to problem-solving and
creating innovation.
