INTRODUCTION
We all find that travel often raises new and unexpected benefits to the weary (and even alert) traveler. This proved to be true for me recently when I traveled to Toronto for a trip I had originally booked as my own holiday. The key word in the last sentence is “own”. Although originally intended to be a near 3-week holiday city-hopping myself around southeast Canada and northeast America, it rapidly turned into holiday-cum-work trip as I offered to visit colleagues in the TR Labs based at Communitech in Waterloo region, just outside Toronto and also Boston.
The timing of my trip could not have been any more fortuitous, as, shortly before traveling out to Toronto, colleagues in the Toronto TR-Lab arranged a Design Thinking Workshop with Robert Marburger and Nola VanHoy, CIO and Senior Director of Legal Technology Innovation at Alston & Bird respectively, as well as staff from Communitech and strategic account executive’s Sameena Kluck, Lisa Das, Joseph Raczynski (Manager, Technical Client Managers) and Carlos Gamez (Senior Director of Innovation) all visiting from the Eagan and Toronto TR offices. Communitech is a startup incubator servicing 1,100 startups in and around Waterloo Region, and located right next door to the innovation labs of companies like Canon, TD, General Motors, Deloitte and Manulife, so is an ideal location for just such a practical, vocational workshop.
Having been given a demo of a number of Proof-of-Concept projects being worked upon and a tour of Communitech by the Account Manager, Karen Klink, we broke off into the design-thinking workshop led by the workshop conveners Dave Inglis and a colleague, focusing on early-stage design of a new interactive tool for our Legal visitors to provide to their customers to help improve their customer resources, outward-facing public persona of their company to their customers.
On from there, the workshop ebbed and flowed between discussing design theory, user experience designing and testing with Dave, and practical activities for those in the workshop to gradually work towards a truly viable solution or the problem presented by those representing the Legal company that day.
First we were introduced to the ‘three Horizons of Innovation’ by McKinsey; a disruptive model for product development and execution to reach that end goal or product. But I was really interested in the discussion followed, concerning the UX ‘Double Diamond’ approach to product design. Having just been briefly introduced to this concept at work shortly before I left for this trip, it seemed an ideal opportunity to put it into practice, or at the very least, understand more of this approach from a theory perspective.
The ‘Double Diamond’ process maps the divergent and convergent stages of a design process. Created by The British Design Council, it describes modes of thinking that designers use. To a lay person like me, Its premise revolves around taking initial ideas for an end product from your customer, and initially expanding these out to a wider selection of options using additional input from interested and involved parties, before honing these to a refined shortlist of requirements, focusing further on these in finer detail to reach a final product specification, that allows product developers, data visualisation folk like myself, actually create a tangible product or ‘Proof of Concept’ that can be used.
The ‘Double Diamond’ approach to design theory and product creation