See Ideas in a New Way – Visual Thinking Enhances Product Development
Written by Hannu Havusto
Manager, Industrial Design
Design thinking is a well-known approach for developing user-centered innovations. In this blog, our industrial design expert Hannu Havusto explains how visual thinking can make the innovation process more efficient, insightful, and easier to share.
Design thinking is a systematic process that utilizes visual methods. It starts by seeking solutions to needs and problems identified through user observation. Often the goal is to solve user problems, but at its best, it opens doors to future opportunities.
Making the Future Concrete with Trends and Scenarios
Looking ahead involves identifying trends and signals to create and describe possible future scenarios. These scenarios can illustrate new use cases, technological possibilities, and evolving new environments. When used as a starting point for design thinking, they help generate ideas for future products and services.
The world is changing faster and becoming more complex, making it harder to notice or understand connections between things. One well-known strategic planning tool is the PESTE analysis, which examines changes and future developments in political, economic, social, technological, and ecological areas. From a designer’s perspective, it’s often necessary to add business visions and emerging customer needs to this list when brainstorming innovations.
Method Futurepipes: A Visual Map to the Future
In one project, we developed a visual presentation method to describe changing needs and constraints and their impact on future products. We saw the need to visualize the future and unify diverse, text-based materials into a coherent whole. The visualization shown in the accompanying image was named Method Futurepipes, a play on the name of a well-known body control method.
In the Method Futurepipes, flows of technology, customer needs, societal changes, brand evolution, and plans are visualized. The key is to see business continuity and make cross-sections of the future – in other words, to create scenarios of how the world will change and how the product portfolio will respond. Similar methods are used in foresight work, where trends and signals are analyzed to create future scenarios across different timeframes. These scenarios support strategic planning.
Strategic Foresight
Strategic planning and foresight methods are familiar to company leadership, but the challenge often lies in translating visions and strategies into understandable product and service development. Bridging this gap is supported by cross functional multidisciplinary team collaboration and visual methods of design thinking.
Research shows that understanding and remembering visual information is much more effective than text. The brain processes visual information multiple times faster than text. Images help us grasp patterns and dependencies more quickly and clearly. Additionally, visual information is language-independent, making it easier to understand starting points and problems, define goals, and generate solutions.
Wicked Problems
Design thinking is especially effective for tackling wicked problems, challenges that are hard to define and have no single correct solution. Visualization helps to outline the problem and explore different solutions, speeding up evaluation, and improving the functionality of the final outcome. The same method applies to product development, where the diversity of product ranges and configurations makes design and testing complex.
Test Ideas with Visual Simulation
Digital product models and simulations are commonplace in various stages of product development. They help reduce the number of physical prototypes, saving both time and money. In concept development, visual simulation and design thinking tools could be used even more. Foresight is becoming increasingly important alongside strategy work in product and service development, and visual design methods have much to offer in supporting innovation.
Want to bring new perspectives to product development and strategic planning through visual thinking? Get in touch, our industrial design experts will help you develop product and service concepts that meet the demands of the future, and beyond.
