SO, LET ME TELL YOU a bit about the background of this design thinking series.
For most of 2016 and 2017, I had many opportunities to conduct workshops on this very topic, which I found to be speaking directly to the question that I had been having for many years: How could I use years of theoretical knowledge that I had learned from school in real life? Design thinking came to me first as a surprise.
I, too, taught that it's one of those terms that people liked to name-drop because "it sounded cool," without knowing its true meaning. Only after a few months of a truly deep dive, I realized that this was a gold mine. In fact, I personally had long been doubting my own ability to be an individual in the world.
In many posts prior to this, I talked about how I felt that the educational and socials system in which I was born were too rigid for m e, to the point that I, at several points in my life, felt as though I did not have a lot to contribute to my community. It's until I had recognized some of the key principles of design thinking (about which I talked in my Day 76 post ) that I began to see myself, retroactively, somewhat as a natural design thinker.
Hold on right there. I am not saying that which was a good thing. To be a design thinker, as I wrote in my last post, one has to constantly challenge himself/herself with the idea that there's always a possibility for things to be better than it is. In other words, one has to see things the way they actually are, and not through the lens of acceptance by the majority.
For instance, I saw I was a horrible good student throughout my formal education simply because I didn't always good grades (actually, almost never) and I had never won any awards at all. The society thought me as an ordinary majority, who would probably go on to become a much-less-than-extraordinary employee in a mediocre company.
That's the way things were presented to me through the lens of acceptance by the majority -- so, what psychologists would call -- "social proof." Then, I asked myself to take a look at the situation differently. The question I had for myself was, What was the reason for me to feel no inspiration at all for what I was studying? Hence, the bad grades and hence the award-less student life. That's exactly the time when I realized that I was starting to see things the way they were.
If anyone were to study what he/she was passionate in, there's very likely he or she would do much better than. Wouldn't you agree? I knew that I enjoyed making drawing. I liked to travel and look at great buildings. Most of the film photographs I took back then were all buildings, monuments, and edifices. Thinking about architecture, and how I could re- design my house to fit my own customized need, made me feel really happy. Every day was a holiday when I thought about architecture so to speak.
Of course, it would be nice if I was also good at biology (my worst subject in high school), geography, mathematics, and chemistry. But maybe I wasn't interested in those fields as much -- so why would I let things that I wasn't even interested in define who I was? So, I shifted my focus from being "good at what the society thought I should be good at"to what mattered to me and my passion, and that which, back then, was architectural design.
I then decided to enroll in a modest technical institution where my entrance examination score was just enough to be admitted outside of Bangkok. Anyone who knew my academic attributes as a student would not be able to predict how I would go on to receive a First Class Honors in architectural design from the technical institute where I enrolled as an undergraduate student. After that, as they always say, the rest is history. I did not know how to call my way of thinking then.
So, my classmates helped me by calling it "thinking out of the box," "critical thinking," "thinking laterally," and most amusingly, "thinking like Non." Years have passed, and I have come to see design thinking in a much more interesting spotlight. And now that I have a name to call it, I have become much more interested in exploring what it has to offer. Design thinking wasn't just a cliche, it's a combination of practical philosophy, cognitive psychology and robust strategy for innovation.
My realization that I could just focus on what I was interested in came from my (then quite) shallow understanding of the self improvement. But for sure my ability to see things the way they were got me a jump start. Of course, my love and obsession with both cognitive psychology and robust strategy for innovation started much later (from early this year onward to be precise) so these two fields, in fact, gradually grew on me as profound elements of design thinking.
Many of my classmates back then still made fun of me by calling design thinking "thinking like Non" -- they could never forget that, couldn't they? So, to begin, I offered myself as a laborer and keen observer to a company that used design thinking to innovate. Then, I read as many books as possible on the topic.
I continued to search as many examples and case studies as I could online, and in real life, to get the sense of what might be the practical gist of the idea: To see what worked and what did not.
And most important, I learned from hundreds of students from all age groups, academic levels, and placements in life in their professional career paths not only what is the apt way to introducing this concept to them, but also what might help them to become a better individual in whatever they were trying to do. In the process that took more than a full year of a combination of self-reflection, self-closing (so that I could think clearly), and self-exploring, I indeed had learned quite a bit.
The real challenge that I had was when I decided to offer a course called "design thinking" as a semester-long undergraduate course for non-designs students at a new university where I would soon be lecturing as a visiting instructor.This was supposed to be a sabbatical semester for me; so I was in that mode of thinking as well (i.e., an "I can teach anything" mode) when I almost carelessly gave the title of the course to the administrator of the university I was a visiting instructor.
Well, normally a course that I offered were merely a two-day-long workshop, so there're so much to instruct during the 16-20 hours of lectures, workshops, and intense seminar. But a semester-long, as in 15-week long, undergraduate course? For students who did not necessary have any knowledge of academic or non-academic background in design? More importantly, was I mad? In the spirit of design thinking, I took up this very challenge anyway. I thought to myself: What if I could use design thinking to "design" this course?
The course eventually had the following aspects: A 15-week-long course; for each week, a reading introducing the key definition of "creativity" from a variety of academic fields that are totally new to students is introduced to the class; Every 2-3 weeks, students would be asked to engage in a hands-on workshop designed to test their synthesis of those key aspects of creativity ranging from a coffee cup to a gift-giving experience, to a better uncluttered life; and, There's no final paper -- students would determine what they want to do for their own good at the end of the course How did I come up with this?
Let's look at the three principles that I wrote about in my last post and how I used them to come up with a design thinking course at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. First, don't always assume that the end-users of your design know what they want. This was the most important factor for my designing the course the way I did.
The classic joke goes, "You can always be sure that your boss will never see what you bring for him to see if that thing is an innovation -- and you can also always be sure that he will not like it right away because he won't know how it works." My first idea was to teach design thinking as a design course, and that was basically what students were looking forward to as they had signed up for the course weeks earlier even before they met me in person and received the preliminary syllabus!
If I were to give them that course, I would be giving them exactly "what they thought creativity was." What's the point of learning about creativity if you already know what it was? And to the point -- my own point -- what did I know really about design that made me feel so confident to teach them? So, that idea was only partially saved and the rest of it got immediately thrown into the garbage can.
I realized that both me and my students were not any of kinds of design experts. I knew architectural design, but not industrial, graphic, communication, etc, design. So, I decided to offer the course with the most basic sets of knowledge that would get the students attention throughout the 15-week-long semester -- the idea of creativity and innovation. Second, don't always assume that things exist because they work. Far from it actually.
The reason why things "look like they work" has to do, first and foremost, with our "availability bias" and "social proof." I cannot recall how many times I heard people's saying "That building is great; they're so many people there so it must be a good building." So, the assumption is that because a lot of people are using it, so it must be good; and/or, because the definition of a building is something that doesn't collapse, so it is standing and people are using it, so therefore it must be a good building.
This is not all wrong, but definitely not all right. Most of the time, we use whatever that is available to us. In Bangkok, I drink instant coffee -- although I know that brew coffee is much more delicious and better for my health (there're many research that show that the process by which the instant coffee grain is made dried is unhealthy). But it is not that easy to find a brew coffee where I live in Bangkok, so I drink whatever I can find! Instant coffee does works!
And if a lot of coffee-lovers like me feel the same way, we would all be buying up instant coffee from the supermarket, which should not be confused with the impression that "Bangkok people like instant coffee" or that "Instant coffee is good." O.K.
So, this example is easy to understand because of the comparative benchmark that I have (i.e., I have drunk better brew coffee elsewhere in the world), so that which is the reason why I know that instant coffee exist not because it was the best, but because it was the best viable option in a particular circumstance. Now, I want you to take a step further -- by imaging that everything around you can be better.
Look at everything around you; a pen, a notebook, computer, mobile phone, etc., and asked yourself, "If you were to design the world's first pen, notebook, computer, mobile phone -- as if they have never existed before in the history of mankind -- how would you go about and design them and what will they look like? This was a challenging question that I also asked myself when I was putting together this design thinking course.
So, instead of hitting the internet and search as many available and existing syllabi for courses with a similar name -- and perhaps learn from those in designing my own course -- I started with finding a nice spot in my apartment's compound where I could see the trees, smell the glass, and listen to the singing of the birds. These were the elements that made my apartment in Poland sort of a heaven on earth even though no other amenities were there.
Then, I visualized how should creativity be taught. By doing so, I wrote this following paragraph that became the basis of this course: This is an experimental class. There are three reasons behind its experimental nature. First, the idea of "studying creativity" seems like an oxymoron. A fixed set of conventions may provide guidelines for what might be useful to learn but it should not overshadow the creative process that learners should design for themselves.
Second, as design is not about thinking about what to design, but one step beyond in not only conceiving but also producing it to test out in reality, the best methods to deliver design education should also be similar. This aspect of learning, therefore, requires a high level of flexibility from both the instructor and learner. Third, design require a "focused chaos"; hence, we will rely on our intuitions to deliver the best possible learning outcomes based on that.
This class meets once a week for a 1.5-hour session that will consist of an interactive lecture, learner-oriented seminar, spontaneous workshop depending on the week, and extensive "design homework." After the first session during which the instructor will give a general overview of the particular session and some thinking points, most sessions will be devoted to discussions and hands-on experience of creative process.
The close reading and critique of required texts are essential to the preparation for each session, so students are required to have read all the required readings before each session. The experimental nature of this course would require students to use design thinking and design research methods to critique and analyze special topics and assignments given to the students for the workshop session each week. Finally, don't always think that design thinking process has to involve high-tech and advanced stuff. For me, this was the key.
I used to think that I would need to do all sorts of things to make a course with the name like "design thinking" sound and appear super high-tech. It should, shoudn't it? I was trying to make contacts with the departments of engineering and the industrial parks associated with the university with the hope that they would let me use their workshop. I was hoping to create an "app" on a phone for students to write and report their progress.
I was aiming at spending around $3,000 of the course's budget (which I had yet to have) on things that I thought would make the course more sophisticated. But then, I was caught off guard by my own principle when I revisited it: What makes something good isn't always need to be that high- tech, is it?
I often use an example of a carry-on luggage that I would like to get a permission of my mother to buy (yes, I am always 36 but I still need her permission if I want to buy anything that is more expensive than $100). I was convinced that a carry-on luggage with a new bluetooth capacity would forever give me a peace of mind -- I will always be able to track it, find it, and see where it is on the conveyable belt.
This carry-on will be a bit heavier because of the battery-powered bluetooth technology and probably a few hundred dollars more expensive than a typical all-around Samsonite carry-on, but it still, to me, seemed like a good price to pay for such a convenience. It's not until my mother told me that "if you want your carry-on luggage to be distinguishable, why don't you just put a colored-ribbon around the handle?" Eureka! That was the moment for me. In this sense, designing a course like this design thinking course.
So, at the end, to learn about the concept of prototyping, for instance, all we used were paper cups and scissors -- and we got to learn quite a lot actually by doing that as the goal of the exercise was not to create the most innovative coffee cup, but to learn and experience how one could establish his/her ability to "make" rather than just to think.
We also learned about the concept of " nudge, " which is widely known and cited in the field of behavioral economics, as a creative process to encourage (not force) people to do things that they should do and to not do things that they should not do. Sometimes, nudging has a large and impact on the society without the society's having to spend its hard-earned taxes on anything. Perhaps we'll get back to that in the later post. I'll stop here for now today.
Will be back soon for the next in this very series of design thinking!
post Day 79: On Design Thinking Part 3: The Black Swan Fri, 12 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000 First, this is not about the film Black Swan starring Natalie Portman, but the book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. But what does Taleb means by the black swan? It means, as the subtitle of the aforementioned book suggest, something that "seems improbable, but possible.
He derives this term from a story of how we humankind believed "all swans were white" until 1697 when some explorers, for the first time, saw black swans in Australia. "Impossible," was the feeling that these explorers had, but since they saw those black swans with their own eyes they had to believe it. So, in the design thinking course that I had the pleasure of teaching last semester, I did not introduce this concept until the last 4 weeks of the semester.
I was not sure that the book and the concept of black swans (which is arguably one of the most important concepts in risk management today) would be useful to design. Thanks to the lively discussion with my students, I was confirmed energetically by the interaction throughout the 1.5-hour seminar on this very concept that it's crucial for design thinkers to understand the impact of the highly improbable.
One of the design concepts that I have yet to allude to is "resilience," or the idea that something that is well designed should be able to recover quickly from the difficulty or robust in difficult situations. If the design is resilience, it will be popular. Think of something as basic as tiding the ribbon around the handle of your carry-on luggage to help you identify it when coming out of the conveyable belt with many other look-alike carry-ons.
This "design thinking" is more resilience than a $500 bluetooth-operated carry-on luggage -- for which to work you would need batteries in both your smartphone (yes, you'll also need a smartphone) and the the bluetooth-operated carry-on itself. You would also need to spend time taking the battery out of the carry-on upon your getting through the security gate. Finally, it will only do the job that the ribbon does despite its much higher realm of technology.
You'll still lose it if someone steals it, or it still won't be arriving with you if the airline misplaced it. What about for a company, city, or an individual to be resilient? Since we don't have the superpower to predict the future, what we need is the ability to be less vulnerable to the improbable difficulty. Kodak, as a company, invented many things. The reliance on the market for film blinded the company from seeing the then less-productive child --the digital camera technology.
For that reason, Kodak got pushed out of the market by surprise when most people decide that they would go for the memory chips instead of films. So, as Taleb sees it, we need to be resilient in order to survive the unexpected. He also coins another term for this form of resilience -- an antidote to the black swans -- called "antifragile," which features also in his book Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder. Although I really like this term, that's another topic for another time.
For this post, let's stick to "resilience" rather than "antifragile" for now. Let's get back to the black swans. I want to use the three most vivid examples that Taleb uses in the book to illustrate what kinds of things are considered highly probable. First, 9/11 attacks -- it goes without saying that we could have prevented it if we thought that it was highly probably.
The problem that Taleb outlines is that the 9/11 attacks make many of us feel as though we could "sort of" or "almost" predicted them, which is only because they are explained retrospectively.
So, the first practical thing to learn about the notion of the black swans is: When the improbable takes place, don't look back at the past in pursuit of justifying why it happens (as it only looks justifiable after the fact); so, do quickly move on and be antifragile (dang, I just said let's stick to resilience). To show you more why 9/11 attacks were only explainable retroactively, let's look at the second example: "the turkey:" Consider a turkey that is fed every day.
Every single feeding will firm up the bird's belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race "looking out for its best interests," as a politician would say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief. Right?
Just because it was well fed every day, the turkey was under the impression that everything was under its control -- it might even thought of itself as important whereas the bigger power over it operates at a much higher and completely different ontological plane. How many times have you been in this kind of "turkey situation?" For me? Plenty, plenty, plenty (I thought I was fed to strive, but at the end I found out that I was fed to be consumed -- metaphorically). One more example.
Third, you: Imagine a speck of dust next to a planet a billion times the size of the earth. The speck of dust represents the odds in favor of your being born; the huge planet would be the odds against it. So stop sweating the small stuff. Don't be like the ingrate who got a castle as a present and worried about the mildew in the bathroom. Stop looking the gift horse in the mouth—remember that you are a Black Swan. So, we are all black swans.
Definitionally, we do not have any clue about our birth. Even if we could trace one step back to the meeting of our biological parents: What brought them together and made them decide to have a family? In other words, you are thrown into the world as a black swan. Now we know what the black swans are. How do we deal with them?
Taleb argues, and I hereby add practical advise to his argument in red, three main things about the black swans: Black swans are improbable, and often almost impossible, until they happen (just like the "discovery" of the black swans in Western Australia 1697). Don't beat yourself up too much if you happen to suffer a lot from it because you weren't prepare for it. You are not alone.
Think of the way to be resilience, think of stoicism, think of antifragile and quickly and robustly learn from it in order to rise up as fast as you can again to tackle the existence and aftermaths of the black swans. In design, we cannot always come up with something exclusively "for the black swans" since we don't know when they are coming (and more importantly what they are); yet, this doesn't mean that you cannot be somewhat prepared.
The same reason we will never know for sure what would be the best antidote to which of the black swans in your life, we also do not know which one of our ideas previously thought as useless might become useful. So, never throw away any notes, drawings, post-it notes, sketches, and prototypes of ideas that you have. Systematically organize them in a shelve, or scan them and organize them on your computer.
They might not seem to be useful now, but you may need some of them in dealing with black swans; Black swans cannot be explained by the past -- think of the turkey story. So, don't try to make sense of it. What you could do is to make yourself as resilience as possible.
This might mean: Don't get over- consumed by data, take small risks to test the water, do not take any big risk (putting all the eggs in one basket), and try your best to keep your option open and welcome. In design, too, this can be practiced by thinking about the variety of ideas that you are investing your time and resource in.
For instance, a lot of people who get laid off from the company for whom they have been working for years often do not know what else to do or how to make a living afterwards. The closing of the company or the lay-off can be the black swans but those who stay afloat after the fact are resilience. A practical advise: Always have a small pet project on the side -- something that you are interested in and feeling good about when you engage in.
Did you know that WeChat (China's largest social media + mobile payment network) was sort of a pet project of the mother company? There're many of these examples. Work on your pet project and enjoy it, as it might become handy to you. There are always unexpected factors involved in just about anything. For example, there's one time that I was so focusing on an exam, which I hoped to ace.
I have read all the books, set an alarm on my phone, and I even let many of my friends know that they must call me should I not be present at the exam room at least half an hour before the exam. That morning, well, truth be told, there's a problem with the main electrical circuit board of my building, so my phone was not charged and therefore was out of battery, which meant that no one on whom I relied could call me. A practical advise?
Do not set your alarm clock on your phone; get a real alarm clock from IKEA. Sorry, that was a joke. I would never do that to you. The problem here is that there're always more factors that we thought we have already covered. One way of looking at any problems is to expect that something might not go as planned (like a stoic) which may include visualizing some worst-case scenarios beforehand and walk through in your imagination, with positive thoughts, about how you might go about and fix it.
Moreover, I think those who tend to be at the worst receiving end of a black swan that happen in this way are those who have been criticizing others something that if they could see it through this very lens, would know that it could well be them who make the mistakes.
So, a practical advise is, and I shall quite Dr Jordan Peterson, "set your house in perfect order before criticizing the world." And since the idea of anything that is "perfect" is probably just a fantasy, just don't criticize and focus on your very own pursuit and care with great care and carefulness. In my life, there're many times that I suffered greatly from black swans. I can tell you the most impactful one: The death of my father.
He was 62, and just retired from work for about one and a half year. My father, at the time, lived in Bangkok with my mother and brother. He was no Hercules but he seemed to not be in any stages of seriously bad health, which I found out later that he was not well at all (and he just didn't want me to know). As for me, I was only a few hours away from my very first class of my doctorate.
I had a wonderful girlfriend and was happy to be in the US where I called my intellectual home. My father was planning to come visit me in the States with my mother and we had a series of grand plans on what we wanted to do. Everything was pictured-perfect (at least to me, the turkey), until I receive an nerve-wrackingly short text message from my brother: "Dad passed away." My father, in this story, was the farmer, and I was the turkey.
He had an operational assumption that it would be unlikely for him to live as long as to visit me in the US, and he had subtlety made this gesture to some of his close friends, such as excusing himself from a wedding of one of his former co-workers, not attending an important gatherings and meetings, and procrastinating on packing up for a health check-up at a hospital. He knew that he was about to leave us but he didn't want me to be distracted.
So, even since he passed away, I always do three things -- in the spirit of design thinking. Go back home to visit my friends and family whenever I can. I make it a routine. During my time at home, I would not let anything else distracting me from my precious time with my family, especially my mother; Now or never when it comes to meeting someone I'd like to see. We tend to postpone meetings that we do not see immediate needs.
But how do we know that which are going to be a great meeting that changes your view (i.e., a positive black swan) or the last meeting between you and that person since we sincerely do not know when are we going to leave this world? Call, text, and keep in touch with those whom I care but do not have the time and resource to see them.
Sometimes my friends ask me why I send them random posts or photos, I answer "to keep in touch," and that which is precisely the reason. Thinking of what they would be interested in seeing and reading is a practical act of compassion that reminds you of your value and friendship. Like good gifts, according to Robert B. Cialdini, this very way of keeping in touch, though seen as weird by some friends (to which they eventually got used), are meaningful, unexpected and customized.
Sometimes I get to strike a conversation with someone I haven't seen for decades -- and see them in person (thanks to the above now or never rule) for a coffee right after I share with them those random posts.
On Design Thinking Part 4: Design, Fast and Slow