This makes me strongly suspect that Design Thinking is indeed BS.
Quality that starts with the electronics and ends with an appealing form factor and sleek fit and finish. Of course the UX needs to be thoughtful and as least frustrating as possible, which arguably has more to do with your typical interaction design and usability testing methods in the realm of UX design and research.
Juul combined great product design, engineering, product iteration, and support from management from the top down to make the best product possible that is typically seen in design driven companies such as Apple.
I think design thinking definitely has the power to break down silos in organizations with heavy engineering culture but you need the right org chart and executive support to create game changing products no matter how much 'design thinking' goes on behind closed doors. I agree it is a hot marketing buzzword sold to clients to win business as mentioned by others, and that we need to acknowledge the fact that you need executive management support at the highest levels or you're dead in the water.
Was design thinking responsible for the Tesla Model 3, or was it more about innovation in tech and manufacturing combined with quality electrical and hardware engineering + funding driven by a leader with a vision hell-bent on creating a game changing product and fostering a culture conducive to that end goal.
> explain in plain English
doesn't generally mean 'download a deck of cards' from Stanford.
You hear a lot about design in corporate discourse these days. Visual art tools like mind mapping, whiteboard animation, and even storyboards are getting prime time in the context of business.
This is partly legitimate. Sketching is one of the best ways to understand complex concepts and come up with new ideas. Both are valuable skills. But organizations also love to boast about how much design-oriented they are. Talking about "design thinking" or "mindful design" and so forth doesn't mean anything changed. Fads come and go.
Today techniques like boards, graphs and sketches are making a comeback within companies. How much is hype versus how much is due to people unwilling to focus for a long time on something? Visual concepts tend to get the point across fast. It's great as long as it is not to the detriment of in-depth analysis.
As an illustrator/designer, companies saw you as a disposable executant who made things pretty. That is, versus a writer who was more on the conceptual side of things and understood the overarching strategy. Not sure the designers gained any more respect in the process but that is another story. It will change again.
> How Juul, founded on a life-saving mission, became the most embattled startup of 2018
A life-saving mission? They are currently being banned by the FDA, the organization that Trump just defanged, for their sale of questionably safe products targeted at children.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/13/health/juul-ecigarettes-v...
What flavour should they make that don’t (theoretically) appeal the children? Beer? Anchovies? Broccoli? Mesquite BBQ?
Adults can like bubblegum or sweet and fruity flavours. I know I ask for them from my dentist for my cleanings instead of mint.
The SRITA archive is pretty damning
> His archived Juul ads are filled with attractive young models socializing and flirtatiously sharing the flash-drive shaped device, displaying behavior like dancing to club-like music and clothing styles more characteristic of teens than mature adults.
In a country where you have to be 21+ to get into a club, what club music is characteristic of teens instead of adults?
That strikes me as a pretty low bar. People used to say the same thing about cigarette ads. Which in retrospect were horrific. I once chatted with some people researching at the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library: https://www.industrydocumentslibrary.ucsf.edu/tobacco/
They had story after story about the depravity of the tobacco advertising industry. The one that stuck with me was the advertising campaign targeted at developmentally disabled adults. Once hooked they were very loyal consumers.
And nobody has ever died from nicotine withdrawal. Or smashed their car after inhaling nicotine.
The method of delivery killed those nicotine addicts. None of those nicotine addicts died as a direct result of what nicotine does to the body. Combusting tobacco and inhaling the smoke is what killed them (ignoring chewing or snorting).
If I used a patch, I can continue my nicotine addiction without fear of lung disease. I can't do the same with smoking.
There's no method of delivering a habitual psychoactive dose of alcohol that doesn't cause harm.
But all said and done, I'm not sure vaping nicotine, with all those flavours, has been proven safe. There's a lot of talk about popcorn lung.
Culture is complex and produces inconsistent behavior. That doesn't mean we should try to do better.
There are tons of competitors in what is effectively a new and disruptive space with tons of potential upside by re-legitimizing nicotine addiction.
For whatever reason, they're winning, but there are so many factors beyond design that I'd be very reluctant to postulate this was the decisive factor.
Marketing, branding, operations, access to large markets, talent, social proximity to 'free press', soft lobbying (i.e. close relationships to various institutions through hiring or serendipity etc.).
Using people who are 'trying to quit smoking and using vaping as a mechanism' is a poor measure of determining the addictivity of vaping because people are already trying to quit.
Personally, I quit 'light smoking' with vaping rather easily.
But then I took up vaping for about a year, and quitting was brutally hard. I was not even a heavy vaper. It consumed my entire body.
Quitting smoking I would get 'pangs' or 'acute' points where I wanted to have a cigarette - if I could get past that, it would be fine. With vaping ... it was like a constant pain. I think this was related to the nature of usage.
And I was using a log mg vape, I could have easily moved up.
Vaping is a really, really bad idea. Though the nicotine addiction is not nearly so hazardous alone, it's far worse or addicting than say, a coffee addiction - particularly for young people this is a bad idea.
After 2 weeks of vaping I wanted to smoke a cig again. It tasted so awful that I instantly stopped smoking cigarettes and continued vaping (I still never intended to stop consuming nicotine, but the positive effects of not smoking were showing pretty immediately)
My coils drifted into the subohm range pretty fast, mechmods and 100W+ boxes was what I needed to produce cubic meters of vape. But upping the volume of vaped liquid allowed me to reduce the relative nicotine contents (improving the taste of the liquid further) up to the point where I started asking myself whom for I'm consuming nicotine.
Stopping to vape was pretty easy at that point.
Never looked back.
It just opens the pandora's box to youth vaping. And also full-on vaping addiction as well.
If I was king I would ban advertising for vaping other than as smoking cessation. In Quebec where I live , you can't even have vaping products in the window. All of the signage and rules are strictly limited, much like the limited packaging on cigarettes.
It's amazing to see that if you separate brand and advertising from a product, how hard it is for companies to be successful. Tells you a lot about human behaviour!
You should visit Europe where smoking doesn't have nearly the amount of stigmatization it does in America.
There are smoking rooms within my office in Germany, and the rooms smell like an American restaurant circa ‘95.
Point being: there's a clear stigma against smoking here, and wherever we're "behind" in terms of pushing back against smoking, we are heading in the same direction.
https://dschool.stanford.edu/resources-collections/a-virtual...
Juul serves as a foundational example of design thinking. In the words of the founders, both grads of the Product Design masters program, the concept was not to create an "electronic cigarette" but to annihilate the concept of cigarettes altogether in favor of a true 21st century innovative delivery system. Regardless of your position on the societal ills of underage nicotine dependency, it's a fascinating case study to see how a niche product (Plume, I believe it was called?) for loose-leaf cannabis and extracts dubbed the "iPhone of vapes" evolved into a $15B household brand.
How Juul, founded on a life-saving mission, became the most embattled startup of 2018
https://www.fastcompany.com/90262821/how-juul-founded-on-a-l...
I think the real skill involved is Visual Thinking. Good old fashioned pencil and paper flow state ideation. If there is one practice I wish I had spent more time acquiring it would definitely be illustration / drafting ;)