#FireStarters is a quarterly event hosted by Google, curated by Neil Perkin, that aims to facilitate debate around the more interesting and challenging issues facing planners. June’s event explored the lessons the planning community can learn from design thinking. Tom Hulme, Design Director at IDEO and John Willshire, Chief Innovation Officer at PHD gave presentations followed by an ‘unconference’ format where groups broke-out for discussion.

Tom’s recommendations included the following:

  1. Challenge The Question. Don’t just accept a brief from a client, be curious and ask questions.
  2. Be user-centered in your thinking. Okay, hardly a new one, but Tom talked about the importance of really getting under the skin of your users.
  3. Clash Messages and Experiences together. He cited Foot Locker’s Sneakerpedia as an example of a successful mash-up. Whilst it’s essentially a user-generated site for people to upload information about sneakers, it reinforces the brand’s message and positioning. It’s neither just a brand message nor solely a user-generated experience - it’s both.
  4. Be holistic. Tom argued that every part of the business model is a creative and marketing opportunity; from pricing to distribution, all elements are an opportunity to differentiate.
  5. Launch To Learn. The act of creating products and prototyping makes you think about the details, so it’s important to focus on implementation.
  6. Stay In Beta. Our ideas should stay in beta, constantly iterating. Tom gave the example of a restaurant that relies on user feedback to shape its menu and pricing. When you shorten the feedback loop you become really user centric.

John Willshire from PHD talked about agencies’ - and clients’ - preoccupation with Process. He suggested process does well because agencies like selling ‘a thing’ and clients like buying ‘a thing’. But he argued process tends to average everything out, making bad work good and killing off the edges that make something else good. “A process is something to sell in lieu of real work” he claimed.

These are just some highlights; there is a good summary here by @huey http://bit.ly/mDxVQh

At Strange & Dawson we like to stay agile in both our thinking and approach to solving client’s challenges; we’re open minded about the path we take. We’re already including some of these ideas in how we work: for instance we’re adamant about challenging briefs and asking questions to better understand client objectives and we’re also hot on examining customer genetics to explore user behaviour. Additionally, we’ll continue to explore new ways of doing things.

Whatever your role in the industry - client or agency, creative or technologist - there are some important lessons here, providing food for thought as we rethink how we add value.