Weekly Talk: Design Thinking with Denise Eler
**This week we were happy to welcome Denise Eler for our weekly talk.**
**Eler is a Brazilian designer based in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais. She is a specialist in Design Thinking, working as a consultant in personal development, business design and innovation. She is a professor for MBA programs and graduate school. **
She discussed how the world of business is changing, shifting from old business and management models to the fast pace of the digital 21st century. As a result of these changes, we often hear the term “Design Thinking” in discussions about innovation and new businesses.
Design is a “human-centric” discipline, therefore Design Thinking is heavily focused on how the user/client/person reacts and interacts with a product, service, brand, etc.
The new position of CDO (Chief of Design Officer) is more and more common among startups and even big companies seeking innovation.
This is a tendency, but the shift is still slow, only now do we have designers taking business classes and business people taking design classes.
**She compared the two mindsets:**
Business Thinking – Fordist model, analytical, rationalist with no long term vision
-Keeping the best practices of the market
-Benchmarking
-Continuous Improvement
-Data analysis to make decisions concerning the future
-Focusing on cutting cost
Design Thinking – Not trading quality over price, creating emotional connections through segmented targeting.**
-Focusing on new practices
-Being the benchmark
-Being disruptive
-Exploring and creating new scenarios
-Focusing on the meaning and value for the user
Denise explained that the new model is about including design, along with business and technology, inside the production cycle. Going from thinking and doing, to a system where you think, observe, understand, prototype and learn, much like the lean startup model.
Check out the video of the interview after the talk!
Thanks to Denise for the amazing talk. We loved having you at the office and hope you’ll be back soon!