One of my heroes is the Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, a man who lived before the profession of design even existed. As the challenges of the industrial age spread to every field of human endeavor, a parade of bold innovators who shaped the world, as they have shaped my own thinking, followed him: William Morris, Frank Lloyd Wright, the visionary educators of the German Bauhaus, the American industrial designers Raymond Loewy and Henry Dreyfuss, the team of Ray and Charles Eames. What they all shared was optimism, an openness to ex-perimentation, a love of storytelling, a need to collaborate, and an instinct to think with their hands—to build, to prototype, and to communicate complex ideas with masterful simplicity. They didn’t just do design; they lived design. These great thinkers were not as they appear in the coffee-table books about the “pioneers,” “masters,” and “icons” of modern design. They were not minimalist, esoteric members of design’s elite priesthood, and they did not wear black turtlenecks. They were creative innovators who bridged the chasm between thinking and doing because they were passionately committed to the goal of a better life and a better world. Today we have the opportunity to take their example and unleash the power of design thinking as a means of exploring new possibilities, creating new choices, and bringing new solutions to the world. In the process, we may find that we have made our societies healthier, our businesses more profitable, and our own lives richer and more meaningful.
Tim Brown, "The Making of a Design Thinker," MetropolisMag.com, Oct 2009, metropolismag.com/story/20091021/the-making-of-a-design-thinker.
