I’m not the sort of person who writes one-star reviews — unless it’s something like Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith — so my compulsion to do so for the perhaps equally clumsily-titled 101 Design Methods: A Structured Approach for Driving Innovation in Your Organization is motivated by a keen sense of caveat emptor.

Vijay Kumar is a professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design, and his book’s main selling point is that it provides a structured, disciplined process for innovation, because “very few organizations know how to make it a reliable and repeatable practice” (1). The “reality,” he points out, is that “Current innovation practices don’t reliably deliver breakthroughs. There is a lack of a set of reliable tools and methods for creating real breakthroughs rather than incremental or random improvements” (2). In contrast, Kumar provides what he calls a “measured, scientific approach.”

I suppose these are fair assertions to make at the outset, but I did keep waiting for some “scientific” evidence to support them. Heck, I don’t even need evidence; I just want examples. None were forthcoming. While I found Kumar’s distinction between product-focused innovation and experience-focused innovation valuable — the latter emphasizes the users, not the product — questions still remain unanswered. What exactly are these “current innovation practices,” and how do they differ from Kumar’s design methods? Why and how are they unreliable? And what does he mean by “real breakthroughs” (my emphasis)? After all, “incremental improvements,” which he sets up in this sentence as his straw opponent, are the very heart of Agile development, and Agile, I wager, has been reliably used to deliver breakthroughs as well. (And one may say the same for Kumar’s sample projects: the reader is told that his design methods successfully resulted in meaningful insights — hard for me to gauge that, though — but did they lead to “real breakthroughs” for those companies? Were they truly innovative? Not sure.)

I’m detecting a slightly defensive posture in his attempt to impose a structured discipline on “innovation practice:” it’s a science, not an art, as the back cover blurb proclaims, and there are certainly enough diagrams here to impress the suits who may be skeptical about Design Thinking’s loosey-gooseyness. But I’m not sure this book will help with that endeavor.

First, it’s ironic that a book meant to foster “innovation” is based on a “design innovation process” featuring “seven modes” that look awfully familiar. No amount of veiling the concepts in fuzzy jargon hides the fact that we all learned these methods when composing research papers in school. (Here’s a method geared for elementary school.)

Second, the book is so overstuffed with empty, imprecise language — precisely the sort of thing good, disciplined scientists should avoid. (It’s not business jargon per se; it’s business-speak.) Innovation is defined here as “a viable offering that is new to a specific context and time, creating user and provider value” (1).

I know what that means, I think, but the slipperiness of the word “innovation” allows Kumar to slide from describing innovation as an abstract “mindset” that you “drive” — it’s in the title! — to using it as a kind of count noun: it’s neither animal, vegetable, or mineral, but an “offering.” And how does one measure newness? (And why the qualifier “new to a specific context and time?”)

The first of his seven modes — I only really have the patience to write about one — is called Sense Intent. (I had to squint a little to parse the sentence; I think it’s supposed to be an imperative, but without an object.) “Early on in the process,” Kumar writes, “we are in this mode of figuring out where to start” (2). Understood. Presumably doing this late in the process is not recommended. Sense Intent “helps us take a pause before jumping into a project and consider the changing world around us” (2). Got it. But it sounds vaguely like something called… planning.

Kumar dives into each “design method” systematically — there’s that — with a short definition, a series of steps, and an “example project.” But the title of 101 Design Methods in reality delivers nothing more than iterations of the same exercises across all seven modes, most of which are completely interchangeable. There is practically no difference between Concept Scenarios (5.14) and Solution Storyboard (6.7) except that one is part of the Explore Concepts mode, and the other, part of the Frame Solutions mode. But the method is the same.

Within the Sense Intent mode alone, you have Buzz Reports (1.1), Popular Media Scan (1.2), Key Facts (1.3), and so on. (The Key Facts design solution is particularly egregious. Defined by Kumar as “gathering key information to anchor the rationale for an intent statement,” this design method sounds suspiciously like gathering evidence to support a conclusion — again, something high school children are taught at a young age when writing research papers for the first time.)

“Sense Intent,” apparently, is different from the second mode, “Know Context,” which is defined as “gaining a full understanding of the surrounding conditions in which those changes happen” (51). This mode sounds like a “literature review” to me, and it’s borne out in the design methods associated with Know Context, for example:

- Popular Media Search (2.2) — not to be confused with Popular Media Scan above
- Subject Matter Experts Interview (2.12) — also not to be confused with “rends Expert Interview (1.5)
- and my favorite, Publications Research (2.3) — how innovative is that? — defined here as “Finding out what is being written and published about aspects of the context.” You get the general idea.

The overall repetitiveness is bolstered by the fact that the illustrations accompanying each method are little more than variations on the same quadrants and cluster matrices. The photographs are colorful (let’s call that a plus), but again, they could be illustrated with the same captions: “People in front of a whiteboard,” “People in front of Post-Its,” “People in front of a whiteboard with Post-Its.” (I exaggerate, but many of the reproductions of the artifacts from the example projects are so tiny — probably because they’re proprietary information — that they’re of little help to the reader actually gauging the effectiveness of the output.)

The writing also suffers from the sort of padding high schoolers do when writing essays: faced with a two-page minimum requirement, high schoolers fall into a hole of rephrasing previous sentences and belaboring the obvious to hit the two-page mark. The same technique happens throughout the book.

The steps — repeated across all 101 design methods — are practically just variations on the following (though I exaggerate):

1. Make a box.
2. Figure out things to put in a box.
3. Put the things in the box and move them around.
4. Discuss the things in the box.
5. Share what you discussed about the things in the box with stakeholders.
(6. Optional first step: Figure out who should make the box / Figure out how to make the box.)

It helps to be methodical.

101 Design Methods is billed as a “step-by-step guidebook,” so I dutifully read it cover to cover; its flaws, alas, become a little more apparent that way. Best, perhaps, for a budding practitioner to simply dip into the book, choose a method that looks interesting, and try it out in the field. But many of these methods have been used by anthropologists and project managers — and elementary school children — for decades; as someone who has been all three, I found nothing particularly innovative about this book.


( )

The book is quite repetitive after the first half. It is not as practical as I expected (no template nor tools recommended). Many examples come from the academic world and may not be easily applied on business cases (less time and money). But it still refreshes on some key values and best practices to ensure innovative solutions. ( )

This book is designed for the practitioner. The author outlines the four core principles of innovation and provides a model of the design innovation process. He describes innovation mindsets and methods. With full-color graphics, the author provides step-by-step instructions for innovation methods for each of the seven modes of the design innovation process. Included with each method is a real-life example of its application. This book is of value to anyone involved in driving innovation. Instructions are clear, the writing is straightforward, the examples are informative, and the graphics are colorful. This is a book innovators will reference often. ( )