A good friend of CCD, Matt Marsh from Firsthand Experience, gave this talk to a TEDx event recently and we wanted to share it.
Its an interesting discussion about innovation and the early insight of human-centered approaches. Matt's point about understanding people's needs and wants as an early part of the design process is really interesting. He highlights a number of failures that might have been prevented with a more user-led process...amazing that some of them got through even though user-centered approaches are often now used in the design process.
The only question back to Matt is how you push and shape needs through innovation by creating things that people didn't know they want until they use it and adapt it. Do we need to have the failures to find the successes?
Perhaps it is a different mind set that is needed in that early part of the process...abstracting to understand goals and needs and not moving to solutions as designers are often drawn towards.