MIT's Steve Eppinger on Design Thinking

I recently came across a video which is part of the MIT Executive Education series which featured Steven Eppinger speaking on Systematic Innovation by Design and Design Thinking. (see below)

Dr. Eppinger is a well known and respected educator in Product Design and I am very familiar with his book; Product Design and Development, which is used as a text for college level design courses.
He is by his own admission a Systems oriented guy with a preference for clear processes.

d.school/IDEO Design Thinking Phases

Eppinger's Critical Skills of Design Thinking

Eppinger retains the reference to Empathy and includes a reference to Go and See in his first phase.

Create includes Many Designs and Prototyping, which correlate with Ideate and Prototype.

Implement calls for Iterations and declares that Details Matter which loosely corresponds to Test.

One interesting thing about the MIT model is that it re-frames Design Thinking from five phases to three, similar to the reduction that Alex Osborn did to his Creative Problem Solving model;
Orientation, Preparation, Analysis, Hypothesis, Incubation, Synthesis and Verification, which he repackaged into three activites; Fact-Finding, Idea-Finding, and Solution Finding

Osborn appeared to be expanding his perspective in both directions, adding more details to the parts while also generalizing the whole.

Osborn's Creative Problem Solving Framework

The differences are more of presentation than content, in that a deeper examination of the d.school/IDOE model, as illustrated by this annotated version of the five phase process;

Empathize is for learning about the audience, from which Points of View and User Needs are extracted. Ideation includes Brainstorming multiple solutions. Prototype is where representations of concepts are created, followed by User Testing and feedback - starting the cycle anew.

Design Thinking with explanations

Eppinger only makes an indirect reference to the d.school/IDEO framework, by using IDEO as an example of a company applying Design Thinking.  There is no mention of John Arnold, David Kelley, Larry Leifer, Jim Adams, Bernie Roth, Matt Kahn, or how IDEO was founded by Kelley, staffed with other Stanford Product Design Program graduates. (Perhaps the rivalry between Stanford and MIT is percolating under the surface.)

The original presentation was an hour. I have edited it down to 15 minutes and restricted the subject matter to Eppinger's comments about MIT's interpretation of Design Thinking. 

Next up; My week with Alex Osborn and some observations on Creative Problem Solving.