November 8, 2012 by

Needs are verbs and not nouns

This week I had the chance to listen to Prof.Vignoli of “Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia” talking about Design Thinking – Stanford d.school (+ something more 🙂 ).

One thing that I took with me from the speech is that:

“user’s need are verbs and not nouns”

Let me explain that: when you have to understand people’s needs, because you have to design something to service them, ask them to describe the need as a verb.

So I don’t need a STAIR (noun), a stair is a already a solution, “I need to go up (verb) to …” . Got it?

I give you an extra tip for free 🙂 : the most the description of the need is ‘open’ (= less constraints, more general), the highes is the number of innovative options you can get back.

PierG