Design thinking

What is design thinking?

In the words of Tim brown himself “Design thinking is a Human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.” —Tim Brown, president and CEO of IDEO

I see design thinking as an approach that can utilise life experiences and culture before a project can be enforced onto the design and development team project.

Agile software development and lean startup both focus on similar principles as design thinking in terms of the core process of involving people through the design process but the elements are more focused on the human centered aspect of problem solving and creating an innovative solution as opposed to a consumer good.

Design thinking

The Design Thinking Process

This process or method was developed by IDEO and it’s taught at the d.school: Institute of Design at Stanford. It involves massive collaboration and frequent iterations. It has five very clear phases: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test.

The end goal of the process is to create a product, service, or experience that people want (desirability), has real potential to become useful (viability), and can easily or conveniently be built in terms of technology (feasibility). – you’re, how (2016) Use our methods. Available at: http://dschool.stanford.edu/use-our-methods/ (Accessed: 16 December 2016).

The process includes:

• Empathising with the audience

• The process starts with empathising with the human context and culture, understanding the audience can be a vital element to consider for all people involved in the development of the product.

• Defining the problems

• Defining the problems with a team can keep everyone on the same page in terms of what to consider, the limits of the project and the overall framework the team will utilise for the specific project.

• Ideate to generate alternatives to test

• Ideation and brainstorming can help more designs come into testing to measure the potential of which design will make the most impact and aid the direction of where the development is heading.

• Iterate based on user feedback

• To build a representation of the product and to start testing on people for feedback

• Reflect on everything and all the changes

• Redefining the experience and feedback from the original concept and consider the feedback received.

• Testing the product with the original end users for more feedback

• Testing on the original end users and receiving more feedback.

Human centered / design thinking diagram i created to visually demonstrate the different elements of the design thinking approach i am most interested in using for the presentation.

My focus will be on empathy and problem solving, i feel the other elements are very similar to agile and lean methodologies, but in terms of the scope and style, design thinking is human centered entirely whereas agile and lean focus on development and collecting user data in all forms to make the development and design phases focus more on usability and the workability of the software itself.

Empathy / design

What is Empathy ?

Empathy is defined as ‘standing in someone else’s shoes’ or ‘seeing through the eyes of another’. Empathizing with another person is the ability to identify and understand another’s situation, feelings, and motives. In design, it may be defined as; identify with others and adopt their perspective. Empathy is different than sympathy as empathy does not necessarily imply compassion. Empathy can also be described as a respectful understanding of other people’s point of view. – medium

“Human-centered design is a philosophy, not a precise set of methods, but one that assumes that innovation should start by getting close to users and observing their activities.”

This inspired me to use elements of design thinking and its human centered approach to create a research model that i can use for my proposal to demonstrate its effectiveness through practice.

Personally i think a design thinking should be part of all organisations due to its human centered problem solving approach, the idea of a team working together at all stages of development can be efficient and productive, but contribution towards the initial idea at the conceptualisation

References

Brown, T. and Katz, B. (2009) Change by design how design thinking can transform organizations and inspire innovation. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers.

In-text citations:

• (Brown and Katz, 2009)

https://medium.com/@ohheygreat/the-value-of-empathy-c57a1a1414f6#.pfkfew43q (Accessed: 16 December 2016).

you’re, how (2016) Use our methods. Available at: http://dschool.stanford.edu/use-our-methods/ (Accessed: 16 December 2016).