Welcome to the course on Understanding Design Thinking. In this course, you will learn the following topics:

The definition of design thinking
The different stages of design thinking
Solving problems using design thinking
Leading a design thinking team
Developing ideas and prototypes
Implementing data intelligence in design thinking
Bringing about changes in the way organizations think and approach problems.

What is Design Thinking?

Design Thinking is a methodology for solving business problems, developing products or developing user-centred experiences. In this method of problem-solving, the user or the customer is given the utmost importance while trying to solve the problem and come up with a solution.
Design thinking is putting yourself in the shoes of the user and understanding the needs of the user to come up with a solution that fulfils the user's requirements.

Note: Design thinking is a mindset rather than a linear process.

Five Steps in Design Thinking

Five stages are usually associated with Design Thinking. These stages serve more as guidelines than as steps or a process for design thinking.

The five stages are:

Empathizing with the user (human empathy)
Defining the problem
Thinking about the solution (ideation)
Building prototypes
Testing the solution

Human Empathy

Human Empathy is the first and probably the most crucial stage during Design thinking. In this stage, the problem is viewed from the user's perspective, and a solution is developed based on an empathic understanding of the users' needs. This process allows the designer and the team to set aside their views and assumptions while developing a solution.

Defining the Problem

In this stage, the problem is divided into several parts, and each part of the problem is clearly defined by synthesizing and analyzing the data and information collected during the empathizing stage.
This helps in understanding every part of the problem and developing solutions.
This stage helps in deciding the functionalities to be developed.

Interactions and Principles

Interactions are the meaningful engagements and communications that an organization has with its customers.

With the numerous ways of interactions that have developed with the rise in technology, it is important to maintain consistent interaction with the customers through experience principles.
If the interactions are inconsistent, the organization may lose its brand image and its loyal customer base.

Experience Principles are criteria built from the customer needs that help in customer interactions and enable the organization to build a good customer experience.

Experience principles are built from the higher-order needs of the customers like affiliations, a sense of belonging, and self-fulfilment.

Ideation

This is the stage where the Designers start developing the solutions to the problems defined by collecting and analyzing the data during the empathizing period. In this stage, unusual ideas are welcomed, questions are asked that lead to other questions that help in addressing the core of the problem.

The commonly used techniques used in idea generation are:

Brainstorming, and
Worst Possible Idea.

Prototyping

In this stage, the team does the experimentation. They build the prototypes based on the solutions developed during the ideation stage.
In this stage, the team builds prototypes in quick iterations, based on the ideas available.
Teams usually apply the fail fast technique in prototyping. In this technique, the results and the data collected from the failures of a prototype are used to build the next until a successful prototype is built.

Testing

In this stage, the designers rigorously test the product using the best solutions developed during the prototyping stage. This is the final stage of Design Thinking.
However, as design thinking is not a linear process, the results of the testing stage are often used to redefine a problem or to get a better understanding of the present problem.
Even during this stage, changes and refinements are made to rule out faulty solutions and derive as deep an understanding of the product and its users as possible.

The Team

Design thinking is a collaborative and multi-disciplinary approach to problem-solving. Therefore, it needs people with different skills to solve a problem, such as researchers, analysts, engineers, developers, and business owners to come together to solve a problem.
In Design thinking, the different roles of the team members are viewed as a perspective they bring in problem-solving.

For example, A developer is someone who codes, but in design thinking, he puts forward a perspective of what technology can be used and whether the idea is feasible or not.
Sometimes teams come up with great ideas, but there are two things that they forget to take into consideration. First is socialise with the stakeholders and explain the idea so that it can be turned into a business and the second is the ground reality of delivery. i.e., the overheads of actually manufacturing and delivering it to the user.

Tangibilty

Tangibility allows visualizing your complex ideas and make them understand to the world.

Direct interaction among different people trying to solve complex problems helps them share ideas and increase productivity.
In design thinking, much of the knowledge is in the form of ideas inside a designers head
Presenting ideas in physical spaces like whiteboards makes them accessible to other team members and also helps users and stakeholders to get involved in the design thinking process.
There are many ways to makes ideas tangible, but they fall broadly into two categories.
Quick Prototypes

Visual Representation
The key to making your ideas tangible is building your whiteboarding and sketching skills.

Backup of BlueTEXT.in

Friday, April 1, 2022

Understanding Design Thinking - Part - 1 [Defining Design Thinking]