Design thinking

We all have ways we deal with the various challenges we are faced with in the various fields of profession we have chosen. Consciously or subconsciously we all find our own unique ways(Divergent problem solving) or follow and perfect an established method(convergent problem solving) ,or we employ both methods to overcome the challenges we face everyday.

Design thinking is an iterative problem solving process that approaches problem solving with a hands on user-centric approach. It is a common misconception that design thinking is new as it has been around for quite sometime .Houses, automobiles, subway systems are all end-products of design processes. It would be seen through out history that innovators have applied user-centric process to come up with innovative ways to solve humanities many problems.

Design thinking is extremely useful in tackling complex open ended problems that are ill-defined or unknown, by understanding the human needs involved, re-framing the problem in human-centric ways, creating many ideas in brainstorming sessions and consequently adopting a hands-on approach in prototyping and testing.

It would be seen that defining problems in conventional ways, often leads to conventional solutions. Asking a more interesting question can help teams discover more-original ideas which ultimately leads to innovation. Although in some cases teams can end up in loop exploring a problem. It is widely accepted that solutions that are built around the users aching points are quite popular.

Five stage design thinking process

According to a model proposed by Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford ,design thinking is composed primarily of five stages namely.

Empathize :

This is the consultation part of the design process. It involves consultations with experts to find out more about the area of interest by engaging and empathizing with people to find out their motivation as well as their experiences.

Define:

In the define stage you put together the information you have created and gathered during the Empathize stage. This is where you will analyze your observations and synthesize them in order to define the core problems that you and your team have identified up to this point. The Define stage will help the designers in your team gather great ideas to establish features, functions, and any other elements that will allow them to solve the challenge.

Ideate :

You’ve grown to understand your users and their needs in the Empathize stage, and you’ve analyzed and synthesized your observations in the Define stage, and ended up with a human-centered problem statement. With this solid background, you and your team members can start to “think outside the box” to identify new solutions to the problem statement you’ve created, and you can start to look for alternative ways of viewing the problem.

Prototype:

This is the experimental phase of the design process and a very important phase of the design thinking processes, it allows the design team to gain a deeper understanding and a broader view of the solutions they plan on building .In this phase, the design team build scaled down versions of the proposed solutions from the other three phases. Prototyping allows the design team to understand the user pain points more, gain more insights about the kind of challenges they might face and come up with the best possible solutions for those challenges. The design team will have a better idea of the constraints inherent to the product and the problems that are present, and have a clearer view of how real users would behave, think, and feel when interacting with the end product.

Test:

In this phase of the five phased design thinking process, the best solutions from the prototype phase are rigorously tested .This is the final stage of the 5 stage-model, but in an iterative process, the results generated during the testing phase are often used to redefine one or more problems and inform the understanding of the users.

When not to use design thinking

From the discussion so far design thinking might seem like a one size fits all shoe but it is not. Design thinking is not really suited for solutions that do not allow for divergent thinking or solution that do not allow exploration. When starting a Design Thinking process you want to have a good idea of useful process steps and methods to approach the challenge. However, the final outcome and eventual process strongly depends on important key-insights that you’ll find along the way.

Conclusion

It should be noted that it is not a must to follow the design process phases linearly as they are outlined above. The phases just serve as a guide to design thinking, they do not follow any specific order and often times occur concurrently. Each of the phases are iterative in nature and allows the design team to get informative insights about the proposed solution.

Design thinking is not a solution in itself, it is how we manage and implement the data gotten from the design thinking process that brings us the solution we want.