Design Thinking isn’t just for designers. Great innovators in literature and art, music, science, engineering, and business have used it. Why is it called Design Thinking? Design Thinking’s uniqueness is its ability to help designers extract, teach, learn, and apply these human-centered methods to solve problems creatively and innovatively in their designs, in their countries, and in their lives.
Many of the top brands globally, such as Apple, Google, and Samsung, have adopted Design Thinking quickly. Design Thinking is taught at leading universities worldwide, including Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and d.school. Do you know what Design Thinking is? Why is it so popular? We’ll tell you why it’s so popular.
What is Design Thinking?
The term “design thinking” refers to “thinking like a designer” and was first mentioned in 1969 within the book “The Sciences of the Artificial”. It only gained recognition after David M. Kelley, the co-founder of IDEO (product design consultancy firm), was able to define the method in terms of “a way of acting creatively.”
It’s a highly person-centered approach (anthropocentrism) and is designed to create innovative solutions that reflect the perspective of the final client in a creative, multidisciplinary, and collaborative manner.
Design thinking is about seeking solutions and developing new products with others, in a collaborative and integrated way, between various departments (multidisciplinary groups) and the intended group of customers. What is created is an exact brainstorming process where everyone assumes the role of the people who are the ones who use the solution.
Design Thinking Process
Your team will go through four phases of design thinking while creating solutions and products. Design thinking is not a set of rules that one must follow. It’s a loose framework that you can interpret to suit your business’s needs.
- Inspiration: This is the first stage of the design process. Here, you will attempt to understand the problem and potential solution. It is essential to define your objectives, benchmarks, and critical points of contact.
- Empathy: This is undoubtedly one of the most vital principles and phases of design thinking. You must understand the client’s viewpoint when designing products, services, hardware, or solutions.
- Ideation: This phase involves generating as many ideas as you can using both divergent and convergent thinking. Divergent thinking involves diverse people engaging in structured brainstorming. Alternatively, convergent thinking focuses on the best ideas and selects one to pursue.
- Implementation and Prototyping: Once you’ve formulated some of the most influential concepts, it’s time to begin designing and prototyping to create authentic goods and solutions that are tested and analyzed before being developed.
Design Thinking is for Everyone
Design thinking isn’t just for designers. It’s also for creative employees, freelancers, and leaders who want to incorporate design thinking into every level, product, or service to create new opportunities for business and society.
Designers have mastered numerous skills over the years in designing to meet human needs and work within the constraints of the business. Designers have created the products we love today by combining what is desirable from a human perspective with technically feasible and financially viable.
The next step in design thinking is to make these tools available to people who might not have thought of themselves as designers and then use them to solve a broader range of problems. Design Thinking is fundamentally a problem-solving approach that was developed in the field of design and combined a user-centered view with rational and analytic research to create innovative solutions. No matter if you are currently living in countries like India, there is still a great scope to learn it through design thinking online course.
Who is involved in Design Thinking?
The Design Thinking Process is not like other methods for software or manufacturing. The Design Thinking process is more efficient when more people are involved, and it is based heavily on empathy and divergence.
The most successful Design Thinking teams typically include 6-12 core members with diverse technical and strategic profiles. While some participants might be designers, most will be leaders and experts in related disciplines like strategy, technology, marketing, and other stakeholders/community members. These are familiar participants in the Design Thinking teams.
Consider the skills required to be able to make decisions in a Design Thinking workshop. This means that you need a mix of strategy and technical experts.
Who is Responsible for the Facilitation of Design Thinking?
Design Thinking is open to everyone, but it takes practice to coach a group through the process. Design Thinking involves coordinating research efforts and running workshops over multiple days.
Create the Right Kind of Team
While specialization is necessary, it’s not the only thing that’s required. We need people who can handle employees better and bring the best out of them to make Design Thinking projects successful. People with such potential have deep knowledge and experience in their fields, and they are also able to connect horizontally and form meaningful collaborations.
A Design Thinking team should ideally be a cross/multidisciplinary team consisting of a mix of specializations, including specialists associated with problem areas. Although specialists might have a lot of technical knowledge, they often work towards solutions that can be more accessible to non-specialists. They also need outside perspectives. If you rectify a cross-section of an organization, it is easy to see that people in certain departments have specific skills in particular business functions. They tend to approach problem-solving from their own experience and use the skill set that they are most comfortable with.
All departments, including sales, marketing, IT, and customer service, view the challenges they face from the perspective of their respective departmental functions. It is essential to bring together diverse teams to provide a broader perspective. Still, it is even more important to encourage them to think outside their own departments to uncover more holistically-framed problems.
Also, account managers frequently create solutions and then hand them down to creative teams for implementation and decoration. This can lead to a team that focuses on the wrong problems. People who can see the larger picture of a situation and are able to connect with people outside of the organization to understand the market are valuable assets.
Final Thoughts
So, Design Thinking isn’t just for designers; it’s an approach to problem-solving that is specific to Design. It involves assessing the known aspects of a problem and then identifying the more deep factors contributing to those problems.
Design Thinking is an iterative process where knowledge is continuously being questioned and gained so that it can help us define a problem and identify alternative strategies and solutions. Designers often refer to Design Thinking as “outside the box thinking” because they are trying to discover new ways to think that don’t follow the more traditional problem-solving methods. You can be a master at finding relevant solutions for obstacles if you learn the stanford design thinking course. This is similar to artists. Design Thinking’s core purpose is to improve products through analyzing users’ interactions with them and investigating their operating conditions. Design Thinking allows us to dig deeper and uncover new ways to enhance user experiences.