WHAT IS DESIGN THINKING?

I am Daniella Olu-Festus and I will be talking about DESIGN THINKING today. This approach might seem cheesy but just imagine you are listening to a podcast on a cold Saturday morning and enjoy.

Taking the two keywords: design amd thinking, I will be giving a brief overview about what this means.

A design is a plan for the implementation of an activity or process, or the result of that plan in the form of a prototype, product or process. In simple terms, it is to create, fashion, execute, or construct according to plan.

Thinking is quite a common word that you even use unconsciously. Thinking is the cognitive activities you use to process information, solve problems, make decisions, and create new ideas. It is the process of considering or reasoning about something.

Combining both words explicitly, design thinking refers to the cognitive, strategic and practical processes by which design concepts are developed. Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative process that teams use to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions to prototype and test.

Practical processes as mentioned above refers to design thinking process. What are these processes? What are they about? Why are they referred to as cognitive and strategic?

There are many variants of the Design Thinking process in use today, and they have from three to seven phases, stages, or modes. However, all these variants of Design Thinking are very similar. All variants of Design Thinking embody the same principles. I will be discussing the five phases of Design Thinking, according to Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, which is also known as d.school. They are as follows:

I remember one time during one of my classes in Foundation of Medicine, my lecturer made us to understand knowing the difference between empathy and sympathy. She clearly stated that during my career as a medical practitioner, I should show empathy instead of sympathy.

The first stage of the Design Thinking process is to gain an empathic understanding of the problem you are trying to solve. This involves consulting experts to find out more about the area of concern through observing, engaging and empathizing with people to understand their experiences and motivations, as well as immersing yourself in the physical environment so you can gain a deeper personal understanding of the issues involved.

During the Define stage, you put together the information you have created and gathered during the Empathize stage. This is where you will analyse your observations and synthesise them in order to define the core problems that you and your team have identified up to this point. You should seek to define the problem as a problem statement in a human-centred manner.

The Define stage will help the designer gather great ideas to establish features, functions, and any other elements that will allow them to solve the problems or, at the very least, allow users to resolve issues themselves with the minimum of difficulty.

Growing to understand your users and their needs in the Empathise stage, and analyzing and synthesizing your observations in the Define stage, and ended up with a human-centered problem statement. With this solid background, you 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.

It is important to get as many ideas or problem solutions as possible at the beginning of the Ideation phase.

This is an experimental phase, and the aim is to identify the best possible solution for each of the problems identified during the first three stages. The solutions are implemented within the prototypes, and, one by one, they are investigated and either accepted, improved and re-examined, or rejected on the basis of the users’ experiences.

By the end of this stage, you 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.

Testing is the chance to get a product out into the world, test it in real life, and test it in real time. During this phase you have a chance to see if you’ve framed the problem correctly. You can generate user feedback particular to the prototype, and this feedback in turn deepens your understanding of the users.

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, the conditions of use, how people think, behave, and feel, and to empathise. Even during this phase, alterations and refinements are made in order to rule out problem solutions and derive as deep an understanding of the product and its users as possible.

I learned Digital Marketing last year and this was the ultimate nugget I got from all the classes. I eventually applied it to my relationship with people.

In order to gain insights about what your users need, it is important for you as a design thinker to understand the people you are designing for so that you can understand their needs, thoughts, emotions and motivations. You should imagine you were in their place thinking the way they should. This will guide you into understanding them better and seeing things from a wider perspective because you would not want to be displeased as well.

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