Concept of design thinking

Design thinking is a methodology that designers use to brainstorm and solve complex
problems related to designing and design engineering. It is also beneficial for designers to
find innovative, desirable and never-thought-before solutions for customers and clients.
Design thinking is used extensively in the area of healthcare and wellness, agriculture, food
security, education, financial services, and environmental sustainability, to name a few.
Design thinking has helped in the digital space, contributed to the development of physical
products, spurred social innovation projects and much more. The iterative design process
helps the designers to involve clients and customers in meaningful ways. It is not just a
strategy to come up with feasible solutions to a problem, but also a method to think of
unimaginable solutions and then trying to make them not just feasible, but also viable. Design
thinking is a blend of logic, powerful imagination, systematic reasoning and intuition to bring
to the table the ideas that promise to solve the problems of the clients with desirable
outcomes. It helps to bring creativity with business insights.

Features of design thinking

 Finding simplicity in complexities.
 Having a beautiful and aesthetically appealing product.
 Improving clients’ and end user’s quality of experience.
 Creating innovative, feasible, and viable solutions to real world problems.
 Addressing the actual requirements of the end users.
Most of the challenges in the world do not get solved because people trying to address
those problems focus too much on the problem statement. At other times, the problem
statement is overlooked and there is too much stress to find a solution.
Design thinking helps to gain a balance between the problem statement and the
solution developed. A design-oriented mindset is not problem focused, but solution
focused and action oriented. It has to involve both analysis and imagination. Design
thinking is the way of resolving issues and dissolving problematic situations by the help of
design.
Applications or Scope of design thinking
Business
Design thinking helps in businesses by optimizing the process of product creation,
marketing, and renewal of contracts. All these processes require a companywide focus on
the customer and hence, design thinking helps in these processes immensely. Design
thinking helps the design thinkers to develop deep empathy for their customers and to
create solutions that match their needs exactly. The solutions are not delivered just for the
sake of technology.
Information Technology
The IT industry makes a lot of products that require trials and proof of concepts. The
industry needs to empathize with its users and not simply deploy technologies. IT is not
only about technology or products, but also its processes. The developers, analysts,
consultants, and managers have to brainstorm on possible ideas for solving the problems
of the clients. This is where design thinking helps a lot.
Education
The education sector can make the best use of design thinking by taking feedback from
students on their requirements, goals and challenges they are facing in the classroom. By
working on their feedback, the instructors can come up with solutions to address their
challenges.
For example, Michael Schurr, a 2nd grade instructor from New York, realized that his
students would be more comfortable with bulletin boards lowered. He also found the idea
of creating comfortable semi-private space for working students as it provided them space
to study. As a result, his students became more engaged and felt free to move.
Healthcare
Design thinking helps in healthcare as well. The expenditure on healthcare by the
government and the cost of healthcare facilities is growing by the day. Experts worldwide
are concerned about how to bring quality healthcare to people at low cost.
Venice Family Clinic in Venice, California has come up with innovative solutions to the
challenge of opening a low-cost children’s clinic to serve the low-income families. Problems
of finance, transportation, and language barriers had to be solved. And all this had to be
done at low cost for the poor kids. Fostering good health along with profits was a challenge,
as it does not sound sustainable. Using design thinking, the inefficiencies in the system
and the perennial crises were addressed.

Process of design thinking

Stage 1: Empathize—Research Your Users' Needs

The first stage of the design thinking process focuses on user-centric research. You want to
gain an empathic understanding of the problem you are trying to solve. Consult experts to
find out more about the area of concern and conduct observations to engage and empathize
with your users. You may also want to immerse yourself in your users’ physical environment
to gain a deeper, personal understanding of the issues involved—as well as their experiences
and motivations. Empathy is crucial to problem solving and a human-centered design
process as it allows design thinkers to set aside their own assumptions about the world and
gain real insight into users and their needs.

Depending on time constraints, you will gather a substantial amount of information to use
during the next stage. The main aim of the Empathize stage is to develop the best possible
understanding of your users, their needs and the problems that underlie the development of
the product or service you want to create.

Stage 2: Define—State Your Users' Needs and Problems

In the Define stage, you will organize the information you have gathered during the
Empathize stage. You’ll analyze your observations to define the core problems you and your
team have identified up to this point. Defining the problem and problem statement must
be done in a human-centered manner.

For example, you should not define the problem as your own wish or need of the company:
“We need to increase our food-product market share among young teenage girls by 5%.”

You should pitch the problem statement from your perception of the users’ needs: “Teenage
girls need to eat nutritious food in order to thrive, be healthy and grow.”

The Define stage will help the design team collect great ideas to establish features, functions
and other elements to solve the problem at hand—or, at the very least, allow real users to
resolve issues themselves with minimal difficulty. In this stage, you will start to progress to
the third stage, the ideation phase, where you ask questions to help you look for solutions:
“How might we encourage teenage girls to perform an action that benefits them and also
involves your company’s food-related product or service?” for instance.

Stage 3: Ideate—Challenge Assumptions and Create Ideas

During the third stage of the design thinking process, designers are ready to generate ideas.
You’ve grown to understand your users and their needs in the Empathize stage, and you’ve
analyzed your observations in the Define stage to create a user centric problem statement.
With this solid background, you and your team members can start to look at the problem
from different perspectives and ideate innovative solutions to your problem statement.

There are hundreds of ideation techniques you can use—such as Brainstorm,

Brainwrite, Worst Possible Idea and SCAMPER. Brainstorm and Worst Possible Idea
techniques are typically used at the start of the ideation stage to stimulate free thinking and
expand the problem space. This allows you to generate as many ideas as possible at the start
of ideation. You should pick other ideation techniques towards the end of this stage to help
you investigate and test your ideas, and choose the best ones to move forward with—either
because they seem to solve the problem or provide the elements required to circumvent it.

Stage 4: Prototype—Start to Create Solutions

The design team will now produce a number of inexpensive, scaled down versions of the
product (or specific features found within the product) to investigate the key solutions
generated in the ideation phase. These prototypes can be shared and tested within the team
itself, in other departments or on a small group of people outside the design team.

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 then accepted, improved or
rejected based on the users’ experiences.

By the end of the Prototype stage, the design team will have a better idea of the product’s
limitations and the problems it faces. They’ll also have a clearer view of how real users
would behave, think and feel when they interact with the end product.

Stage 5: Test—Try Your Solutions Out

Designers or evaluators rigorously test the complete product using the best solutions
identified in the Prototype stage. This is the final stage of the five-stage model; however, in
an iterative process such as design thinking, the results generated are often used to redefine
one or more further problems. This increased level of understanding may help you investigate
the conditions of use and how people think, behave and feel towards the product, and even
lead you to loop back to a previous stage in the design thinking process. You can then
proceed with further iterations and make alterations and refinements to rule out alternative
solutions. The ultimate goal is to get as deep an understanding of the product and its
users as possible.

Role of Empathy in design thinking:

➢ As the starting point of the design process, Empathy allows a designer to

understand the people who will eventually use their product or service

➢ Empathy is a core value of design thinking .it is also the first step in the

design thinking process.

➢ Empathy, draws attention to the abilities of researchers and designers to see

the world through other people’s eyes, feel what they feel, and experience

things as they do

➢ Empathy allows a designer to understand the user’s physical and emotional

needs.

➢ The Oxford Dictionary defines Empathy as “the ability to understand and

share the feeling of another”.

➢ Empathy is the first step in design thinking because it is a skill that allows us

to understand and share the same feelings that others feel. Through empathy,

designers are able to put ourselves in other people's shoes and connect with

how they might be feeling about their problem, circumstance, or situation

Some questions to consider:

• What is the person feeling?

• What actions or words indicate this feeling?

• Can you identify their feelings through words?

• What words would you use to describe their feelings?

➢ Empathy is the cornerstone of any successful design project. The extent to

which you understand and empathize with your users ultimately determines

the outcome of your design

➢ This means observing and engaging with people in order to understand them

on a psychological and emotional level. During this phase, the designer

seeks to set aside their assumptions and gather real insights about the user.

➢ Design Thinking cannot begin without a deeper understanding of the people

that designers are designing for. In order to gain those insights, it is

important for designer as a design thinker to empathize with the people you

are designing for so that you can understand their needs, thoughts, emotions

and motivations

➢ Finally, empathy shows a designer how users think about the world and what

is meaningful to users.

Why Empathy is so important?

➢ In a social context, empathy is often what drives us to take action

➢ If we see people suffering or struggling, and we are able to empathize with

their situation, we are compelled to help relieve them in some way.

➢ Designers need to build empathy for their users in order to take the right

course of action

➢ It’s important to understand how the user feels when interacting with a

certain product or interface; does the layout of this website evoke feelings of

frustration?

➢ In building empathy, designers can create products which truly please the

user and make their lives easier

➢ Without this empathy, the design process lacks that all-important usercentricity which
often marks the distinction between product success and

failure.

Tools for empathy used in design thinking

i. Overview
ii. Competitive analysis
 iii. Map positioning
iv. Problem statement
v. Hypothesis statement
vi. Quantitative survey
vii. Qualitative interviews
viii. Empathy maps