It’s my first write up — Why shouldn’t we begin with Design Thinking?

One can be in the stream of literature, art, music, science, engineering, and business and I can say that everyone has practiced Design Thinking. So, why call it Design Thinking? From my understanding designers’ work process can help us to teach, learn and apply these techniques to solve a problem in creative and innovative way– in our designs, in our businesses, in our lives.

What is Design thinking?

Design Thinking is an iterative process in which we try to understand user, assume challenges and redefine a problem in an attempt to find alternative strategies and solutions that might not make sense with initial understanding. Design thinking provides a solution based approach to solving problems. There are many variants of Design thinking in use today, and they have from three to seven phases. However, all variants of Design Thinking are very similar. The five phases of Design Thinking, according to me and I am sure you would also relate to, are as follows:

• Frame a Question
  Inspire your team to think about your customers (who you’re designing a solution for) and what they actually need.
• Gather Inspiration
  Go out into the world and seek inspiration by observing and discovering what people really need.
• Generate Ideas
  Use the inspiration you gather to help push past the obvious to come up with fresh solutions to your problem.
• Make Ideas Tangible
  Build rough prototypes and find what’s working and what’s not.
• Test to Learn
  Test your prototypes, gather feedback, and iterate.

It is important to note that the five phases are not always sequential. They do not have to follow any specific order and can often occur in parallel and repeat iteratively.

An Example of Problem solving: The most important piece of technology in history.

Human is design by our ability to conceive, create and use tools. The first edged tool has been recorded to be more than a billion years old. When humans entered the world, a redefined edge and the “design” of better stone knives began. This process has slowly led up tp our super “high tech knives” that we use today. It only took around 2 billion years to get the knife in your pocket today.

Interestingly, as humans have repeatedly experienced the need of the knives’ evolution, so has the design. Earlier humans have considered expedient tools which means tools were made as they were needed and then disposed of.

The Take Away:

Design Thinking is essentially a problem-solving approach specific to design, which involves assessing known aspects of a problem and identifying the more unknown factors that contribute to the conditions of a problem. This contrasts with a more scientific approach where the concrete and known aspects are tested in order to arrive at a solution.

Design Thinking is an iterative process in which knowledge is constantly being questioned and acquired so it can help us redefine a problem in an attempt to identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding.