Design Thinking

Vicky Vikrant
Dedication
“…There has been no greater time of need for social, economic,
and environmental improvement than today, and no better people
to make a difference than “design thinkers”: those who venture
outside the box, who are open-minded, who enjoy collaborative
ideation, who have an eye on design and an eye on the future,
who have a passion for change, who tell visual stories, and who
do all of these things with a spirit of goodness. We can make the
world a much better place, by design, in every moment.”

-- Design thinking: integrating innovation, customer experience, and

brand value Edited by Thomas Lockwood.—3rd ed
 Introduction
“Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that
integrates the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the
requirements for business success.” - Tim Brown, CEO, IDEO
○ Follows a systematic innovation process that serves as a toolbox for
stimulating problems.
○ Involves applying concepts of design thinking and hypothesis-driven
innovation (popularised by the term, lean startup) to design and test.
⮚ Expectation from You:
⮚ Use the design thinking and hypothesis-driven innovation processes to
develop viable solutions to user challenges.
⮚ Gain user empathy through observation and interviewing to develop user
insights to identify unmet needs.
⮚ Use multiple brainstorming techniques to find innovative solutions
⮚ Develop and test a model or case to support the viability of the solution.
⮚ Prototype a solution to a user challenge.
Introduction
● It is a methodology for creative
problem-solving -- provides a
solution-based approach to
solve problems.
● Induces a deep human-centric
understanding to deliver
delightful client experiences
through quick iteration of ideas.
● Useful in tackling complex problems
by re-framing the problem in
human- centric ways.
● Helps to adopt a hands-on approach in
prototyping and testing.
○ Some of world’s leading brands who are
using design thinking - Netflix, Apple,
● Empowers anyone to apply design Google, HBO, Samsung, World Bank,
thinking methods to solve complex General Electric etc.
problems that occur around us.
The Philosophy of Design Thinking
Overview Of Design Thinking
★The term design thinking is generally referred to as applying a designer’s
sensibility and methods to any problem solving.
★Emphasizes observation, collaboration, fast learning, visualization of
ideas, rapid concept prototyping, and concurrent business analysis
which ultimately influences innovation and business strategy.
★Creates a vibrant interactive environment that promotes learning
through rapid conceptual prototyping.
★It is a tool to imagine future states and to bring products, services, and
experiences to market.
★The objective is to involve consumers, designers, and business people in
an integrative process, which can be applied to product, service, or even
business design.
★It is a methodology for innovation and enablement.
 Rules of Design Thinking
1. The Human Rule: All Design Activity Is Ultimately Social in Nature
○ Solve technical problems in ways that satisfy human needs and acknowledge
the human element in all technologists and managers.
2. The Ambiguity Rule: Design Thinkers Must Preserve Ambiguity
○ Innovation demands experimentation at the limits of our knowledge and ability to
control events, and with freedom to see things differently
3. The Re-design Rule: All Design Is Re-design
○ Understand how human needs have been addressed in the past and apply “foresight
tools and methods” to better estimate social and technical conditions we will
encounter in the future
4. The Tangibility Rule: Making Ideas Tangible Facilitates Communication
○ Idea is “prototypes are communication media.”
○ Seen as media, we now have insights regarding their bandwidth, granularity, time
constants, and context dependencies to “make it tangible”
Key Tenets Of Design Thinking
● First: Develop a deep understanding of the consumer based on
fieldwork
research
○ Using an empathic approach can be both a source of inspiration and an
aid to reaching consumer insights and discovering unarticulated user
needs.
○ Getting out in the real world with consumers, with open-
minded collaboration, even with co-design concepts
○ Includes observational research and ethnographic methods, by watching,
listening, discussing, and seeking to understand.
○ The key is to start from a seeking to understand point of view—
not in seeking persuasion
● Second: collaboration, both with the users and through forming
multidisciplinary teams
○ This helps to move toward radical innovation, rather
than incremental improvement, and of course seeks added value
Key Tenets Of Design Thinking
● Third: accelerate learning through visualization, hands-on
experimentalism
○ Creating quick prototypes, which are made as simple as possible in
order to get usable feedback
○ Help grasp a potential implementation well before many resources
are spent in development
○ Goal is to fail quickly and frequently so that learning can occur.
⮚ Failing quickly is a stated objective at Pixar Animation
Studios because it leads to better work done more quickly
[https://www.pixar.com/, https://www.pixar.com/pixar-in-a-box]
Key Tenets Of Design Thinking
● Fourth: visualization of concepts to make the intangible become
tangible
○ Prototypes can be concept sketches, rough physical mock-ups, or stories
or
role-playing or story boards – any form of visualization
○ Using visual explanations provides context, which is greatly helpful
when the consumer is a partner in concept development
● Fifth: concurrent business analysis integrated during the process
○ Enable integrative thinking by combining the creative ideas with
more traditional strategic aspects in order to learn from a more
complete and diverse point of view.
○ In collaboration, constraints can be removed and great ideas can emerge.
○ Helps in anticipating the business activities required by a conceptual
new product, service, or experience offering, as well as the
resources it may require and the competitive landscape in which it
will appear.
Key Tenets Of Design Thinking
Design Thinking makes us use our observation, empathy, and understanding of
the audience to design experiences that create opportunities to engage the
audience.
An Analogy: Digital photography
I. First, look for the big picture as well as the details.
A.Thinking and observing are in zoom mode - both macro and telephoto
views
B.By thinking like designers—being able to see the details as well as zoom
out to the big picture
C.We collaborate with the subjects and hunt for the best angles to represent
the picture of our ideas and observations.
II. In the second step, process information.
A.Visualize by quick previews; we sort, trash, re-zoom, rethink, and
immediately share the findings and observations with others.
B.Similarly, design thinking moves through process, preview, and share
modes.
III.Third, demonstrate results by producing final, visualized concepts.
A.Apply business methodology to best prepare the idea, like image-enhancing
software.
B.The final image—the result—is a plan for a product, service, experience, or
business strategy.
 What is Design Ability?
“What I mean by design is doing things with intention, trying to decide what’s
important to somebody, building a bunch of prototypes and showing them
around, developing a point of view and getting it out so that it has impact in the
world. So design is really a process of making impact on the world by doing this
kind of creation of something new to the world and then getting it out there.”
– David Kelly, Founder IDEO
“Our job is to give the client, on time and on cost, not what he wants, but what he
never dreamed he wanted; and when he gets it, he recognises it as something he
wanted all the time.”
– Denys Lasdun, architect.

❖ Design ability is a collective or shared ability: not individualistic.

❖ Some application areas:
➢ In the areas of brand value, for service design, for customer experiences,
etc.
Some Related Terms
● Design thinking is an innovation process to discover unmet needs and
opportunities and to create new solutions.
○ It is part of the “fuzzy front end” and is also being adopted to help reinvent
businesses, as in solving “wicked” problems and business transformation.
○ It is about connecting ideas and methods from different areas of thought in
order to create new structures, new associations, new combinations.
● Design management is the ongoing management and leadership of design
organizations, processes, and designed outputs— products, services,
communications, environments, and interactions.
● Design leadership and design strategy are outputs of effective
design thinking and design management.
○ Design management and leadership lie in the area of integrating design into
business and in continuous development and improvement, whereas design
thinking is more interested in front-end
The HPI-Stanford Design Thinking
Research Program
● Started in 2008 and is financed by the Hasso Plattner Foundation.
● Engages multidisciplinary research teams who are passionate
about developing ambitious, long-term explorations related to
design thinking to investigate the phenomena of innovation in all
its holistic dimensions scientifically.
● It is a rigorous academic research applied to understanding the
scientific basis for how and why the innovation method of design
thinking works.
● Goal is to discover metrics that predict team performance and
facilitate real-time team performance management.
● The program invites to design, develop and evaluate innovative
tools that support teams in their cooperative creative work
eventually even bursting time and space boundaries
The HPI-Stanford Design Thinking
Research Program
● Research Questions:
○ What are people really thinking and doing when they are engaged in creative
design innovation? How can new frameworks, tools, systems, and methods
augment, capture, and reuse successful practices?
○ What is the impact on technology, business, and human performance when
design thinking is practiced? How do the tools, systems, and methods really
work to get the innovation you want when you want it? How do they fail?
■ For more details: https://ecdtr.hpi.de/
● The heart of the design thinking process lies at the intersection of
technical feasibility, economic viability, and desirability by the user.
● The inquiries of design thinking research extents to all aspects related to
these dimensions towards a thorough, scientifically viable exploration of
the design thinking process