Innovation and Design; Faster. Better. Cheaper
Design thinking is a faster, better, and cheaper innovation process. This process is already used to create successful business, but if we forget to use it to address our social issues we cannot move forward in innovation.
Innovation and Design is taking place in countries across the world. Everyone is innovating new ideas and creating new designs to help everyday citizens live a more efficient daily life. Design thinking is a headline that business people use day to day, primarily in developing countries to effectively create new business ideas that are both feasible as well as solving an issue for people. Design thinking is defined as methodology used by designers to solve complex problems, and find desirable solutions for clients. This calls for thinkers to draw upon logic, imagination, intuition, and systemic reasoning, to explore possibilities of what could be — and to create desired outcomes that benefit the end user. The design thinking has 5 key components to it which are,
Empathizing: Understand
- Develop a deep understanding of your challenge
- Through connecting, consulting, questioning, and engaging
- This allows thinkers to set aside their own assumptions and to think in context of the users needs
- In the field this looks like; you going out and interviewing customers to understand the issue, taking surveys, community involvement
Define: Analyze
- Based off of all the information you’ve collected on the empathizing stage, you define your users problem
- Define the issue as a problem statement
- Allows empathizers to establish ideas which can solve the problem or help the other user solve the problem
- In the field this looks like; writing out the problem in a problem statement, spreadsheets or charts explaining the quantitative information
Ideation: Generating ideas
- Think outside the box to identify new solutions to the problem statement you've defined
- Techniques include brainstorming, brain writing, worst possible idea, SCAMPER
- Allows thinkers to be innovative and create a plan for how theey are going to solve a problem
- In the field this looks like; pages of notes and drawing boards full of sketches. This step can be very unorganized and uncut
Prototype: Creation
- Inefficient and scaled down versions so that you can investigate the problem solution
- Experimental stage that is tested by the team and potential users of the product
- Allows thinkers to understand the restraints that are present and gives them an idea of how users would interact with the problem
- In the field this looks like; rapid prototyping, running test and trials, modeling and scaling projects
Test:
- Test the product based off the solutions identified in the prototype stage
- Results produced ini this stage help to identify other problems that may occur
- Allows thinkers to derive the answer to the problem solution and to observe how it interacts with the end users
- In the field this looks like; end users interacting with the product, conducting R&D
The amazing thing about this process is that it isn’t set in stone, you as a design thinker can move steps around even skip steps if you would like, there is no limitation to your thinking process.
While Design thinking is big in developing countries such as India, Peru, and Kenya just to name a few. I feel as though we can apply design thinking to life her in the bay area, through our business and organizations. Yes, it is true design thinking is being used by big companies and industries to create new products and services here in the bay however, I’m saying we should use design thinking like it is used in developing countries to address social issues. Whatever medium you use to become a design thinker you must follow the steps, beginning with empathizing by getting out of your office space, going outside and interacting with customers to learn about the issue. While everyday life in the bay area is becoming more and more expensive, we must as a community figure out how to apply design thinking to low socio-economic communities in the bay whom face issues such as homelessness, hunger, loss of jobs which we can do through the design thinking process as well as frugal innovation. We can’t just use this process to move forward in our economy we have to apply it to our everyday life to move our society forward.
This process can be utilized at any company so as long as you are following the steps in the process and being a frugal innovator along the way. The process may be challenged differently at a for-profit company vs. and non-profit company. At a for-profit company empathizing may be harder for companies to do because the aren’t seeing any money produced through understanding their users. As well as the ideation process because it may be hard to generate new ideas and take risk where a positive return on investment is unlikely. Nonetheless, at a non-profit company prototyping and testing may be harder because they have to raise the capital for prototyping. This is a challenge because all money comes from donors and the test they may do is usually what all their money has gone to. Therefore they can’t re-test unless they raise more money which can be a challenge for a non-profit prototyping 10 models, raising money for each one only to solve 1 problem.
Design thinking is changing the way we operate in both the business world as well as social issues. We must continue the work, designing, creating, and innovating in order to be faster, better, and cheaper. Lets work together using these processes to build a better tomorrow.