Understanding Design Thinking, for “noncreative” people
Forget about those descriptions full of buzzwords and focus on what matters. Understand once and for all what it is and how you can take advantage of it.
If you are the type of person who considers yourself the noncreative, the one with a logical mind, and who focuses on the rationality of things. But, at the same time, feels curious to understand what is Design Thinking about, you are in the right place.
I’m Caio Arruda, an ex-almost industrial engineer that even not finishing the graduations keeps the rational mindset, trying to understand the logic behind everything.
In the previous years, I fall in love with Creativity and I promise you that I’ll do my best to explain what is Design Thinking about from a logical-based perspective.
Let’s go?
The Concept
The first time I heard about Design Thinking was that classic explanation of, “It’s a set of principles, more an approach to problem-solving than a regular structure to be followed…”, “design-centric culture, the principles from design applied to…”.
For me things — most of the time — have to be clear, define and structure. I’ll try to help you understand it with some external help.
— Buzzwords Alert! — According to the Interaction Design Foundation:
“Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative process which seeks to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions to prototype and test.”
Okay, so you can have in mind that the focus here is to: understand the ones who are going to use your solution; don’t go with assumptions, challenge it first; figure out the real problem to bring the real solution; finally, prototype and test it.
To give you an example, imagine you want to build a house for someone.
Drawing the House Project
You can simply go and do a standard house, you know, with one entrance door, one bedroom, a living room, a kitchen, a laundry, a toilet and maybe one office.
However, what if:
- The owner has two kids and he wants another room for them;
- The owner has mobility issues and needs the stairs needs to be adapted;
- The owner doesn’t need an office, so she would prefer to invest in a cinema room;
- The owner loves to cook, so for her would make sense to have a kitchen more integrated into the living room.
Exist many possibilities that you need to check before going immediately to build the house. You need to understand the ones who are going to use your solution, in this case, the house.
Building the House
But let’s say that you listened to the owner, know what she wants, now you did the design and are going immediately to build the house. But what if:
- The owner doesn’t like your initial project, will you build it before validating with her if it’s what she wants?
- During the construction, she changes her mind and prefers to make the Cinema Room become an Office again;
- You realize that it won’t be possible to use the material you thought first because for any reason it’s not possible, and now you need to figure out another one.
Many things can change during the execution, right?
We can’t simply say that because you listened once to your client you know everything she wants. Because people change, plans change and you need to be able to, within the limits, adapt to the needs.
This is where Design Thinking helps you, to understand your user/client. Make you avoid assumptions — all the houses have to have this or that — and figure out the real problem. Once you know it, you can bring a solution, and the most important, validate it — What if the owner doesn’t like your initial project? — and see if it really solve the problem.
The whole DT idea is based on some principles, that help you to ensure its purpose and see the bigger picture of its execution.
Design Thinking Principles
According to google, exist the 3 E’s for design thinking, points that work as its principles. — Buzzwords Alert! — They are Empathy, Expansive Thinking, and Experimentation.
Let me explain to you a little bit more about them and how you can implement it.
Empathy
When we are building something, such as a product or service, we aim to build something that is more than anything useful for someone, the customer/user. To avoid spending time with useless creation, your customer/user should be your №1 priority, and Empathy is one of the most important steps.
In order to facilitate this process to you, exist many frameworks that can “simply” be implemented. You can start with the most famous such as Customer Journey Mapping, Customer Interviews, Empathy Map. And if you want to explore more the external and internal context you can check the PESTLE Analysis, McKinsey 7s, and SWOT Analysis.
Expansive Thinking
Don’t limit your ideas, this is the base of this principle. Now that you can understand what is going on with your users/customer/stakeholder reality, explore as many solutions as possible to solve the problem or improve the situation. Don’t spend your energy searching for the best, spend searching for more. And understand that it’s okay if not all of them are great and you end up not putting it in practice.
Do you know that classic brainstorming meeting, when someone arrives at the room and say: “How can we solve this? Bring ideas.”. This is not always the best approach, everyone has already experienced a brainstorming that wasn’t very useful. Frameworks, such as Double Diamond, can allow you to guide much more efficient brainstorming meetings, you just need to understand the idea — aka logic — behind and guide the discussion.
Experimentation
You spent time creating a bunch of possible solutions, now it’s time to prioritize them, take this final list and, of course, execute it! It’s not only going to make it, but you also need to execute in a way that you can get learnings from it and understand which ones work and which one doesn’t, and it has to be done fast. A very common mantra is: If you fail, fail fast!
The idea here is: before going 100% for it, taking the risk to discover in the end that this was not the most suitable solution, go on experimenting. Test whether or not you are really going in the right direction. Agile Methodologies look for that, and good news, they are not just for developers and designers.
“By empathizing with your users, practicing expansive thinking, and experimenting with your ideas, you and your team can tap into your collective creative power.” (Think With Google)
Is it becoming more clear for you now? I hope so.
But if it’s not and you really really need to see a framework with steps and so on, I recommend you keep reading.
The Five Stages of Design Thinking
Design Thinking is described by the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford as a five-stage process. And yes, this facilitates a lot the understanding for people with a linear-logical mindset, but at the same time, these stages are not always sequential.
They should be seen more as part of the process that contributes to the outcome. But trust me, if you joining this world now, you can simply look at it as step 1, step 2… step 5.
Summarizing each one we have:
- Empathize: Do you remember the 3 principles? Well, here is one of them. Make sure to understand your №1 priority, your customer/client/user.
- Define: Have clear the problem you’re trying to solve. Based on the needs you’ve realized, which one will you tackle? Have a clear problem statement, this will make it easier for everyone to focus.
- Ideate: Time to go out of the box. Bring ideas, as many you can to solve your problem. Expansive Thinking, remember?
- Prototype: Don’t jump fully into the solution you decided as “the best”. Before, create simple prototypes, cheaper and scaled-down versions that help you understand if it makes sense or not move with this solution.
- Test: With the prototype done, it’s time for Experimentation! Don’t simply check if it’s good or bad, collect the learnings from it and go back to improve your solution or build another one.
Taking Advantage of the Design Thinking
As you can see, Design Thinking is not — only — that group of buzzwords that cool designers say while they are working in a hipster coworking. Actually it can be applicable to many different areas. As soon as you have a problem that is human-center, DT can help you.
And one very important alignment to do is, you are creative! Everyone was born creative. During our life, some people explored it more and others not that much.
DT helps you to structure principles and processes that allow you, and the ones involved, to explore your creative potential and come up with the most suitable solutions.
So, next time you face a problem, consider applying Design Thinking to solve it.
Finally, thank you so much for reading it! Share below what are your thoughts about the topic, I would be more than happy to have a conversation with you about it.
