Design Thinking and Entrepreneurial Mindset
The term “design thinking” is widely used and often in slightly different ways, making it tough to define. I have encountered innumerable resources online offering to teach me design thinking, sometimes for a fee and sometimes not. IDEO, one of my favorite companies of all-time, offers a course in it on their website — elsewhere, groups like the Interaction Design Foundation offer articles to introduce the topic to fledgling designers. There is a basic recipe, and I will explore it on my own in the upcoming months, but since I am not yet practiced it I don’t want to take the time to summarize it right now without examples of my own. After all, telling stories is one of the cornerstones of communication in design, so I’d best leave the five steps for a later date. Instead, I’d like to talk about an experience I had that I believe to be similar.
In my high school AP Microeconomics class, our final project was somewhat nonstandard. The project was called “build a better mouse trap,” and we were supposed to introduce a new product to the class either by modifying an existing one, or creating our own to fill a need. While the project may have been better suited for a business or entrepreneurship class, I enjoyed it as my first real opportunity to design a product.
After two weeks brainstorming and preparing, we gave our product presentations to the class. After seeing mostly interesting variants or amalgamations of existing products, I delivered my product idea: something that I didn’t even think was marketable. I still remember finishing the presentation and looking at my teacher, ready for him to ask why we didn’t make something that we could sell. He didn’t ask. Instead, he simply said, “that was the best presentation I’ve ever seen.”
Here was the most important slide of the presentation:
While I no longer entirely agree with most of the statements on this slide, I still do think that I figured out something crucial in my time working on that project. This wasn’t even a required slide for the presentation, but I thought it was important to take time and address how I went about brainstorming, because this is the crossover point between design thinking and what I then dubbed “entrepreneurial mindset”:
It’s unlikely that you’ll get to a new place by thinking about the same problem in the same way. Instead, you have to find a unique way of thinking about it, a new angle, that may even seem wrong at first because of how strange it is. But this is “thinking outside the box.”
So while everyone else thought of something flashy, or a modification to a common product they interacted with on a daily basis, I chose to acknowledge that I probably wasn’t going to out-think entire R&D departments at companies that exist just to improve their products. At the time, I figured that I had to choose something so mundane that maybe, just maybe, nobody had really given thought to it and I could get onto something new. (I now know this to be false — virtually everything that makes it to a market has designers, but I was onto something).
This is how I settled on our final “product” — repainting parking lines to help drivers assess their parking without turning off their engine. I decided that maybe nobody had ever thought about parking lines before, the standard kinds that have two spots head-to-head and then spots to either side, in a row. I noticed that drivers would often park too far forward or too far back in a spot, causing difficulties for other drivers. If we painted a stripe at the rough distance of drivers’ doors, they could open their door as they parked, glance at the stripe, and know if they lined up their car correctly. Like I said, not marketable — but I was very proud of the outcome of my process.
As I move forward learning about design in the coming months, I absolutely will begin to go through the full design thinking process, from empathizing with users all the way through testing. Until then, I will hold onto the spirit I learned back in high school — think weird, and you’ll escape the box.
