Design thinking: A hero’s journey
The process Medill students learned is about more than creating products — it can also help you navigate your life.
Last fall, I was introduced to the concept and practice of design thinking by two well versed and exceptional practitioners of the craft, Hannah Hudson and Anthony Jakubiak. Over the course of three months in San Francisco, Hannah and Anthony led Medill media innovation graduate students in their Design Thinking & Research for Media Products course.
According to Jakubiak, design thinking is “a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.” I believe, however, that this definition does not fully consider the possibilities of design thinking outside a business context. Despite the utility of design thinking to drive business and growth, the process is adaptable to any solution-oriented endeavor, creative or self-improving.
Design thinking’s applicability to my work inside and outside of class.
As part of our class, which was asked to develop new product ideas that would help the San Francisco Chronicle build its subscriber base, I co-designed and pitched a subscription based texting service for once-a-day news updates. For Berkeleyside, an online news publication in Berkeley where I was an intern during the fall quarter, I collaborated on a design research campaign to understand the information needs of potential readership markets in Oakland. Most recently, I began a remote internship with a community newspaper in rural Washington state, the Wahkiakum County Eagle, as the lead designer for innovating their current offerings.
Achieving desirability, viability, and feasibility in my own life
Many aspects of the design thinking methodology and philosophy have leapt from academic and professional application into my own day-to-day experiences. In order to demonstrate this perspective, I’ll introduce design’s main objective: to achieve a simultaneous state of desirability, viability and feasibility.
Forget media products, I want to achieve those things in my own life, job and relationships. Thinking back on whether or not I wanted to attend graduate school, I unknowingly assessed my decision using this three-pronged criteria. Will it help me achieve my goals? Can I afford it? Can I sustain the commitment? These are some of the many questions that design thinking has prompted me to consciously and critically consider in a variety of contexts.
Embracing the human-centered approach in storytelling
According to IDEO, “A design thinking mindset embraces empathy, optimism, iteration, creativity, and ambiguity” and “keeps people at the center of every process.” In a clear, concise, and methodical way, design thinking presents a multidisciplinary approach to translating individual human experiences into shared touchpoints (mobile app, website, movies, music) through collaboration. If only I had taken a design thinking course before four years of undergraduate film school!
Prior to my time with Hannah and Anthony, my experience as a filmmaker was motivated by empathy but did not consider the human-centric approach to crafting a story. Yes, filmmakers collaborate, but not often do we consider the subject or audience in the iteration process. I’ve learned that considering and engaging a specific group of people before crafting the story angle is a better source of inspiration than my self-interest. The relationship fostered with your audience prior and during the creative process improves the end result because it addresses their experiences in tangible ways. It’s authentic.
Life as one big design thinking process
Design thinking is a journey, but so is life — a continual and cyclical process of new experiences and ideas synthesized into individualized thoughts and choices that inform something new or different. Much like the hero’s journey, the design process presents individuals with a challenge or pain point that they address by interacting with an unknown world. Following the acceptance of the journey, the hero must engage with characters and new information to inspire their subsequent actions, experience frustrations, and lead to an epiphany that could save the world. The hero doesn’t find a solution alone, though. Collaborators with complementary skills come into play throughout the journey to guide the ultimate solution. In the end, the world is saved, but at the end, a new challenge often presents itself and the journey begins once again.
As cyclical as the hero’s journey, design thinking presents a framework that I can apply to many personal and professional contexts to increase my understanding of human-centric needs and their potential solutions.
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