Reflections on Design Thinking
Something I always knew, but in a way I had never thought of
I am part of a program called EDGE UP in Calgary. I was in this program for several weeks before I realized it stood for Energy to Digital Growth Education and Upskilling Project. The name is a mouthful, and honestly, so is the volume of work. In 4 months my cohort of students is being exposed to a mountain of courses across Product Management and Digital Marketing.
For many of us this is a brave new world. Not the dystopian Aldous Huxley kind. It’s one that challenges our way of thinking about how we work and the kind of opportunities that exist for us to apply our skills gleaned in energy (oil and gas) to new ones in the digital space. You see, oil and gas has had a tough time the last few years, and while it is on an upswing now, its long term trajectory for career growth pales in comparison to the digital space. It’s time to learn and adapt.
The cool thing about learning new ideas to thrive in the digital space is that many of those ideas are not new at all. They’ve existed for a long time. Yes, in some cases there are new tools that let us do things in miraculous new ways that need a whole new approach (like social media marketing). In some cases, they’re described by new words, and in other cases they’ve simply been repackaged with incremental changes. Unlike students learning something for the first time, our prior career and educational experiences prepare us well for adopting these new concepts that aren’t really new at all.
So that brings me to the concept of Design Thinking.
Ooh, isn’t that a grand design? So elegant, so pretty. That’s what I originally thought a designer was — someone primarily focused on aesthetics. As we jumped into the material, I quickly realized how wrong I was. My concept missed the mark, but my understanding of design thinking was pretty close to its current incarnation. I just never called it that.
Today’s design thinking to me was really the process of invention. In the past we thought of the great heroes of invention like Thomas Edison (light bulb), Alexander Graham Bell (telephone), or Nikola Tesla (alternating current). Yes, they had teams around them but we often consider them to have been the individual heroes.
Today, technology has advanced and become so accessible and so democratized that anyone with an idea can find a way to advance it. At the same time technology has become so complicated and interconnected that success can come only when we gather a team of diverse thinkers with different experiences and skill sets to come together and hash out the thinking to make the initial inspired thought into something real.
“Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration” — Thomas Edison
Today, we consider design thinking to be made up of three parts: Inspiration, Ideation, and Implementation. It’s not a process, since there is no linear path that connects the three ideas. All the way along one tests, and iterates, and evolves. It’s a lot of sweat.
Inspiration is what it always has been. That spark, that aha!, that “Eureka” moment. It is also much simpler. It can be the observation that a problem exists and that there might be a better way to do it. It can be the realization that an opportunity exists where no one has seen it before.
With that spark in hand, you gather people around and ideate. That was a new word for me. I always called it brainstorming. Tomato, tomahto.
You keep your goal in mind for what that spark represents and then you throw out every crazy idea that helps make that spark better. Eventually, you iterate and filter those ideas to find solutions that meet at the nexus of desirability, feasibility, and viability (IDEO U, 2018). I thought that was a pretty cool way to think about it.
Now, you need to build it. You need to implement it. You develop a prototype.
“The first draft of anything is shit” — Ernest Hemingway
The Oxford Learners Dictionaries defines prototype as: the first design of something from which other forms are copied or developed. A prototype is often fully functional but before that you can start much simpler.
You’re going to iterate and evolve that idea many times. So, before you build anything — physical or digital — you want to find the cheapest initial way to get your idea across. That means sketching. As an engineer that went to school in the dark ages, one of the first things we learned to do was sketch complex objects by hand with a pencil. This was quick, easy, and cheap. You needed a good idea of dimensions and materials before you built it in the shop. Now, Google offers videos on how to do rapid prototyping using the same ideas. It’s not new, but it is more colourful.
Now, beyond the concept of the three phases is the philosophy of where to place design thinking in the human experience. This concept was new to me, but also so incredibly obvious I don’t know how I didn’t think of it on my own. Design thinking must be “human centred”, or more broadly “humanity centred”. The concept is simple if you’re solving a problem to make a person’s life simpler, you need to understand that person’s experiences. “This also includes articulated, unmet, and unknown needs.” (Hans, 2022)
Learning the modern take on design thinking taught me something I knew all along, but has made me look at in a way I never had before.
References:
IDEO U, “What is design thinking,” IDEO U, December 5, 2018, YouTube video, 1:54, https://youtu.be/ldYzbV0NDp8.
Hans K. Lecture notes, Module 3 — Human Centred Design, Course COR 628–001 — Design Thinking, University of Calgary, June 2022, https://d2l.ucalgary.ca/d2l/le/content/458280/Home
