How we use Design Thinking as a Framework and a Guiding Principle | Part I: The Design Challenge
It’s up to you if you consider Design Thinking as nonsense or not. Whatever you might think: Design Thinking addresses our ability to collaborate with others and grow together as a team within shortest time.
Today, we will share some insights on how we apply Design Thinking to organize our innovation process, focusing on the Design Challenge.
But first things first:
Design Thinking — Method, Tool, or Mindset?
Design Thinking is a method of innovation management. The application of this method supports you and your team in developing new ideas for business models, services, products, software solutions, and processes oriented toward your customers’ needs.
Change of perspective, responsiveness, creativity, and empathy for your team members and your customers are in the foreground — so: your attitude matters too!
The Co-Fathers of Design Thinking
The computer scientist Terry Winograd and Larry Leifer (Stanford University), and David Kelley, the later founder of the design and innovation agency IDEO in Palo Alto, modified the approach originating from the 1960s and developed the process further. Research and implementation of this concept are supported by the Hasso Plattner Institute within the framework of the d.school in Potsdam.
The Design Thinking Process
Design Thinking is an iterative process divided into six phases:
In the first three phases (Understand, Observe, and define the Point of View), you deal intensively with the so-called Design Challenge — the problem to be solved and approach the actual needs of potential users and customers.
As a problem expert, you move into the so-called solution space (Ideate, Prototype, Test): Brainstorming, you collect manifold ideas for solving the problem and evaluating and prioritizing them.
From the prioritized idea, you then develop a prototype in concepts, wireframes, models made of cardboard or Lego, customer journeys, or role-plays. Your customers then test the prototype, and the feedback flows into the iteration process.
And in the very beginning, there is the Design Challenge.
The Design Challenge
The Design Challenge is the problem our client faces — reframed to a question.
One of my favorite writers — Warren Berger, author of ‘A More Beautiful Question’ — researched how designers, inventors, and engineers come up with ideas and solve problems. He conducted interviews with the world’s leading innovators. He found one common denominator: ‘For some of them, their greatest successes — their breakthrough inventions (…) could be traced to a question (or a series of questions) they’d formulated and then answered.’
How to create the right question
A Design Challenge should neither be too broad nor too narrow. The Goldilock Principle helps us to define these questions, which ideally are not too systemic and abstract nor too specific and therefore uninspiring.
Design Challenge Examples from the QLab
How might we…
… support the Utility Provider of the City of Verden to be positioned in the future to meet the climate goals and ensure a climate-neutral energy supply for their citizens?
… support companies in the German Photovoltaic sector in boosting their business operations to increase the speed of energy transition?
… we monetize AWATREE’s business model to create a scalable way to save a million city trees through data?
… contribute to the sustainability of construction projects through agile ways of working?
… bring the topic of e-fuels to the public in a thoughtful, transparent, and winning way?
These were the Design Challenges we tackled for our clients in the last months, which enabled us to find manifold ideas for solutions.
The Design Challenge as a Guiding Principle
The Design Challenge is not only the compact version of our client’s briefing or a hypothesis but the baseline for a common approach and our guiding star throughout our five-week QLab Design Sprint.
The Design Challenge not only addresses the problem but the stakeholders and the aim we would like to achieve.
Phase 1 — Understand
To help us create a shared vision, we dissect the Design Challenge in the next step, the starting point of the Design Thinking Process Phase 1 — Understand.
Firstly, the team members individually collect their thoughts, research results, information, and ideas on post-its focussing on the highlighted components of the Design Challenge. (Let’s make it precise using our latest question.)
How might we support the Utility Provider of the City of Verden to be positioned in the future to meet the climate goals and ensure a climate-neutral energy supply for their citizens?
- What kind of entity is the Utility Provider?
- What do we know about the City of Verden?
- How do we define future?
- What are the Climate Goals?
- What is a climate-neutral energy supply?
- Who are the citizens?
You might sense it; the answers are manifold!
Within the shortest time, we generate valuable insights. When consolidating our work, we start to build a shared vision, we detect differences in our approaches, we share our knowledge and ideas, and as we discuss, we create even more questions. (Each question is the door to a New World!). This approach helps us step into our co-workers' shoes and create empathy — essential ingredients to initiate a successful Design Thinking Process.
We gather as much information as possible. We make assumptions, which we need to check with even more desktop research. Most of all, in interviews and observations, interventions are crucial to developing a user-centered mind.
Phase 2 of the Design Thinking Process — Observe, I will introduce to you in my next article. Stay tuned and subscribe not to miss it!
Andrea Kuhfuss, Co-Founder and CEO of QLab Think Tank GmbH
