Design Thinking: Innovation and Beyond with Sourav Sarkar
Every designer aims to craft products or experiences that cater to the evolving and expanding market. But to deliver well-rounded products and consistent experiences to such a diverse audience, designers need a thorough understanding of the market backed with solid customer research. It can provide crucial insights into the real-world problems faced by the users, which can help create inclusive and innovative products. So how can designers develop a customer-centric design thinking and problem-solving approach?
In the 67th episode, we interact with Sourav Sarkar, Head of Design at Airtel, to know more about this theme. With over a decade of experience leading and managing design teams and delivering innovative solutions, a large part of his work revolves around dealing with internal teams and the end customers. Along with accessible leadership and a customer-centric design thinking approach, he also holds expertise in user-centered design, interaction design, user interface design, and much more. Let’s know more about his journey and experience in the latest episode of “Avantika Designeering Series Podcast,” “Design Thinking: Innovation and Beyond.”
Rohit Lalwani: Collaboration, insight, issue solving, construction, and testing based on human-centered design may be used to summarize design thinking. The influence of design thinking is more of a mentality than a process. It is not necessarily about trying something entirely new but it is about doing things in a way that works best for you. Could you break the ice by explaining how can designers adapt and induce this approach in their design journey?
Sourav: Design thinking is a lot about questioning any assumptions and biases but getting close to whom you are designing for, and by using that knowledge, you reframe the problem, test the solutions early, and then you iterate on it. Before we jump to this question it is important to understand that most people know the Hasso Plattner Institute of design, a model of design thinking which is something that we lovingly call empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. Interestingly, it is very important that understanding each of these verbs is key to design thinking and not necessarily the sequence because each of them separately is a skill that designers must learn and get fluent in. It is not necessarily linear and they do not need to follow this specific order. They can often occur in parallel and they will repeat iteratively. Therefore, this is a very important thing that designers and especially starters need to understand. It is not necessarily a linear process, at the end of the day, design thinking is a tool, it is a framework that provides a human-centered way of solving problems. Since it gives such desirable results, in most cases, not only designers but all great innovators in literature, art, science, engineering, business, etc, have practiced it. It is a tool for innovation.
Innovation does not necessarily need only to be revolutionary, it can also be evolutionary.
It is useful in tackling problems that are not only new, unknown or ill-defined, but also existing or seemingly well-defined. Robert Ford, for an instance, said, if I were to ask my customers, what would they rather have? They would say we need faster horses and that beautifully goes ahead to say how an existing predisposition might actually be argued and attribute it to design thinking.
Rohit Lalwani: It is exciting to see nowadays that data is the new oil, but we have to consider why the statement appears to be true because, without the right usage of data, it is completely useless. A design is regarded as a good design when it is goal-oriented and based on insight from data and not random guesswork. I wish to know how can designers use data to drive discussions to solve disagreements as a product team and evaluate quantitative and qualitative data?
Sourav: Airtel data is our oil and our network for us, and today the total customer base that we use is about six-hundred billion-plus. If looked at we deal with two-hundred and eighty million-plus digital identities and they are almost about 1 billion-plus touchpoints captured every single day on Airtel properties and this leads to a look at 10 billion-plus customer attributes captured daily. We have about 5 billion-plus worth of daily transactions. The reason I am telling this is that it is so easy to get bogged down by all of this. Data is a tool and like most tools, it can be manipulated. Speaking about the usage of data, let me break this down into two parts because for design, we need to balance data and creativity. The first point is on how to use data. Definitely, it is a truth when we say what gets measured gets done.
When you bring numbers, you end up speaking the vernacular of the apparent decision-makers whether it would be the business, your clients, product managers, business analysts, etc, and you will often find more meaning if you see your solutions provide tangible outcomes that are represented through numbers because no one disputes numbers.
However, it is easy to get dragged down into analysis, paralysis, and vanity metrics. You got to ask if a particular thing that you are measuring, a particular metric, whether it can lead to a course of action or inform a decision, that is the kind of thing you want to really measure, that is where your data is really helpful. If it is not, get an actionable metric to work on. Focus on tangible observations. Qualitative data is useful and very often gives you the ‘What’, but it is only through qualitative observation that you would be able to find out the real ‘Why’ behind it. Therefore, this was the first part on how to use data. Designers are an interesting breed, usage of left and right brain, science, humanities. We are at the cusp of the two. For designers, it is important to balance data with creativity and we often as designers tend to over-index on data, and death by data is actually quite real because most designers will try too hard to incorporate data. Use it, but then go beyond it, talk to the people.
In design, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. You have to be in close touch with the people you are designing for and data cannot compensate for that.
Rohit Lalwani: At Avantika University we follow this philosophy of coaching the next breed of talent on the team on the philosophy of ‘Designeering’ which is the blended approach of design and engineering. What is your view on this philosophy? Do you think it is an interesting value proposition out there? Do you think both these worlds actually merge or converge at a common point?
Sourav: That is a beautiful portmanteau of the two words. But more than just the word itself I like what you are trying to do there. You are trying to build or rather take the design aspect and put more implementation perspective of engineering to it and make sure that it becomes tangible. If we look at the movements that have been going on, the whole makers’ movement, if we might want to talk about it, it is not just about conceptualizing, but also creating. That is where the term engineering comes from Engenia means cleverness or contrive to the device. I believe you are on the right path, but the deeper meaning of this is not just to think, not just to conceptualize, but to bring it to function and reality. No design is done until it is been tested and consumed and has given some sort of outcome.
Our speaker Mr. Sarkar has given us deeper insights into the fields of design. To know more, head onto our full Podcast episode. For more details, do visit our profile.
