Stages of design thinking => Design Thinking — Day 12
1.0 Recap
Yesterday, I wrote about what I learned from watching David Kelley videos talking about design thinking. I also shared links to these videos, hope you find it useful. You can check it out here.
2.0 Five stages of design thinking
Today, I studied about the stages of design thinking. Earlier on, I mentioned some of these stages in Day 002. These stages of design thinking allow one to solve any complex or wicked problem. The past few days we have talked a lot about wicked problems and their characteristics.
The five stages include: Empathy, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Testing
2.1 Empathy
This stage of design thinking has to do with gaining understanding around the problem you are developing a solution for. Lots of research and talking to people concerned are done here. Also, you need to engage and interact with people, their environment to truly understand their feelings towards that problem.
In the empathy stage, a designer needs to put aside whatever assumptions he/she has in order to see the problem through the eye of the people.
2.2 Define
This stage is usually done after information and insights are gotten from research. Here, you are able to define the problem in a problem statement manner that is usually understandable by both your team and stakeholders involved.
When you define the problem using information gotten from the problem research, you and your team are able to know which features are needed when creating the problem solution.
2.3 Ideate
The ideate stage is like the heart of design thinking. This is where innovative thinking or outside the box thinking comes into play. After gathering information from research and interacting with people affected by the problem(Empathy) and then creating a Human-Centered problem statement(Define), the next stage being ideate has to do with developing ideas based on the problem statement. There are some ideation techniques you might want to check out. I didn’t do much reading on these techniques.
2.4 Prototype
A Prototype is equal to experiment. This stage has to do with testing the creative solution internally within the team, usually people outside the design team. At the end of this stage, the design team will have a better understanding of the solution they came up with.
2.5 Testing
This is the last stage of design thinking. This is where regression and rigorous testing is done on the completed product. You need to take into account how people use your products and gain insights from it through this phase.
3.0 Resources
The best way to learn is by asking questions and letting people know how you understand the topic. Feel free to leave a comment, we will definitely learn from it 🙂.
