What is Design Thinking?
Today I want to give you a first insight into the topic of Design Thinking, which at the same time lays the basis for all future articles. In later articles, you will learn more about the topics of Design Thinking Methods, Innovation, Design Process, User Experience, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and User-Centered Design.
- Historical
- Preconceptions
- The design thinking process
- Closing word
Historical
Thomas Alva Edison already said in the 18th century: “fail early and often”. He found 10,000 ways to fail before he finally lit the first light bulb — and that made him one of the pioneers of today’s “design thinking” and user experience.
It wasn’t until much later — in 1991 — that the term Design Thinking was coined by Bill Moggridge, one of the co-founders of IDEO. In 2005 the first D-School was started by David Kelley (another co-founder of IDEO), Terry Winograd, and Larry Leifer as an experiment with 20 students. A little later, SAP founder Hasso Plattner joined them and supported the venture with 13 million dollars. In 2007 he founded the second D-School in Potsdam.
It is hard to imagine that design thinking is offered by many universities and institutes around the world — it forms the basis for innovative ideas. It is used by many large companies in the digital industry. The best known include Google, Microsoft, Apple, and SAP.
What is Design Thinking?
Design thinking focuses on technology, business and people. Design Thinking creates an interdisciplinary connection with a wide variety of ideas and methods from different areas and cultures. These unique connections are intended to create new, unconventional ideas and innovations. Design thinking is therefore based on the fact that you can only generate new and exciting ideas together in a diversified group.
Furthermore, it helps us to direct and structure our own thinking and that of our surroundings. In an upcoming post I will also go into more detail on the so-called design process, which should help us to approach tasks and possible projects in a structured manner.
Preconceptions
“Some people say: You can’t be creative in a team”
Many studies support this prejudice. Therefore, the careful planning of a suitable design thinking workshop takes a lot of time. Despite good planning, you notice that it somehow always ends in a dead-end. It can help ask the participants or other workshop leaders about the possible causes. You can do this directly after the workshop or with the help of an anonymized questionnaire — services such as Google Docs or Microsoft Forms can be beneficial here. If you participate in such a workshop, open feedback is always the best solution to improve the quality of the workshop in the long term.
“Nice marketing idea to sell workshops, but otherwise just hot air?”
A workshop will not help you live a design culture. Instead, most workshops should give the participants an insight into so-called design thinking. Ideally, you can take enough from such a workshop to strive for the necessary processes or changes in yourself or your environment. So if you take part in a workshop, it is crucial to find out what this workshop is about precisely. Is it about getting to know Design Thinking, or is it a workshop on a specific problem? In any case, you shouldn’t reduce Design Thinking to workshops because Design Thinking describes a culture that needs to be lived rather than an activity.
“Back then, users would certainly not have wanted iTunes, iPod or iPad …”
That’s true. The ideas probably would not have come from the user himself. That is why it is essential for you as a designer to look behind the user’s statements. Because users don’t always know what they want, they try to explain what it is to you as best they can. Your job as a designer is to determine whether this is really the core of the problem or just a side effect.
The Design-Thinking-Process
Subconsciously, you will have already established a process for yourself that will help you direct your creativity in an orderly manner without you having actively realized it. The design process always follows a fixed pattern consisting of Understanding, generating ideas, and testing. One of the most famous versions of this process looks like this:
The individual components can vary. It is essential to acknowledge that the process is not necessarily linear or viewed from A to B. You can jump back and forth within the process at any time and make changes depending on the project.
In theory, the six building blocks are correct — in practice, however, the biggest mistake lies in the form of representation often used. The design thinking process is not a yellow brick road at the end of which the ultimate solution is waiting for you. Instead, the design thinking process is a journey in which you decide where to start and which adventures you want to experience.
The design thinking process is an exciting topic. And that’s why: Please check back next week when more articles on the subject of Design Process go online!
Closing word
Design thinking is not a miracle. Instead, it is a logical construct of various modules that should help you turn ideas into solutions. Design Thinking is an ideology that should be lived holistically by companies and designers. It’s not about a single workshop. It’s about a change in company culture.
Do you have any questions or comments? Just leave me a comment.
