Design… cooking?
Does anybody have thought that the million-dollar idea will get to us by looking to the sky and wait? That ideas shouldn’t be hard to develop, that no guide or process should be needed? But also… does anybody have had that feeling when… cooking? And what happened? Usually, it’s not that easy to generate the perfect solution… or to cook a meal and at that’s the moment where Design Thinking fits perfectly.
“Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.”
Tim Brown, Executive Chair of IDEO
Every great idea is nothing without a spark, and that spark would quickly burn out without something to feed it, in this case, a creative process. Yeah, yeah, yeah… Ideas, processes, but Eder, you haven’t mentioned how Design Thinking relates to cooking and every other daily process! Alright, alright, let me introduce a little bit of myself and my connection with both worlds; I’ve been working as a UI/UX Designer for the last 5 years and have been an amateur Chef since I was young. In that time, I have found that Design Thinking and the cooking process have a lot in common.
From that experience, I can tell that both activities follow a methodic process, in other words… a recipe; but why is it important to follow a recipe? According to Sam Sifton, a food editor for the New York Times, you’ll experience cooking differently than if you simply shrug and omit ingredients or change their use based on your experience or whim. This doesn’t mean you have to follow it to the letter, but if you are not the most experienced chef or designer, it’s really useful to use as a guide. Put yourself in the shoes of the recipe’s creator and you’ll learn something every time.
Another good example is the first stage of the design thinking process, which asks us to empathize with the user. This can be done through interviews, surveys, and other tools to understand our users’ final behaviors, preferences, and pain points. This is what I do when I cook for friends and family… I ask them what flavors they like, if they have allergies, or if they have a specific budget, so we can make a special dinner.
Let’s imagine that you want to smoke a big piece of brisket, that means that by this time you already have a nice smoker, you have a good amount of free time considering that this task can take you 12 hours (or more), that you have previous knowledge of how to set the fire and temperature in a good spot, the weather, and many other implications; this stage could be named as “Define”.
After gathering all this information, you might still have some minor issues like probably you don’t have all that time available, or maybe there is a rain probability, so you must start solving those problems by putting into work your creativity, making decisions, and prioritizing; here we are in the Ideation stage.
If it is your first time cooking this big amount of meat you might be kind of nervous, and you don’t want to ruin that nice brisket, the same thing happens in the technology world, where we create a prototype, which is an early sample or model test a concept or process, in cooking terms, you can cook a smaller sample, that way you can build your confidence when you finally cook it for real.
Perfection (if it exists) is an iterative process, and Design Thinking and a Cooking Recipe have a stage for try and failure. It is the testing, which means we must try our recipe several times before, so we can make it better each time that we cook it, and with these iterations, we can create a dish that we can serve proudly to our friends, family, or even our costumer.
But you know what the best part is of following this process? It is flexible! It adapts to every project or living area, and we may use the tools that fit better to solve any life problem. So even if you are an experienced designer or chef, don’t forget to put this to work when you’re designing an e-commerce website, cooking a carbonara pasta, or any other daily activity, to follow a recipe will help you to find the most effective solution.
Takeaways:
- Recipes are the knowledge of experienced and successful creators, follow them!
- In every creative process, it is important to understand the final user, their goals, and their needs.
- Once you understood and have used the recipe several times, you will be able to adapt it to your needs and goals
Illustrations by Ana Landero
