Design Thinking Is Not A

Process
It's A Mindset
How is a Mindset Different From a Process ?
A mindset is based on experience and teaching.

Vs

A process is purely based on teaching.

You cannot successfully follow a mindset because someone taught you the rules but you can
successfully follow a process after being taught the rules.

Acquiring a mindset requires to understand the Why of all the things the other carriers of said
mindset do. In the case of a process understanding why you do something is not really important.
You can still use it and be successful.

A mindset will grow stronger and become more and you will defend it more and more once you
make enough positive experiences of applying it. That is when a mindset starts to morph into a
belief. A process is easily abandoned. After all it is just a bunch of rules to follow and after
changing employers you can quickly learn to deal with a new set of rules.

What is Design Thinking Mindset ?

Design Mindsets are the lenses that we wear to be more creative, user-centered, and agile.

Design mindsets are about how we can work, and how we can tackle problems.
These three principles can be your lodestars as you navigate the design process to create
something new, innovative, and successful.

 Be user-centered. Do things and provide things that your intended audience can use, that
are useful to them, and that they want to use. Be experimental. Open yourself to new
ways of doing things, and trying them in quick and thoughtful ways to see
 if they work.
 Be intentional in how you operate. Be conscious of what kind of process you are using,
what space you’re in, what might be going wrong, and what might be made better. Be
ready to change and adapt to make for better outcomes.
Qualitites You Need To Get Design Thinking Mindset:
1. Be curious and observe

2. Create and harbor empathy

3. Don’t just optimize- challenge to innovate

4. Consider the big picture.

Lets go through ever point clearly-

1. Be curious and observe -

If you look deep into design thinking, you will see that it is actually all about being curious. It’s
about being a keen observer of things around you. You need to be curious about why things are
the way they are, why things don’t work, or why people behave the way they do.

Once you nurture the mindset of being curious, you let go of judgment, and seek to better
understand everything around you. Being observant is about paying attention to the finer details.
It is not just looking at things looking underneath the top layer is what you need to learn.

Observation and curiosity go hand in hand- ask questions when you start assuming, and seek to
understand what you don’t know. Curiosity will ultimately lead you to gain empathy for both the
people and systems in place, help you connect with individuals and deepen relationships, and see
problems from new perspectives.

2. Create and harbor empathy -

The next important thing that follows curiosity is empathy. When you are designing
products/solutions for someone else, the biggest challenge is to understand the people you are
designing for. We often take users for granted, or worse, we tend to assume how they experience
the world. We think that they experience it as we do and that is where we go wrong. The key is
to get an understanding of user’s mental models, and how the world looks from their perspective.
This is where empathy comes in handy to understand how they think, feel, and behave every day,
especially in environments and situations that relate to your product or service.
How, and most importantly, why do they feel and behave the way they do? Empathy allows you
to understand this. So, how do you gain empathy and get those insights? The best way to gain
empathy is by engaging directly with the people. Methods such as co-design sessions,
ethnography/user research, and interviews can help you uncover how and why they see any value
in your product. All this information put in an experience map is the way where you can analyze
digital behavior, and it can help you understand how people behave, as well as what they might
expect from your product or service.

3. Don’t just optimize- challenge to innovate

There is always a first time for everything. It is applicable to all of us. Henry Ford once said, “If
I asked what people wanted, they would say faster horses.” Or like Steve Jobs said: “Often
people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” Before the iPhone, we simply did
not know how to use a phone without a dial pad. Every day, we make assumptions based on
previous experiences, and a lot of those are based on a ton of experiences, are more or less
accurate, and also help lower our cognitive load. However, when solving problems in new and
innovative ways, a designer must challenge assumptions and constraints that are often
unconscious.

The assumptions of what you can and cannot do, how it’s done today, unwritten rules you set up
for yourself, and so on. Challenging your assumptions helps you challenge the status quo, and
ask: “How can this be done better?” What we call a “problem” is often more a symptom of an
underlying cause. When we dive in too quickly to fix a symptom, the effect will eventually come
back or happen again. Instead, we need to address the cause to create a more permanent change.
Innovation happens when the inspiration comes from the underlying cause.

4. Consider the big picture -

Design is about understanding the little details about the users we are designing for; however, the
big picture is just as important Your users are part of many technological and social systems that
already have a significant impact on their belief systems and mental models. So, looking at the
bigger picture means you consider how these systems in play will influence the innovation, and
how the innovation will influence these systems.

We need to keep in mind that customers don’t use your product merely for the sake of using it,
but for the value it provides. When you focus on the bigger picture, you focus on the value, you
focus on the why- and that will allow you to make better and more relevant decisions around the
things you design. Focusing on the value enables you to create something that customers want to
pay for, share, and come back for. By keeping the big picture in mind, we can better set the right
constraints, tap into the right values with solutions that fit in seamlessly and make an effort not to
create new problems when solving the current.

Conclusion :

I believe designing anything new starts with a mindset. One we shouldn’t confine to business
context, but in everything we do –family, relationships, culture, politics, society - we need to
have a positive impact to create change. If more of us got a little better being empathetic and
curious, we could also get better at providing value in other people’s lives.

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