DESIGN THINKING

Chapter One:
Introduction to Design Thinking
Design thinking is a way of reframing everyday projects and problems, the design thinking process
is an interaction among design intents, operations, and justifications. It is different from critical
thinking in that design thinking is process-oriented while critical thinking is judgment-oriented. In
design, the solution is not the interaction of data or the process of calculations; the solution is a
creative assemblage of variables.

Definition of Design Thinking

Design thinking is an ideology supported by an accompanying process that asserts a hands-on and
user-centric approach to problem-solving that can lead to innovation differentiation and a
competitive advantage. The design-thinking framework follows an overall flow of 1)
understanding, 2) explore, and 3) materialize. Within these larger buckets fall the 6 phases:
empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test, and implement.

Empathize
Research to develop knowledge about what your users do, say, think, and feel.
Imagine your goal is to improve an onboarding experience for new users. In this phase, you talk
to a range of actual users. Directly observe what they do, how they think, and what they want,
asking yourself things like ‘What motivates or discourages users?’ or ‘Where do they experience
frustration?’ The goal is to gather enough observations that you can truly begin to empathize with
your users and their perspectives. Thinking about how to design with users and not for users.

Define
Combine all your research and observe where your users’ problems exist. While pinpointing
your users’ needs, begin to highlight opportunities for innovation.
Consider the onboarding example again. In the define phase, use the data gathered in the empathize
phase to glean insights. Organize all your observations and draw parallels across your users’

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current experiences. Is there a common pain point across many different users? Identify unmet
user needs.

Ideate
Brainstorm a range of crazy, creative ideas that address the unmet user needs identified in the
define phase. Give yourself and your team total freedom; no idea is too farfetched and quantity
supersedes quality. At this phase, bring your team members together and sketch out many different
ideas. Then, have them share ideas, mixing and remixing, building on others' ideas.

Prototype
Build real, tactile representations for a subset of your ideas. The goal of this phase is to understand
what components of your ideas work, and which do not. In this phase, you begin to weigh the
impact vs. feasibility of your ideas through feedback on your prototypes. Make your ideas tactile.
If it is a new landing page, draw out a wireframe and get feedback internally. Change it based on
feedback, then prototype it again in quick and dirty code. Then, share it with another group of
people.

Test
Return to your users for feedback. Ask yourself ‘Does this solution meet users’ needs?’ and ‘Has
it improved how they feel, think, or do their tasks?’ Put your prototype in front of real
customers and verify that it achieves your goals. Has the users’ perspective during onboarding
improved? Does the new landing page increase the time or money spent on your site? As you are
executing your vision, continue to test along the way.

Implement
Put the vision into effect. Ensure that your solution is materialized and touches the lives of your
end users. This is the most important part of design thinking, but it is the one most often
forgotten. As Don Norman preaches, “we need more design doing.” Design thinking does not free
you from the actual design doing. It’s not magic.

Importance of Design Thinking

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 There are numerous reasons to engage in design thinking, enough to merit a standalone article, but
in summary, design thinking achieves all these advantages at the same time.
Design thinking:
• Is a user-centered process that starts with user data, creates design artifacts that address real
and not imaginary user needs, and then tests those artifacts with real users
• Leverages collective expertise and establishes a shared language, as well as buy-in amongst your
team
• Encourages innovation by exploring multiple avenues for the same problem

History of Design Thinking

It is a common misconception that design thinking is new. Design has been practiced for ages:
monuments, bridges, automobiles, and subway systems are all end-products of design processes.
Throughout history, good designers have applied a human-centric creative process to build meaningful and
effective solutions.
In the early 1900 husband and wife designers Charles and Ray Eames practiced “learning by doing,”
exploring a range of needs and constraints before designing their Eames chairs, which continue to be in
production even now, seventy years later. 1960s dressmaker Jean Muir was well known for her “common
sense” approach to clothing design, placing as much emphasis on how her clothes felt to wear as they looked
to others. These designers were innovators of their time. Their approaches can be viewed as early examples
of design thinking — as they each developed a deep understanding of their users’ lives and unmet needs.
Milton Glaser, the designer behind the famous I ♥ NY logo, describes this notion well: “We’re always
looking, but we never really see…it’s the act of attention that allows you to grasp something, to become
fully conscious of it.”
Despite these (and other) early examples of human-centric products, design has historically been an
afterthought in the business world, applied only to touch up a product’s aesthetics. This topical design
application has resulted in corporations creating solutions that fail to meet their customers’ real needs.
Consequently, some of these companies moved their designers from the end of the product development
process, where their contribution is limited, to the beginning. Their human-centric design approach proved
to be a differentiator: those companies that used it have reaped the financial benefits of creating products
shaped by human needs.
For this approach to be adopted across large organizations, it needed to be standardized. Cue design
thinking, a formalized framework for applying the creative design process to traditional business problems.

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The specific term "design thinking" was coined in the 1990s by David Kelley and Tim Brown of IDEO,
with Roger Martin, and encapsulated methods and ideas that have been brewing for years into a single
unified concept.

Chapter Two:
Design Thinking Model
Based on (Archer, 1984; Cross, 1990; McDonnell, 1997; and Blanco, 1985), the following model
of the design thinking process has been developed. The model consists of three phases: the
analytical phase or clarifying the task, the creative phase, or searching for concepts and the
executive phase, or searching for solutions. The first phase depends on objective observation and
inductive reasoning, while the second phase depends on subjective judgment and deductive
reasoning. Each phase has many steps which are not linear and can be repeated.

The first phase is the analytical phase, in this phase, the designer’s first focus is on becoming aware
of peoples’ needs and developing insights. Awareness of needs and pressures leads to the
development of constraints and obstacles to the design, which in addition to the designer`s
observations can help in formulating the initial design problem. The clarification of goals or
strategies can crystallize the problem`s formulation. So in this phase, the designer makes his
observations of the needs, and he collects and analyzes the related data. Then after studying the
requirements and constraints, he identifies the goals to formulate the design problem which
explains how can the designer start from his observation of people's needs and other factors to
reach the initial design problem.

The second phase is the creative phase; it is the longest and most complicated one because it aims
to understand the problem and shape the conjectured solution. Three intersected, correlated, and
overlapped steps exist in this phase, they are problem formulation, creative leap, and concept.
Designers can use the role of the conjectured solution as a way of gaining an understanding of the
design problem. So in this phase, the designer starts to formulate the design problem, the
designer`s very early conceptualizations and representations of the problem are critical to the
procedure that will be followed.

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After the designer has formulated the design problem, he starts looking for a solution, so he needs
the creative leap, which is the real crux of the act of designing, it is a bridging concept between
the problem and solution which synthesizes and resolves a variety of goals and constraints. The
creative leap distinguishes design from certain other problem-solving activities. The process of
creative problem-solving consists of four stages, which are preparation, incubation, illumination,
and verification.

The last step in this phase is developing the design concept, which is the result of traveling from
the given data and requirements to the solution. The designer searches for a solution to the problem
by examining all kinds of analogies, experience, simulation, and deductive reasoning. The design
concept can be reached by the creative leap, philosophy, and personal taste, and by prescription
between the formulation of the idea and its embodiment. These three steps (problem formulation,
creative leap, and concept) will continue in feeding back on each other until the designer
formulates and understands the design problem, and until he shapes the conjectured solution.

The third and last phase of the design thinking process is the executive phase which is looking for
solutions and alternatives evaluation. The designer in this phase has to designate sub-problems,
arrange factors, and solve each one, and then by ranking the ordering list he can reach a
compounded solution. The initial solution will help in reshaping the design problem to the final
statement (framework) because the design problem and solution are developing together in parallel
ways, so what you need to know about the problem only becomes apparent as you`re trying to
solve it. After deciding the general form of the solution, the designer should suggest several
alternatives. Each alternative should define the design`s problem, should analyze the design`s data,
and should have a creative leap from pondering the question to finding the solution.

Evaluation of alternatives during design involves testing the fit of a design alternative with the
design problem as it is currently framed. Evaluation of design alternatives brings different aspects
of the design situation into focus; alternatives can lead to new descriptions of the problem. The
selection of one alternative as a final solution can be reached by evaluation and estimation of the
extent to which the solution solves the problem. The final steps in this phase are design

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justification, development, and implementation followed by post-occupancy evaluation which can
be a source of feeding back the whole model from the beginning.

Chapter Three:
Design As A Discipline
‘Design in general education’ is a value and not an instrumental. Design develops innate abilities
in solving real-world, ill-defined problems. Design sustains cognitive development in the
concrete/iconic modes of cognition. Design offers opportunities for the development of a wide
range of abilities in nonverbal thought and communication. In the field of design, there is research
about the way designers work and think, and the kinds of problems they tackle. There are five
aspects of designed ways of knowing:

• Designers tackle ‘ill-defined’ problems.

• Their mode of problem-solving is ‘solution-focused’.
• Their mode of thinking is ‘constructive’.
• They use ‘codes’ that translate abstract requirements into concrete objects.
• They use these codes to both ‘read’ and ‘write’ in ‘object languages’.

The research path to design as a discipline has concentrated on understanding those general
features of design activity that are common to all the design professions: it has been concerned
with ‘design in general’ and it now allows us to generalize at least a little about the designed ways
of knowing. The education path to design as a discipline has also been concerned with ‘design in
general’, and it has led us to consider what it is that can be generalized as of intrinsic value in
learning to design. Both the research and the education paths, then, have been concerned with
developing the general subject of design. However, there is still a long way to go before we can
begin to have much sense of having achieved a real understanding of design as a discipline – we
have only begun to make rough maps of the territory.

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Design‘ stretch the mind’, and ideally this involves a progression from step to step, some discipline
of thought to be acquired in more or less specifiable components, reflected in a growing
achievement of the pupil that both he and his teacher can recognize with some confidence. At
present, there does not seem to be enough understanding, enough scholarly work on design, and
enough material of a suitable nature to make such teaching possible. I believe we should strive to
remedy this state of affairs.

The education path to design as a discipline forces us to consider the nature of this general subject
of design, what it is that we are seeking to develop in the individual student, and how this
development can be structured for learning. Like our colleagues in the sciences and the humanities,
we can at this point legitimately conclude that further research is needed! We need more research
and inquiry: first into the designedly ways of knowing; second into the scope, limits, and nature
of innate cognitive abilities relevant to design; and third into the ways of enhancing and developing
these abilities through education. In this way, both design research and design education can
develop a common approach to design as a discipline.

Design Thinking Philosophy

Coming up with an idea is easy. Coming up with the right one takes work. With design thinking,
throwing out what you think you know and starting from scratch opens up all kinds of possibilities.

Design thinking is an innovative problem-solving process rooted in a set of skills. The approach
has been around for decades, but it only started gaining traction outside of the design community
after the 2008 Harvard Business Review article [subscription required] titled “Design Thinking”
by Tim Brown, CEO and president of design company IDEO.

Since then, the design thinking process has been applied to developing new products and services,
and to a whole range of problems, from creating a business model for selling solar panels in Africa
to the operation of Airbnb.

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At a high level, the steps involved in the design thinking process are simple: first, fully understand
the problem; second, explore a wide range of possible solutions; third, iterate extensively through
prototyping and testing; and finally, implement through the customary deployment mechanisms.

The skills associated with these Steps help people apply creativity to effectively solve real-world
problems better than they otherwise would. They can be readily learned, but take effort. For
instance, when trying to understand a problem, setting aside your own preconceptions is vital, but
it’s hard.

Creative brainstorming is necessary for developing possible solutions, but many people don’t do
it particularly well. And throughout the process it is critical to engage in modeling, analysis,
prototyping, and testing, and to really learn from these many iterations.

Once you master the skills central to the design thinking approach, they can be applied to solve
problems in daily life and any industry.

Here’s what you need to know to get started.

Understand the problem
The first step in design thinking is to understand the problem you are trying to solve before
searching for solutions. Sometimes, the problem you need to address is not the one you originally
set out to tackle.

“Most people don’t make much of an effort to explore the problem space before exploring the
solution space,” said MIT Sloan professor Steve Eppinger. The mistake they make is to try And
empathize, connecting the stated problem only to their own experiences. This falsely leads to the
belief that you completely understand the situation. But the actual problem is always broader, more
nuanced, or different than people originally assume.

Take the example of a meal delivery service in Holstebro, Denmark. When a team first began
looking at the problem of poor nutrition and malnourishment among the elderly in the city, many
of whom received meals from the service, it thought that simply updating the menu options would

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be a sufficient solution. But after closer observation, the team realized the scope of the problem
was much larger, and that they would need to redesign the entire experience, not only for those
receiving the meals but for those preparing the meals as well. While the company changed almost
everything about itself, including rebranding as The Good Kitchen, the most important change the
company made when rethinking its business model was shifting how employees viewed
themselves and their work. That, in turn, helped them create better meals (which were also
drastically changed), yielding happier, better-nourished customers.

Involve users
Imagine you are designing a new walker for rehabilitation patients and the elderly, but you have
never used one. Could you fully understand what customers need? Certainly not, if you haven’t
extensively observed and spoken with real customers. There is a reason that design thinking is
often referred to as human-centered design.
“You have to immerse yourself in the problem,” Eppinger said.
How do you start to understand how to build a better walker? When a team from MIT’s
Integrated Design and Management program together with the design firm Altitude took on that
task, they met with walker users to interview them, observe them, and understand their
experiences.