Since a lot of people know about this process but don’t really know about steps to implementing this process, I figured I would offer this explanation to those people. Just keep in mind that this will be long and it will take quite a lot of explaining so just brace yourselves.
Design Thinking is the process of taking a multitude of ideas and putting them together in the best way possible. In order for one to do this, they must first go through a 5 step, or mode, procedure to gather all of their ideas to the table. They have to Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test in this specific order if they want to get their point across.
The first thing that one has to do is to Empathize and when you hear the word “Empathy” you normally think of putting yourself in the position of other people and seeing how their situations affect you in any way. And that’s exactly it, this is how you observe different peoples ideas on different circumstances which are normally done through interviewing the person, conversing with different people or just casually observing the person’s reaction to certain things around them. Now people often ask others “Why to empathize with people for an idea if you are coming up with it all on your own?” and that is answered relatively well in the article An Introduction to Design Thinking, which is really just a process guide but it gets the job done, where Hasso Plattner says “As a design thinker, the problems you are trying to solve are rarely your own-they are those of a particular group of people; in order to design for them, you must gain empathy for who they are and what is important to them.” While this applies to really anything that you do in a job or internship, it’s definitely a big deal to do it in this field since for you to think of something to design for them you pretty much have to represent your audience in the best way possible.
The second thing one has to do is Define their idea in whatever way they can. When you already have an idea of what you want to do, you also have to know what the design will mean to you and your audience. In other words, add a bit of clarity and give a good statement as to what it will mean in the future. Fast Company’s article Design Thinking… What is That?, whose author’s name is not specified, sums up the Define step pretty well by stating “Design Thinking requires a team or business to always question the brief, the problem to be solved. To participate in defining the opportunity and to revise the opportunity before embarking on its creation and execution.” So you can tell how important this mode is which leads very well into the next mode which is to Ideate.
Ideating is just as obvious as it sounds, thinking about the ideas you came up with and then going into detail about the concepts and outcomes that may occur over the course of anything you do. This mode just goes beyond designing for different people as it also applies to make something for yourself or just doing something casually, no matter what you’re doing, you’re always going to find yourself thinking of the outcome and how it might affect the people around you or even just yourself. There are many articles in design thinking that explain why you should do this but the overall statement is that Ideating allows you to think of solutions for certain problems and then hypothesizing about what would happen if you go through with it, hence the thinking being true to the overall process.
And then once you’ve got your idea, you know what your audience will be, you know what it will mean in the future and you’ve come up with some solutions to solve the problem as well as made a hypothesis of your own, you then have to do something that literally everyone in every job has to do and that is to go into Prototype mode. If you’ve ever done a project in school/college or an internship before, you know that typically before you show that to the world you have to show it to someone else you know and have them “test” it out. Essentially testing your hypothesis without actually testing your hypothesis, and what I mean by that is showing a sort of beta or working state of your design and seeing how people in your vicinity bodes with it. This is also a good way to get your questions answered and to talk to a couple people about it before showing it off in full, and like with many projects it also gives you the opportunity to make changes to it that can make it different but still get your idea across to the world.
And then after you’ve gotten your questions answered, if not a good chunk of them answered, you then finally come to the Test mode. This is where you finally show your efforts to the world and see what they think of it. Which also gives you the opportunity to do the process all over again, whether people like it or not. So in short, Design Thinking is a big network of complex steps all put together into one simple process that is found in everything you see in the world. And it’s definitely a go-to for a lot of people who want to change the lives of others including themselves.
Sources:
https://dschool-old.stanford.edu/sandbox/groups/designresources/wiki/36873/attachments/74b3d/ModeGuideBOOTCAMP2010L.pdf?sessionID=573efa71aea50503341224491c862e32f5edc0a9
https://www.fastcompany.com/919258/design-thinking-what
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