Design Thinking: Empathize

Design Thinking

• Design thinking, in the term of design, can be understood as graphic design or the design of the structure and shape of products.
• It involves designing solutions to problems through creative, innovative, human-centered thinking, and understanding the target audience, their challenges, needs, culture, and lifestyle.
• Solutions may involve changing systems, policies, strategies, developing goods and products, or providing services and developing infrastructure.
• Design thinking has become common and is key to success for major international companies like Apple, Amazon, and Google.
• It is taught and practiced in major educational and administrative institutions and systems, in profit and non-profit fields.
• Design thinking aims to make the target audience happier, satisfied, psychologically, and socially stable by solving their problems, meeting their needs and desires, and finding innovative solutions.

Empathize

• The first stage of design thinking is to "Empathize": understand your audience.
• Empathy with the audience means you gain insight into them, sense their problems, and know their interests and thoughts by putting yourself in their place and listening to their personal stories and situations.
• Aim to gain insight into needs, realize the problem, and define it accurately.
• Tools for gathering information about the target audience include field research, interviews, dialogue, observation, monitoring, and stories and situations.
• Solutions must develop through meeting, dialogue, or coexistence with people, and knowledge of people's needs or interests.
• Solutions should stem from empathy and coexistence with the audience.

Define

• The second step of design thinking is to "Define": analyze the audience and define their problems.
• This follows after the empathize step.
• Through the information obtained from the audience during the empathy stage, data is analyzed to try to accurately define the problem according to collected information.
• A report about the real problem is formulated, ending with a statement that describes the problem in a specific, simple, and clear manner.
• If time is spent understanding and defining the problem, simple and creative solutions will emerge.

Ideate

• The third step of design thinking is to "Ideate": challenge and create ideas, and follows after the Define step.
• Many ideas and solutions are generated and written.
• Solutions should range from ordinary until creative and innovative ones are reached.
• Cooperate with the audience in formulating some solutions and hearing their ideas about them.
• Tools that help generate ideas include brainstorming, drawing, mind maps, and inspiration from successful experiences.
• Proposed solutions must be desirable from the beneficiary's point of view, technically applicable, economically feasible, and financially and socially sustainable.

Prototype

• The fourth step of design thinking is "Prototype", and follows after Ideate.
• The process includes developing a set of innovative ideas and solutions, then selecting the best executable solutions of the problem.
• The prototype of implementation is being prepared.
• Products and tools are being designed and developed as a prototype that can be modified, developed, and improved according to the results of testing solutions after the fifth stage.

Test

• The fifth step of design thinking is "Test", and follows after prototype.
• After the implementation plan, tools, and products of the solution are ready, it is now being transferred from the planning and production stage to the trial and implementation stage on the ground.
• This is done by a group of the audience to ensure its quality, economic, and social feasibility, and its suitability to the problem.
• The stages of design thinking are non-linear.
• The team may need to return to one or more previous stages to obtain more information about the audience or to redefine the problem, modify solutions, create new ideas, or modify the prototype.