Design Thinking: Principles and Applications

The Use of Design Thinking

• Design thinking emphasizes empathy for the people targeted in the design.
• The design thinking process opens a new way of thinking, offering means to apply this mindset and improve the world through innovative solutions.
• Design thinking is taught in top colleges and universities globally and promoted in all business levels.
• Design thinking is a discipline combining a designer's sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with technological feasibility and viable business strategy.
• IDEO, a consulting company founded in California in 1991, uses design thinking to design products, services, environments, and digital experiences.
• Design thinking combines desirability, feasibility, and viability, according to Tim Brown (CEO of IDEO).
• Design thinking is a constant process of finding solutions through deep understanding and empathy of the target user.
• Design thinking seeks complete understanding through solution-based approaches, improving user experiences by inquiring about the problem, assumptions, and implications.
• Ideas are formed via brainstorming, requiring research, prototypes, testing, experimentation, and concept trials.
• Airbnb used design thinking, leveraging insights that people wanted to share and leverage assets to create a "shared economy."
• Apple used design thinking to make the phone a universal remote control.
• Design thinking is problem-solving oriented and beneficial to customer-oriented businesses/entrepreneurs.

Principles of Design Thinking

• Human-centricity and Empathy: Solutions should focus on human needs and responses, with the process considering the users' perspectives.
• Collaboration: Design thinking benefits from diverse teams working cooperatively to form a pool of perspectives for innovation.
• Ideation: The focus is on generating many ideas and potential solutions, encouraging participants to produce ideas without initially considering quality.
• Experimentation and Iteration: Ideas are prototyped, tested, and iterated to discover defects and refine the solution.
• Bias towards Action: Design thinking is practical, favoring face-to-face engagement and concrete prototypes.

Origins of Design Thinking

• Design-thinking arose from attempts to solve societal changes by engineers, architects, and industrial designers throughout the 1950s/60s.
• Herbert A. Simon's 1969 book, "The Sciences of the Artificial," design thinking was mentioned as a way of thinking
• In the 1970's, design thinking combined human, technological, and strategic needs and innovation technology.
• Simon outlined a seven-stage design thinking process.
• The Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford created a five-stage design thinking model used in this book.
• Companies, including Google, Apple, and Airbnb, applied design thinking with remarkable success.

The Design Thinking Process

• A five-step process from the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford is typically employed in design thinking
• Empathize: Learn about users to help define the problem.
• Define: Define the problem.
• Ideate: Learn from prototypes to spark new ideas.
• Prototype: Tests create new ideas for the project.
• Test: Tests reveal insights that redefine the problem.
• Note: The Design Thinking Process provides iterative feedback, allowing for continuous information to have deep knowledge of the problem, solutions, and customer.

Empathize: Research About User's Needs

• This is the initial step and involves using research to understand the people experiencing the problem.
• Empathy involves observing, engaging, understanding user experiences/motivations, and immersing in the physical environment.
• Empathy helps gain insights into users' needs and underlying problems.
• Designers set aside assumptions and gather genuine user insights.
• Designers can create products that satisfy users and improve their lives by building empathy.

Empathy-Building Methods

• Empathy interviews: Use open conversations to gain as much insight as possible, constantly asking "why?" to encourage storytelling and observe nonverbal cues.
• Immersion and Observation: Observe users in their natural environment, photographing or videoing them to identify needs, motivations, or challenges.
• Extreme Users: Seek extreme users to restructure the problem and discover intensified needs that could help solve it.
• Ask What, How, and Why in Curiosity: Consider users' behavior by asking what action took place, how it was completed, and the underlying motivations/emotions.

Empathy Map

• An empathy map is utilized to efficiently record information and lead to surprising insights on unmet needs, frustrations, improvement areas, perspectives, assumptions and beliefs.
• The components:
  • Say: Direct quotes from the user.
  • Think: User's thoughts, including those they are hesitant to articulate.
  • Do: User's actions.
  • Feel: User's emotional state.

Define: State User's Needs and Problems

• This step involves discovering the user, their needs, and insights.
• An actionable design problem statement is defined in a human-centered manner to combine all answers in the Empathize Stage.
• It's designed to establish the core issue and generate tangible/actionable ideas to address the problems.
• Guidelines:
  • Strengthen the good to intensify the positive aspects of customer needs.
  • Eliminate the bad components.
  • Search the opposite by transforming the problem into an opportunity.
  • Enquiry of Assumptions.

Ideate: Challenge Assumptions and Construct Ideas

• Designers generate ideas by thinking outside the box with entrepreneurs looking for alternate ways to view and solve the problem.
• Ideation techniques include Brainstorm, Brainwrite, Worst Possible Idea, and SCAMPER to encourage to magnify the problem space.
• Brainstorm: Solving a problem with imaginative thinking.
• Brainwrite: Series of asking participants to write their ideas on a sheet of paper.
• Worst Possible Idea: Technique to examine ideas in order to find solutions and strengthen creativity by boosting confidence in team members.

The SCAMPER Method

• It aims to discover unfamiliar/innovative solutions to the problems to improve a product or service.
• The SCAMPER acronym:
  • Substitute: Replace something for improvement through a trial and error process.
  • Combine: Combining ideas, processes or products.
  • Adapt: Modify, exaggerating to offer new insight or added value.
  • Put to another use: Making the idea something different from original plan.
  • Eliminate: Eliminating waste due to inefficient processes.
  • Reverse: Doing the opposite of the original purpose.

Prototype: Start to Form Solutions

• A prototype is a low-cost, scaled-down sample of entrepreneurial ideas for new and particular features to show how a product will work and look.
• Prototypes can be in different shapes/sizes from sketches to interactive models.
• Solutions are applied for each of the identified problems.
• They are then accepted, enhanced, re-inspected, or rejected.

Benefits About Prototyping

• Timely feedback: Prototypes allow reviews at steps of the product.
• Prompt changes save time and cost: Initial model made easier, and also makes changes more promptly.
• Validation prior to development: Prototypes can ensure a product can perform what is really needed.
• User research and user testing: Is it vital to identify potential users and serve them best.

Types of Prototyping

• Low fidelity: Used in early stages and constantly improved, focusing on the system, not the outer appearance.
• Medium fidelity: Incorporates practical functionalities based on storyboards and user situations.
• High fidelity: Provides product experience with real functionalities that make look like the real thing.

Test: Try Solutions Out

• The product is tested in real life environment using the best solutions in the previous steps.
• Allows designers to make repetitions, adjustments and improvements to consider alternative solutions, gaining a better understanding of the product and possible users.
• The process is reiterated if final users are not happy.

The Power of Storytelling

• Stories can spark ideas by referring to those real life details.
• Hence, Storytelling is an effective tool in the design process of both products and services by connecting the entire experience through time.
• During the process of prototyping, stories and prototypes are used to get feedback. The explanation creates a better understanding.
• All throughout the steps of the design process, the events and lessons are explained through.
• Consumers explain the problems they face while using the products.

Every Story Includes These Elements:

• Domain/What - The topic is the main solution to customers.
• Players/Who - The people involved in the story of designing new product.
• Story flow/How - The Chapters that are made by the people.

Storytelling in the Design Process

• There must be user involvement in the design thinking in ordert to form solution.
• It is used with the right utilization to reach the end goal for each stage.

The Double Diamond Process

• It involves exploring an issue deeply (divergent thinking) and then taking focused action (convergent thinking).
• This then determines if the solution/s are best fit for all issues.
• This takes place when both the problem is defined and when the solution is formed.
  • Understand involves defining the problem that people are experiencing.
  • Define can help describe the issue in a different way.
  • Develop inspires people to make answers to well-defined challenges.
  • Delivery includes testing the solutions to see and decide if they will work.

Problem Framing

• Early in the design process that explores the issue.
• Storytelling can identify the qualitative data from consumers.
• Sessions can be made from data gathered from other consumers.

Solution Framing

• The designers solve any kind of solution to gain communication between customer and designer to confirm that the issue works best for any consumer/solution.

Solution Implementation

• Consumer feedback about a product or service becomes the standard.

• Therefore, storytelling is a instrument to find how consumers use products.

• Use storytelling well such as the Happiness that the Coke company has been able to establish.

Observation and Insights

• Collecting information from target customer is part of the design thinking approach.
• Know what customer wants and needs is the first step to any future products or services.
• Questions would be more closer to back up.

The Three Types Of Research

• Generative research, evaluative research, and validating research can be helpful when brainstorming different types of research. When you are looking for feedback on experiments that can be applied in recurring ways, then the usage can work better.
• The main two focuses are in both of the generative and evaluative researches are future/new ideas.
• While the other wise can work with presently what the other wise cannot.

Observation Techniques

• There are nine dimensions of the observation. To use the most out of the dimensions, the person must know all the things. There are also the descriptors.
• AEIOU - to get information about what all is being tested, there have to be these types of questions and info

AEIOU framework:

- Environment: The details of the characteristics of the situation.
- Interactions: The people around and interracting during the space/project
- Objects: A note of the items found and how the interaction between the user/object
- Users: The customers in where this whole scene is taken.
- Interview is important in making the relationship with the user
- Interview helps build ideas from insights on how to better the product

Interview Techniques

• An expert here must be open-minded, good listener, observer, and patient and flexible.
• Here are some reminders to what helps it to give more information and to become successful
  • An expert should keep the customer relaxed
  • Keep the customer on track
  • Constantly bring customer thoughts on the conversation
  • Give open ended thoughts on answers.

Effective Question Techniques

• Open-ended questions boost people to what essentials are for them. Some questions are:
  • Explorative can help open new doors (How do I find..?)
  • Affective can help show the peoples feeling. (How is the impression of....?)
  • Reflective- Can boost further explanation in a better sense (What in your opinion causes...?) -Probing - Can you explain in better analysis -Analytical can create where the origin originated What are reasons for..?) -Clarifying aids on support. (So, that means?)
• Closed ended demand exact answers
• Experiement- Testing to see if something will perform well when used.
• Hypotheses - Assumption to test if what is being made will preform well when being used.

Art And Science Applied to Entreprenuership

• Both are in the entrepreneurship because the idea/outcome of each can be of great value.
• Creativity is foundation to ingenuity. Science is a key to combining new information in the product.
• Creativity with technology can strengthen the entrepernuership.
• By knowing all aspects of the customer, you can provide your product will be successful. By reviewing and refining the business, the entrepernuership can achieve very close to perfection.

Explore design thinking's core principles, popularity, and objectives. Learn about its influence on problem-solving and practical applications. Understand how techniques like SCAMPER enhance innovation and leverage existing solutions across industries.