Design Thinking

Reuben Mbuve

Reuben is a development enthusiast with expertise in communications, partnerships, MEAL and knowledge management. He is passionate about skill development through training.

What is Design Thinking?

There are many definitions on DT but the simplest and most common is that Design thinking is a user-centric approach that draws on the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of the people. Design Thinking is not an exclusive property of designers- all great innovators in literature, art, music, science, engineering, and business has practiced it.

What’s special about Design Thinking is that designers’ work processes can help us systematically extract, teach, learn and apply. The human-centered techniques solve problems in a creative and innovative way.  By creative, it means you can use the methodology to create an idea from scratch, and by innovative it means you can use it to change/make better an existing idea.

Some of the world’s leading brands, such as Apple, Google, Samsung and GE, have rapidly adopted the DT approach, and DT is being taught at leading universities around the world, including design school, Stanford, Harvard and MIT, most recently, here in Africa, African Leadership University have adopted DT in their curriculum delivery.

N/B

 In the case of product, user is the customer, case of service, user is the client and case of project delivery, user is the beneficiaries/community, so when I say user-centric then replace user with your area of operation.

What factors Influence design thinking?

While you start from consumer desirability in Design Thinking, any ideas generated are also weighed against the technical feasibility and the business viability. The benefit of Design Thinking is that, through empathy for your customer, consumer, or client, you are able to create products and experiences that truly help people and even change lives. So the factors include:

• People Desirability

People desirability asks the question ''Is there a place for this product or service in the market?'' Navigating whether or not your customers desire a product or whether there is a market for it is the first innovation challenge that design teams must contend with. Understanding the desirability of your product or service is knowing whether it solves a customer need or not. If it does not, it may be nice to have, but it won't be desirable.

• Business Viability

When we're talking about business viability, we're asking, ''Should we do this? Is it sustainable?'' Yes, design thinking is about focusing on solving customers' needs, but if it costs too much or takes too long to create, is it a smart business decision? Business viability is therefore concerned with making sure that an innovative idea fits with a company's business goals and can be accomplished both in terms of the money it costs to create and the time it takes to produce.

• Technical feasibility

 ''Will this idea work?'' Does your team or your company have the processes, resources, skills and tools to make this product or service feasible for your organization?

Use the 3 factors to influence your decision before any project.

What's design thinking to someone advancing women rights?

In this context, someone advancing women rights will have to use Design Thinking to recognize the needs of the women s/he wants to represent, and the best solutions to those needs. The individual will have to use DT process to empathize with the women (Target audience). It is important that s/he must fit in their shoes, to understand them. For instance:

• What challenges are they going through?
• Do they recognize their right?
• If not, what can be done?

These are but a few questions that the individual will use the DT process to answer

What is the importance of design thinking as a development concept?

Design Thinking is extremely user-centric. It focuses on humans first and foremost. It seeks to understand people’s needs and come up with effective solutions to meet those needs. It is what we call a solution-based approach to problem-solving. For example, in a development context, by user-centric we mean beneficiary-centric, or community-centric. The whole project design process has to focus on the people the particular project expects to serve

The human-core in the process encourages organizations to focus on the people they are creating for, which lead to better project deliverables. When you sit down to create a solution for a community, the first question should always be, what's the human need behind it?

The guiding principle behind Design Thinking is putting users and their needs at the center of business think about the user, the community in social development case. It’s about designing for change and creating new relatable value for the community.

Instead of designing a project and trying to find ways it will make people’s lives better, you start by looking at what the community/users really want and need and work backwards toward that goal. You look at the whole user experience from their perspective. This means, the more complex the project gets,  the closer you need to look. Focusing first on the experience rather than simply rushing ahead to just “solve the problem” leads to faster, more successful solutions and results.

What are the elements of the Design Thinking process?

I will mention the main ones. They include:

• Human-centered- If you don’t understand the person who will be using the thing you’re trying to create (the beneficiary of the project deliverables it simply won’t work. This principle starts with empathy and focuses on research to really understand people—clients, customers and users.
• Creative and playful- Creating an open, playful atmosphere is critical to fueling creativity. It allows you to frame the problem in a new way, look at it from different perspectives and considers a variety of solutions. Play around with crazy ideas, do not limit your thinking as all ideas are possible solutions
• Iterative- Once you’ve come up with a solution or product, it’s important to keep challenging and reframing the problem. Test, iterate, test and test again. Early rounds of testing and feedback helps ensure you are delivering solutions that people will love.
• Collaborative- People with diverse perspective work together, creating multidisciplinary teams that encourage different viewpoints and client co-creation. Working in a flat hierarchy.
• Prototype driven- A prototype can be used to communicate and test your data. Whether it’s a sample product or an idea drawn on paper, creating tangible representations of your solutions allows for sharing and gathering feedback.

Having understood the elements of design thinking and you have given an example ,now can we narrow down of the real process of thinking ,where do someone starts from and where does he or she ends ? In simple what steps should follow when using design thinking methodology as a way for solving problems within an organ?

• Empathize– Observe, listen, Conduct research to know your users (Customers, clients, community/beneficiaries)
• Define– Combine all the findings from step 1 to understand where your user’s problems exist, deeply understand their needs. Not solutions they are looking for, but the need, do not let them tell you the solutions just ask for their problems, challenges. Define the problem; do not think about the solutions at this stage
• Ideate– Generate a range of crazy ideas, as many as possible. Do not limit your thinking- go weird and overboard, whatever idea comes in your mind, write it in the lists (This stage works well with a team, in as much as all stages work much better with a team.
• Prototype – Build a real representation of the above ideas. Based on all the ideas above, some ideas will fall out of place, and the best ones will start to take shape.
• Test – the prototype in stage4 is the pilot project, test with a small population. Put it out in the market, to the specific target users: let them use it, feel it, and get feedback from them.
• Do they like it?
• Does it solve their problems?
• What changes would they like?
• Would they afford it?
• Color? Shape? Texture? (If it is a product)
• Timelines? Scope? (If it’s a project for example)

• Implement- (This stage is not included in the standard stage model, with assumption after test the product/project will be ready) The final stage is best explained using the ‘persona’ elements, WHO, WHAT, WHY

What are some of the challenges and proposed solutions that we can face while undertaking this design thinking approach?

Challenge 1: Some people View project/product Design as a Glorified 2-3 Day Workshop but this often leads to unsuccessful projects.

Solution:  If it’s truly a human-centered problem (All community projects are human-centered anyway), it is going to take time to solve (typically 4-8 weeks). Set expectations early and often. Shortcuts lead to shortcomings. How can you predict where the process might take you? Make sure people understand the process and why it takes time and are committed to taking the journey, wherever it might lead.

Challenge 2: People Want Human-Centric Outputs without Human Inputs. Understanding human challenges to find the right problem to solve takes time. Unfortunately, many Design teams get asked to take shortcuts and reduce critical immersion work to phone interviews and to limit the creative period for ideation to four hours of a two-day workshop, with disastrous results.

Solution: Resist! You can’t get human-centered outcomes without sufficient human understanding. Get out and spend time with the users and do what they do. Extend the creativity/ideation time to allow inspiration to occur, and for ideas to be built upon, combined, and improved. Provide people with the right creativity techniques, environments, sufficient collaboration time, and an online platform to keep the collaboration going outside of the sacred two-day workshop.

Challenge 3: People Use Design Thinking on Obvious Challenges. Using Design Thinking for obvious challenges (especially those that are not human-centered) may still help, but it may be overkill when compared to traditional problem-solving methods.

Solution:  Before waving the Design Thinking flag, determine the nature of the stated problem. If the problem is well understood and the solution path is obvious, don’t use Design Thinking. If the problem requires deeply understanding people, solving it may have significant impact, and the team gets energized about it, then you’ve got yourself a nice Design Thinking challenge.

Challenge 4: Design Thinking Is Marginalized. Design Thinking is not always trusted or understood by senior executives, and so it is only approved for use at lower levels of the organization. Stuck in the basement, even great solutions will have a tough time getting noticed or fast-tracked by senior executives.

Solution:  Involve senior executives in your Design Thinking efforts or at least make sure they are visible to them. Bring them along everyone onto the designing table-even in a small way, so they become familiar and comfortable with the methodology and its results.