Design Thinking — An innovative way to innovate
The emergence of Design Thinking
Design Thinking has been used — not with that name — for a long time in the cognitive development process of designers. This process consists of: research, brainstorms, selection of ideas, prototyping.
The idea of Design Thinking applied to different areas of Design came from two personalities from Silicon Valley: David Kelley, professor at Stanford University and his colleague Tim Brown, author of the book Change by Design, both founded the innovation consultancy IDEO and in 2009 they released the book Design Thinking.
According to Brown:
It is not just designers who should pay attention: those who work in management, administration or in leadership positions also benefit from this knowledge
What is Design Thinking?
Design Thinking is an approach that helps to solve problems of the most diverse types. Well, it is good to make it clear that it is not a methodology or a cake recipe that the result of its application will necessarily be success. This is scary, isn’t it !? If you are very brave and have a strong desire for success, keep reading, otherwise this article will not help you.
“Design thinking is an anthropocentric approach to innovation that uses designers’ tools to integrate people’s needs, technology possibilities and requirements for business success” — Tim Brown at Change by Design
Think revolutionarily?
Have you noticed that most “new” ideas arise and are executed in a similar way? In other words, someone realizes a problem, almost at the same time, quickly, envisions a solution and produces a robust and “infallible” business plan. After that, time, financial resources and energy are spent to develop the “ideal solution”. After this chain, the strict minority of solutions will bring the expected result (success + money), don’t you believe? click here and see a survey made by IBGE (Brazilian social research organization).
That is already the formula for failure. So why not try it in a much more effective and promising way? That if you go wrong, you will lose much less?
We are living in the height of pressure. Whether in the workplace, family or academic. The level of competitiveness has increased, society demands that you stand out, that you are better than your brother or your cousin, in short, that you shine more than everyone. This pressure makes you very cautious, fearful and calculating. This is totally the opposite of innovation, how to innovate while being fearful?
We have to understand that the error is part of our life, and, literally, every mistake made now will be an error overcome in the future. So, we must not be afraid of making mistakes, and even with each attempt, we must include error, failure as an expected result.
To innovate, create an innovative and effective product or solution, we must do it differently, lose the fear of failure, take the risk, skin in the game.
Innovating with the Design Thinking approach
After identifying a possible problem to be solved, what happens is a real brainstorming, the team responsible for the project tries to put itself in the place of those who will enjoy it. With this, the project will be based on empathy, perceiving patterns and opportunities. In addition, this is a proposal that considers several points of view, which are seen as possible paths to the solution.
The Design Thinking process can be done in phases, the number of phases is not and does not need to be exhaustive, we will mention five here:
1. Empathy and Understanding
Put yourself in the other’s place, leave your life context and enter the context of the user who will enjoy the solution. Entering the context can be literal, the team member (s) can live the user’s life for “1 day”.
2. Definition
The knowledge acquired in the previous step should be used to define the problem about what is being analyzed. After analyzing this knowledge, the objective that the solution should bring is defined, that is, to delimit the problem.
3. Idealization
It is the brainstorming phase. Ideas and suggestions should flow, without censorship, bold ideas are welcome without fear of making mistakes.
4. Prototyping
This is where MVPs are born. One or more ideas from the previous phase should be chosen. It is time to put into practice what was thought and evaluate through tests. End users themselves can follow and give feedback while creating MVPs.
5. Test
This is the time to try the MVPs generated in the previous step and choose the one that solves the problem (s) more efficiently and effectively. The essence of Design Thinking is exactly that, tests and more tests.
What if at some stage you find yourself wrong?
This is the diamond of Design Thinking. You discover the error quickly, it can save you a lot of energy. In the conventional model, the error is usually seen after the launch of the product, even worse, many times, they still try to score a bad product, spending more and more resources.
Using the Design Thinking approach, it is possible to discover the error at the end of each step, with this, you have the opportunity to go back to the previous step, correct and continue the cycle, considerably reducing the waste of resources.
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