Growing up, my parents and some friends would say stuff like “you’re such a creative type” and “I don’t know how you do things like that.” I never knew what to say in those moments, but going back I would now say that they also can do it they just haven’t sat down and tried that hard. Sure, there’s a small bit of natural talent incorporated, but being interested and finding answers is a natural human trait. Embracing this way of thinking can be utilized to create better and more useful things.
Design thinking was somewhat recently defined, but has been used for years before the label. This is the way a problem is treated through a process of thinking and stages. The designer, after receiving a design problem, much start with empathizing with who they are designing for, or the audience. How could I make something for someone in Japan if I have never even been to Japan, for a simple example. Seeing the problem from the perspective of the audience or user is important, and the center of the human centered design thinking. Designing for people rather than corporations or algorithms is where great and useful ideas are born.
After the starting point of learning the problem and who this problem affects, the design can define the problem more narrowly and take that into the ideation stage. The empathize stage is definitely important, but I think the ideation stage sort of gets rushed over when we talk about design thinking. To get to a really great idea, sketching too much and coming up with too many ideas is the better way of designing. From too many ideas, the really strong ones stick out and can be elevated to another level through adding pieces of other ideas, in a mix and match type method. Early in school I would sketch a little and find an idea I liked and then just went fully down that road, rather than fully flushing out all the ideas I had or could have had. In this internship I am in currently, I first came to him with sketches of this and that to see what stood out to him, rather than just show him one idea and hoping he also liked it.
Beyond everything, design thinking is the all around process that every designer should be taking advantage of. We are all trained in the technical side of design and can pick the right pair of fonts, but not all designers do the heavy research and numerous sketches. Implementing that and also obtaining a perspective from the user’s side are all important pieces to the design process that lead to life changing work.
SOURCES //
Brown, Tim, and Jocelyn Wyatt. “Design Thinking For Social Innovation.” Stanford Social Innovation Review, 2010, ssir.org/images/articles/2010WI_Features_WyattBrown_New.pdf.
Gibbons, Sarah. “Design Thinking 101.” Nielsen Norman Group, 2016, http://www.nngroup.com/articles/design-thinking/.
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