DESIGN THINKING
Defining ‘Design Thinking’ — in theory, and action
Design thinking is a human-centric methodology that requires a multidisciplinary team and can be applied by regular, ‘non-creative’ individuals
Design thinking can help develop new offers, increase levels of organizational innovation, and accelerate growth in existing businesses or new ventures (i.e. startups). Design thinking is considered a powerful approach in helping people envision new opportunities and become comfortable with uncertainty. Design thinking is a human-centric methodology that requires a multidisciplinary team and can be applied by regular, ‘non-creative’ individuals. ‘Creative’ people are not geniuses, but rather people who boost their creativity by triggering positive emotions through the activation of intrinsic motivation. Therefore, design thinking provides processes to experiment with and learn how to uncover creative insights and innovative solutions following clear and guided processes, consequentially transforming regular people into creative ones.
Defining design thinking
Design thinking is an approach for innovation, a systematic approach that aims to identify customer dis-satisfactions and build innovative solutions through iteration. Therefore, design thinking is a problem-solving approach.
Even though design thinking is about launching an innovation in the future — counter-intuitively — it does not start with thinking of the future, but the present. Because the objective is to ensure the desirability of the solution by addressing a real customer need. Once desirability is validated, then business viability and technical feasibility will be addressed. It is, therefore, a multidisciplinary process that favors collaboration between designers, social scientists, business people, and engineers.
Design thinking is a systematic approach towards innovation, a creativity method, a problem-forming and solving approach, and a mindset, that is based on the following three principles:
- Empathy with the users for whom the innovation is developed, to fully understand their pains and problems.
- The invention of something new that does not already exist or that enhances current solutions. It’s about imagining and creating the future, rather than accepting current norms.
- Iteration, because it is hard to develop a deep understanding of user needs, requiring us to test and position the imagined solution for users.
The design in design thinking
A good design is associated with a product or service that is easy to use and interact with. For example, consider your smartphones, they have been designed to be addictive, to have consumers hooked. Or consider push notifications on social media applications such as Instagram or Facebook; these notifications are triggers of interaction with the content of interest to increase engagement rates with the service. This is the design in design thinking.
For a successful design to happen, designers, scientists/engineers, and business people come together to collaborate and share skill sets in the following ways:
- Designers — ensure the desirability of the product/service, because they can empathize easily with the end-user and are good at capturing and expressing emotions. They create new things and are used to creating mock-ups and sketches to visualize their ideas and share them with others, which is key for experimenting and testing.
- Business people — research existing market offerings. They perform competitive analysis, collect data about the size of the market and interview experts looking for trends, either social, environmental, technological, or political, and read industry reports. They provide a recap of findings in presentations, with market forecasts, and make strategic recommendations, supported by calculations on expected ROIs.
- Engineers/Scientists — conduct technological research, researching patents, reading recent findings, technical documents, and potential sources for product/service development. They analyze crash reports and conduct calculations. They sum up findings with technical notes and reports and suggest alternative technologies or designs.
With the descriptions above, on the one hand, designers look for subjectivity, human experience, and emotion in their work. Their approach is qualitative, experiential, intuitive, and novel.
The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant — Albert Einstein
But novelty does not necessarily create value. And even if a value is theoretically created, it needs to be executed to generate profits for the business. Therefore, business people, engineers, and scientists are used to thinking rationally and objectively based on quantitative data. Their objective is to reduce uncertainty by pursuing control and stability.
In design thinking, one core strength is that it’s okay to be wrong, to be breaking things, it’s okay to put something out there and have people critique and challenge it, because there’s a nugget inside something failing, and design thinkers will only find the ‘right — solution’ after failing.
Design thinking is about ‘intuitive thinking’
Design thinking is a systematic approach that enforces the combination of intuitive (designers) and analytical thinking (business people and engineers).
When it comes to analytical thinking, there are two lines of reasoning:
- Deductive reasoning — is useful to make sense of new information, based on existing knowledge. ‘Deduction’ is the logical reasoning that using a general rule, infers a conclusion after observing an event or finding evidence. The crucial task with deductive reasoning is to select the appropriate rule to apply and then confirm or refute the conclusion.
- Inductive reasoning — is logical reasoning that infers a rule based on observations of a cause and effect. The inferred rule is credible given the premises and follows the theory of evidence. In inductive logic, any new evidence consistent with existing beliefs and mental models reinforces the beliefs and mental models, while other evidence is simply considered anomalous. Therefore, inductive logic can prevent individuals from interpreting evidence in alternate ways; it lacks intuitive thinking.
But design thinking starts with intuitive thinking — and intuitive thinking is based on abduction, reasoning that infers and proves an explanatory hypothesis for a body of recently discovered observations. For example, abduction happens when a product manager suggests an explanatory hypothesis to account for the patterns and insights observed in the user behavior data collected on a mobile application. If the hypothesis is validated, it becomes a rule that feeds deductive thinking for a larger group of users.
There are two types of abductive reasoning:
- Explanatory abduction — is used when we observe an anomalous or surprising event, by which we infer a hypothesis to explain the new observation. Explanatory abductions give sense to newly observed behavior and data collected.
- Innovative abduction — is used when we don’t know the means to achieve the desired outcome. Here we infer two hypotheses, one that connects the strategic option to the desired outcome and one that connects the strategic option to its implementation or mode of operation. The desired outcome is the only given or known data point. The strategic option explains what should exist to achieve the desired outcome and the mode of operation explains how the strategic option will be realized and executed. Innovative abductions lead to a strategic option and its implementation method to deliver a new outcome.
For example, consider we want to improve the citizens’ recycling behavior. Here, we first start by developing empathy with the citizens and observing their recycling behaviors. This observation reveals a potential explanatory hypothesis or insight: ‘People will only recycle if the product is useful to someone.’ At this stage, the formed insight is neither true nor false, it’s a hypothesis that needs to be tested. For that purpose, you run experiments to generate data on the motivations for recycling, and experiments on recycling with and without intrinsic and extrinsic incentives. As a result, the hypothesis is validated, allowing you to trust your hypothesis and further extend it to all other citizens. This is the power of abductive reasoning.
Design Thinking in Action
Design thinking in action, ABC Nightline, IDEO redesigning and improving a shopping cart
The 3-phases of design thinking
There are three phases to design thinking:
- Inspiration — this involves going into the field, interviewing several segments of stakeholders, observing them, living their experience, collecting data with pictures, videos, and interviews, and taking it back to discuss within the team until patterns and hypotheses emerge. These findings should explain the users’ behavior and help them understand their needs and pains.
- Ideation — this refers to the generation of ideas or solutions to address user problems and needs. These ideas are combined into comprehensive solutions that could potentially address the needs and pains.
- Implementation — in this phase, teams rapidly build rough and low-cost prototypes to put concrete solutions into the hands of users, thereby testing problem-solution fit.
Duration of phases
Inspiration and implementation phases take the longest to complete:
- The inspiration phase is concrete, it’s about understanding the users and their pains and problems and takes time as teams need to deep dive into users’ mindsets and behaviors.
- Ideation is abstract and imaginative. It needs focus and it’s intense. But it should not take a large amount of the team’s time. The more time is spent here, the less we can interact with users to test the solutions.
- Implementation is once again concrete. It’s about experimenting by confronting ideas with reality. Teams put the prototypes in the hands of the users. Here again, it takes time to build the prototypes, test them, gather feedback, and reiterate designs.
The ideation funnel
During the design thinking process, it is common to generate as many as 250 ideas, which are then narrowed down to as few as 25 concepts. This widening and narrowing at each phase are called divergent and convergent thinking.
- Divergent thinking is about opening the choices, looking broadly, and considering many different options. The rationale of divergent thinking is to avoid being trapped in the usual setting of the problem within a pre-existing set of solutions.
- Convergent thinking is the process of narrowing down options and selecting the most promising ones to be further explored and tested.
Description of the image above: understanding users through empathy and inspiration is a divergent way of thinking. Once many possible needs and pains are considered, the team narrows down the options and selects some hypothetical problems to be further explored. This is convergent thinking. During ideation, many ideas will be generated as potential solutions for the selected problem. This is an example of divergent thinking. Then, ideas will be combined and a few will be selected to be tested with users to validate problem-solution-fit. Therefore implementation is convergent thinking.
The people and the environment
Design thinking’s guided and systematic process is followed by people from different backgrounds, skills, and expertise, gathering in a specific place that favors sharing and building a constructive and collective mindset. In other words, the design thinking process is sequenced and clear, but it has to be contextualized to the environment of the organization it is immersed in. Within the design thinking process and in the long term, people and the environment they are working in is the most important pillar of successful design thinking efforts. After all, one needs talented and happy designers to run design thinking activities.
Visualization is key to success
Visualization is the transformation of information into images. It makes data and ideas tangible, accessible, and interpretable with emotion and intuition, Designers favor drawing over text because while the text is open to various interpretations according to your interlocutor, a drawing reduces the possibility of mental models. This is why startups build user personas in their early days when trying to define their customers.
Visualization is important at every phase of the design thinking process:
- In the inspiration phase, photographs and sketches are used to capture the observations. Visual thinking is also required to synthesize and structure data and look for patterns and insights. In the ideation phase, the brain is creating images, and concepts are coming out of our imagination. In the implementation phase, more detailed diagrams are needed for prototype development and to represent how the user will interact with the solution to identify the main points of vigilance and friction.
Storytelling
Just like a comic, a story has a narrative that involves emotions, enabling people to understand issues and create engagement. Storytelling is the human way of conveying information. And since design thinking is a human-centered approach, every phase of the process needs storytelling.
A story adds context to the data gathered. The inspiration phase is about listening to and interpreting human stories, writing them down, and developing empathy with user personas and pains. In the ideation phase, storytelling makes ideas real, concrete, and tangible. In the implementation phase, storytelling on-boards stakeholders and engages them to have their feedback and comments included in the suggested solution.
Project types best suitable for design thinking
Design thinking is not adapted for all types of innovation projects but can work wonders in any project that needs to connect deeply with the customers, transform insights and data into actionable ideas, or create and implement new solutions with fast and effective business impact.
There are five criteria to consider when deciding to use design thinking:
- The project needs to be human-driven
- The project has a high degree of uncertainty. Uncertainty is a situation where its probability of occurrence and degree of impact is unknown.
- The project has a poorly defined problem
- The project is complex, meaning it has interdependent and dynamically moving parts and therefore can’t be modeled using links between causes and effects. So it is difficult to know where to start.
- It lacks data or the available data is not organized and well-framed
Therefore, if humans are not at the heart of the problem if there is a clear and shared definition of the problem if you can accurately predict and determine cause and effect in advance if the problem is decomposable into parts, and if you have well-framed and structured data, then design thinking is not suitable for such a project.
Design thinking is an approach that we can follow to reduce uncertainty levels through experimentation and testing and not through prediction — which is generally used in risk management projects. Design thinking is suitable and should be adopted when there are many stakeholders involved and everyone has their definition of the problem. When time and effort are required to learn about the context of the problem. When it is not possible to prove that any particular solution will work until it is tested and when several expertise and specializations are required over a collaborative team effort.
To explore further, check the link above — Parts Without a Whole — where you can find ~20 example themes and project types in which design thinking is currently used, starting on page 59. You can also find more examples of design thinking projects in the following two books:
This is part of a 5 series article. You can find all the other articles here:
Hope you enjoyed reading this article! :)
If so, then:
- Follow me on Medium
- Become a Medium Member
- Subscribe to hear more
- Let’s connect on LinkedIn
