Week 3: Design Thinking

Week 3 Lecture notes:  

Brown, T. & Wyatt, J. 2010, Design Thinking For Social Innovation, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Stanford University, Stanford.

This article introduces what design thinking is, the source of design thinking and the three key points (Inspiration, Ideation, Implementation) in design thinking.

The Origin of Design Thinking

David Kelley, the founder of Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, remarked that every time someone asked him about design, he found himself inserting the word “thinking” to explain what it was that designers do. Eventually, the term design thinking stuck.

Inspiration

Every design process begins with inspiration. Most design teams start with a well-structured brief. It's a step-by-step approach to finding out what people want. It's useful, but it's hard to breakthrough. Henry Ford said, "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said 'a faster horse. Although people often can't tell us what their needs are, Their actual behaviors can provide us with invaluable clues about their range of unmet needs." Therefore, for the designer, the best starting point is to go out, to observe the consumer/user's daily life, get real experience and information, to know what people really need.

Ideation

Linus Pauling, scientist and two-time Nobel Prize winner, said, “To have a good idea you must first have lots of ideas.”

At the end of the field trip and research, the design team will integrate all the findings from the trip and extract a solution or opportunities for change. At the same time, they need a variety of different people involved in the design process, such as multidisciplinary people.

“To operate within an interdisciplinary environment, an individual needs to have strengths in two dimensions—the “T-shaped” person. On the vertical axis, every member of the team needs to possess a depth of skill that allows him or her to make tangible contributions to the outcome. The top of the “T” is where the design thinker is made. It’s about empathy for people and for disciplines beyond one’s own. It tends to be expressed as openness, curiosity, optimism, a tendency toward learning through doing, and experimentation.”(This paragraph was copied from the article)

Implementation

Transforming the best ideas in the process into concrete ones, prototyping is at the heart of this implementation. After prototyping, test it, refine it, update it.

Week 3 Lecture notes:

Design thinking is the process of applying methodologies of design, to a broader set of issues and problems in society. To use an integrated style of thinking is at the heart of design and with this method the designer is able to implement a broad range of skills that help look at the world with complexity. Design thinking requires a problem to be seen from a quantitative and qualitative point of view, allowing the designer to first begin with user needs, apply ethnography and observation, then brainstorm and diverge. A designer then begins looking at possibilities and prototyping through iteration where a solution will present itself. This process or method of thinking is how human creativity and the design mind can be a powerful tool in solving problems within the community.

Design output from design thinking is the idea of making creative leaps to produce a solution. The idea of representing those leaps with prototypes and choosing between them and developing ideas further. Designers become problem solvers who not just use their inherent knowledge but also learn while doing. And through tacit knowledge the designer will come up with solutions using intuition obtained during the design thinking process.

Where design thinking differs from a business style of thinking is that business will usually want one idea to succeed and will take one idea to market and test it. Whereas the designer will take many ideas and test them watch many fail until a desired solution is achieved. Business speaks a finite number of languages stuck in looking at profit and loss statements and balance sheets. Business does not want to experiment or try different things, essentially it wants its one idea to execute on plan and on budget. The contrary of this is a designer who will play and experiment, test and fail, fail often and create, succeed by creating through failure. It is very hard for business to invent, in fact it is not business’ job to invent but invention is necessary for business so this is exactly where business will always benefit from design thinking.

A danger to the design thinking movement is that people will try to push it so far that it will turn into a formula. The problem with reducing design thinking to a set of steps and turning it into an algorithm is that you will lose all of the values that design has to offer. No longer will design thinking innovate and find the outliers that break the patterns of the norm. Innovation will become a predictable set of steps and thus cease to be the very thing that it is.

Our world will always need improvement and design thinking provides an incubator for creativity to flourish giving a framework towards human innovation.

Week 3 Tutorial notes:

_From Brown & Wyatt-_

Define ‘Design Thinking’
Design thinking is the application of human-centered design methods to business, public services and social problems.  

What are the main advantages to utilising Design Thinking?
Design thinking helps to find more possible solutions and address the user’s real needs. It also helps businesses to create innovation and differentiate themselves from competitors.

Is DT optimistic or pessimistic? What are your reasons for your answer?
Design thinking is optimistic because it requires the designer to believe that there is a better solution that can solve wicked problems, take risks and not to be afraid of failures.

Summarise the insights using DT the Sternin’s (researchers) had in Vietnam
The researchers observed positive deviance in Vietnam and realised that poor people feed their children things that are readily available but often perceived as unsafe such as shrimps and snails. They also gathered that having multiple small meals could make children more healthy.

What is IDEO?
IDEO is a design consultancy in the US that pioneers in using design thinking and human-centered design methods in approaching system and service design.

Describe the 3 ‘spaces’ in the DT process

The 3 spaces in the design thinking process are ‘inspiration’, ‘ideation’ and ‘implementation’. In the ‘inspiration’ space, designers observe and engage in the user’s life to understand and reframe the problem. Then, with the problems and opportunities found, the designers move to the ‘ideation’ space where they generate and test ideas of possible solutions. ‘Implementation’ space is where the ideas are prototyped, products are developed and systems are tested, iterated and refined. It is not a linear process.

https://designthinking.ideo.com/

_From Kimball-_

Define ‘Design Thinking’

Although there is a lot of research done to study the designer's profession, there is no absolute correct answer to define what design thinking is. In general, ‘design thinking’ is used to characterize what designers know and how they do work. Depending on the focus of the research, ‘design thinking’ is described as a cognitive style of designers, a general theory of design or resource for business or organisations. 

What is the creative class?

Creative class is people who work in the creative industries such as designers, musicians, performers, movie makers, and also people whose profession requires them to give meaning to their work, such as computer programmers and columnists.

What is thinking/doing dualism?
The integration of thinking and making in the design process.  

Is design special?

It depends on the definition of design. Broader definition of design, like the one proposed by Simon in The Sciences of the Artificial (1969), that ‘design is a rational set of procedures that respond to a well-defined problem’, then design is said to be applied in other professions such as engineering, management and medicine. Design thinking is also a method used in business or other organisations that requires innovation, not limited to traditional design professions, because some believe that organisational problems are also design problems. Then, under this definition design is not special

Group Reflection and Discussion:

Design thinking is fluid and differs from things like science and business thinking. 

Design thinking is applied throughout the design process: Inspiration, Ideation, and Implementation.

Design thinking is the beginning of a product, service and technology.

As designers Andrew thinks we already use design thinking. Engineers don’t design think, they problem solve in a different way, are results driven, while designers are focused on the users