Design Thinking

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Design Thinking is a problem-solving framework that focuses on solving customers’ needs with a feasible and viable solution. It is often described as being a state of mind, i.e. combining the creative right brain with the analytical left brain in solving people’s problems. Design Thinking focuses on understanding the customer’s needs that are both latent and acknowledgeable in nature. Design Thinking delivers a problem-solving framework that is iterative in nature and drives innovation in a more customer centric direction. Steve Jobs once said, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works”. This very true in context to Design Thinking and my biggest takeaway from the workshop, is how Design Thinking helps us in observing the end users, how users interact with products in their day to day lives, what do they like and dislike, and eventually what do they want and need. All these details about the user really gives us key insights about our target consumers and how we could make it a bit easier for them through our products and services. This enables us to define the problem or the challenge better and help channel the observations into buckets that specially address the problem.

Through Design Thinking I have learnt that it is really important for businesses to keep their focus on solving real world issues and satisfy the unmet needs of the users. Design Thinking is a highly collaborative tool that makes critical thinking and creativity as its base. Being iterative in nature, it really implies that in the end failure is a good way to learn and bounce back with the most optimal solution to the problem. Design thinking also helped me appreciate that during brainstorming there is no idea that is better than other ideas. This where Design Thinking stimulates creative thinking, by eliminating the fear of rejection. Prototyping in Design Thinking is where designers try to test their hypothesis and brainstorming ideas with the end consumers in an affordable way to quickly assess whether the solution actually works for the users or not. The feedback that is generated from testing these prototypes is generally taken home and worked on into a new prototype and iterated further till we reach close to the actual solution. While a traditional problem-solving approach might result in just an incrementally better solution, design thinking can sometimes bring along a dramatic change that goes beyond satisfying the need of the problem.

There are plenty of designs out there in the world that are inspired by design thinking. As mentioned earlier, design thinking is a state of mind, and indeed it evolves into a state of being. Once design thinking is adopted into solving a problem, it’s hard not to resort to it to solve most problems in the society. Japanese are known to be minimalist and multi-functional. Japanese way of life speaks the language of Design Thinking. A typical Japanese washroom has only one faucet that is used for both the sink and filling up the bath. Sometimes, a sink is mounted upon the water closet of the commode so as to minimise wastage of water and to utilize space. All the taxis in Tokyo have doors that open automatically at the control of the driver. This reduces the hassles the passengers go through while entering and exiting the taxi with luggage in hand. Subway station signs that are visible from the train carriages show the name of the station and also the name of the next station, a pre-empt for the passengers who want to get down at the next stop to get ready. All the fuel stations in Japan, have the fuel dispensers mounted to the ceiling that results in extra space to manoeuvre.  All these solutions solve the actual problems that Japanese have faced in their day to day lives. As Henry Ford once remarked “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”, most of the times users would not be able to tell us about what they want, and hence observation is the key in defining the challenge we want to work on. It’s observing that its really cumbersome to carry around a clunky Walkman and hordes of cassettes and CDs to go by for listening to music that lead to Apple designing the the iPod. And we all know how iPod changed the music industry.

Design thinking as an approach is best applied to certain kinds of problems or challenges. It is really important for businesses to identify what kind of problems is best solved through the traditional analytical way of thinking and what can be addressed by design thinking. The analytical way of thinking can be easily applied to problems where there is a general agreement on the definition of the problem. All the problems where we have a lot of data, a cause and an effect fit into this category. We can use the existing data and several analytical processes to arrive at a solution. Design Thinking is best applied to those situations where businesses are not even able to define what the problem or challenge is. Sometimes it is possible that the problems at hand are less customer centric and during such situations is it better to tackle the problems the traditional way. Design thinking helps in addressing situations that has several uncertainties and unknowns along the way. Even with a lot of data at hand if it is difficult to put pieces together and define the specific challenge statement, this is where design thinking is best utilized. It is design thinking challenge to look at why consumers don’t pick up a particular brand of shampoo, but the problem of which cities to target for the sale of a particular brand of shampoo can be dealt with the help of analytical processes.