Design Thinking: The Elixir to Continuous Innovation in Communication.

By Jessica Nanjendo

As professional creatives, marketers, advertisers and public relations practitioners, the pressure to conjure up yet another engaging headline, Instagram reel, or a marketing plan on a daily basis is ever piling.?

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You’ll hear sentiments such as “think outside of the box”, or, “its only social media, it can’t be that hard!” from wicked on-lookers and colleagues. While these pontifications have a morsel of truth in them, the general resolution is that?being a creative is hard.?

The concept of?design thinking, which sits at the cornerstone of the Brickhouse Counsel Philosophy,?has been explored by scholars in the field of communication and design as a methodological approach to basic problem-solving.

Simply put, design thinking is an?iterative process in which you seek to understand your users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions?with?which you can prototype and test.

Here, in order to achieve success,?one must adopt a designer’s mindset and approach the problem from the user’s perspective.

Given that the fact that general communication is largely audience-centered, the iterative nature of design thinking gives communicators the impetus?to create, publish and review the effectiveness of their content with their respective target audiences

At the Brickhouse Counsel, we apply the following principles of design thinking to make the process of creating content easier:

1.???Focus on User Centricity

Put yourself in the shoes of the consumer. What would you like to see or hear?

2.???Collaboration is Key

Researchers lay emphasis on the pooling of ideas, no matter how silly they may sound, and refining into something better

3.???Ideation

Design thinking aims at solving a certain problem, so it is important to lay out all possible solutions to the communication problem you have and narrowing down to ones that work.

4.???Experimentation and Iteration

In the experimental stage, the idea is to narrow down on the ideas?that show promise can be iterated rapidly until they take sufficient shape to be developed; those that fail to show promise can quickly be abandoned.?

5.???Bias towards action

Instead of hypothesizing about what your?audience?wants, design thinking encourages you to get out there and engage with them face-to-face, coming up with real-time, working prototypes

Having been in the field of communication for quite some time now, our general attitude towards content creation as the Brickhouse Counsel is that no idea is a bad idea,?because even the craziest, creative visions can inspire action and eventually turn into?value-impact content.?