Design thinking: the five design thinking process

For some time I was taken a course on?Future learn?calls?Design Thinking for Sustainable Development. Learn how to use Design Thinking principles to develop innovative and user-centric solutions to complex issues of sustainability.[it’s good to have an idea about?the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)].

Introduction

Design Thinking is a design methodology that provides a solution-based approach to solving problems.

It’s extremely useful in tackling complex problems that are undefined or unknown, by understanding the human needs involved, by re-framing the problem in human-centric ways, by creating many ideas in brainstorming sessions, and by adopting a hands-on approach in prototyping and testing. Understanding these five stages of Design Thinking will empower anyone to apply the Design Thinking methods in order to solve complex problems that occur around us — in our companies, in our countries, and even on the scale of our planet.

“We must design for the way people behave,

not for how we would wish them to behave. “

Donald A. Norman

Design thinking first appeared to help and teach engineers a way to find solutions to the problems they suffer from.

John E. Arnold?was one of the first people to talk about design thinking by writing “creative engineering” (1959), which established the four principles of design thinking. And from this, design thinking began to develop as a way of thinking in the field of science and engineering design.

The basic lines of the Design Thinking process are a series of stages that use this method, starting with empathizing with users and understanding their needs, ending with devising the appropriate solution to their problem, and achieving the proposed solution.

What makes design thinking unique is the problems it addresses, when we talk about design thinking as a way to solve problems. We do not mean the usual common problems confirmed and previously tried. Rather, it is about problems that are more complex and very dangerous (such as climate change, poverty, community challenges, food and water security, sustainable development, and others), of the kind that cannot be solved by traditional or identifiable methods of solution.

Design Thinking Process

Design Thinking is a practical methodology that can be used to tackle the world’s most serious problems. It promotes a focus on problem-solving with a focus on the user, creativity, and innovation out of the box.

There are many types of Design Thinking processes, but all have a similar structure.

UX designers start by defining the user and collecting the information and move through the process to an end solution.

The Design thinking process contains five Ideas(steps):

1.Empathize

This is an important first stage where we develop an understanding of our users. We place importance on gathering primary data to understand our user's emotions and uncover their motivations. We also gather a wide range of secondary research to understand the context the challenge is in. This stage is known as a DIVERGENT stage as we are gathering data but we aren’t making sense of it yet.

2. Define the problem

In this stage, we make sense of the data gathered in the Empathy stage. We require tools to help us translate primary and secondary data into the real needs of our users. In the define stage, we can clearly frame the original challenge into solvable parts. This stage is known as a CONVERGENT stage, as we are converging our research into meaning.

3. Ideate

This stage is a creative stage where we use tools to help us brainstorm possible solutions to the action points created in the defined stage. We explore the solution space by creating many ideas - 10, 20, 50! This is known as a DIVERGENT stage. We then start to choose the best ideas against criteria defined earlier - so we start to CONVERGE.

4. Prototype

Here we build a representation of our best ideas to test. These prototypes can take many forms, with the early aim of creating fast prototypes to gather feedback as quickly as possible. This stage is CONVERGING.

5. Test.

This stage and the prototype stage tend to move in continuous cycles. User testing is gathering feedback from our end-users, and then we use this feedback to adapt or discontinue our prototyping.

This process may look linear, but in reality, we can dive backward at any stage. After Define we may need to go back and test our main thoughts with the user group, and so we empathize again, or our prototype may fail, so we move back to ideate.

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