Design Thinking... The lost art, Found!

The year was 1996, an 8-year-old boy has just started enjoying the first showers in the city. He was alone and wanted to play. Watching him sad, the mother quickly goes to the kitchen garden creates a channel around the perimeter. Soon the rainwater fills in the channel, the mother makes a paper boat and hands it over to the child. He happily plays till the sun sets. That's DESIGN THINKING from the mother in the year 1996

As the world today talks about this very term being used in various organizations and various fields, what is required is to understand the basic essence of this terminology. We all have been thinking design since our childhood. Consider this, when a months old kid who still can’t speak wants something, the kid uses sign language, to get noticed. That's DESIGN THINKING again.

To say the least, this does look like an easy thing to do but the very nature of the human failing to think the design way has today, given birth to the term 'Design Thinking', which is a process to follow. Indeed, when you are dealing with large organizations and giant complex problems in your hand, one certainly needs a workflow which can streamline the path towards the innovative solutions. And as we would read further, Design Thinking is certainly the way to do so.

As Tim Brown rightly said, “The Continuum of Innovation is best thought of as a system of overlapping spaces rather than a sequence of orderly steps”

So, what spaces are we talking about in Design Thinking? Those are Inspiration, Ideation & Implementation

Inspiration is the space where you search for the problem areas as the opportunities to find a definite solution. It starts from the willingness and the acceptance of a complex problem. An embrace to the issue at hand will always be the first step towards design thinking. The inspiration will come only from the desire to find what lies within the daily doing of a customer. Only when you can empathize with the current situation of the customer , there will be desire to do something about it and only when you have the desire to do it , you will have the inspiration to achieve it .

Ideation is the space where, you generate ideas, build prototypes and then test them. and this always will be an iterative and a nonlinear process. Nowhere does it mean that Design thinking is an unorganized process rather it is an exploratory process, a process which has the potential to make unbelievable discoveries on the way if done right.

Implementation space leads you from the design room to the market and that too in quick time. Design Thinking is a process leading up to a solution which is creative, iterative, and often leads to more innovative outcomes, Design Thinking is a rising method, used more often by leadership to comprehend a new way of thinking that is both differentiative and creative.

Design thinking empowers you with the process of understanding, interpreting and resolving the issue at a greater pace than the conventional methods, resulting in greater scope, better team synergy, higher levels of interaction & increased creative spirit.

So, do you have what it takes to create the fusion of these 3 spaces? I am sure you have. You’ve had it since your childhood.