Design thinking: why should you think like a designer?

What is your perception of a designer? If you have seen the movie, The Devil Wears Prada, those fashion designers are often portrait as self-centred, artistic, subjective, emotional and passionate people. This is probably a stereo-type, and reflect a public image of some famous designers. 

Ten years ago I co-founded a carpet design firm with two veteran designers. We are a small company, but we have six designers working all the year around for leading five-stars hotels. The majority of the design projects are in Hong Kong and China, but we also partnered with international interior design companies and had projects in India, Dubai and Paris. In my working relationship with designers, none of them were like those in the movie. But I must say that designers do think differently. I have no glue about this until I get to know something called Design Thinking. 

The origin of design thinking

Design thinking is a problem solving methodology developed within IDEO, the famous international design firm founded in 1991 by Professor David Kelly of Stanford University. David Kelly was a good friend of Steve Jobs and his company designed the first mouse for Apple. In the first ten years, IDEO focused on designing consumer products such as the Palm V PDA, Oral-B toothbrushes, and Steelcase chairs for school children. Later they were approached by new clients on projects like restructuring a charity foundation, revamping the education system in developing countries and creating learning environment for a university. IDEO realized that their way of problem solving could be used in many situations, and David Kelly coined it as design thinking. 

David Kelly- Founder of IDEO

Today if you want to learn design thinking, you don't need to apply for a job in IDEO. There are short programs offered by the Institute of Design at Stanford (often called as the d.school), which was also founded by David Kelly. 

What is design thinking?

Tim Brown, its present CEO, says that design thinking is a human-centred approach to innovation. This approach starts with building a deep empathy of the users, generating many ideas, testing the idea with prototypes and eventually putting the new solution out in the world. Tim Brown further explains that the design thinking process could be visualized as a system of three overlapping spaces: Inspiration, Ideation, and Implementation.

Tim Brown- CEO of IDEO

Let us take a quick overview of the three spaces: 

1. Inspiration

The design process begins with a problem or opportunity that motivates people to search for solutions. To understand the problem or opportunity, team members need to spend time in the field. Unlike conventional research, team members cannot ask people directly what they want. They should observe actual behaviour that provide invaluable clues about the unmet needs. Empathy is the most important skills in the inspiration space. 

2. Ideation

After spending time in the field, the ideation space is to let team members distill what they saw and heard into sights. Divergent thinking and a structured brainstorming process will help the team to generate many choices and options. IDEO will assemble people from a very diversified background, such as architect, artist, psychologist and engineers. There are also visual tools to help team members to articulate and organize their ideas into patterns. 

 3. Implementation

The core of the implementation space is prototyping, turning ideas into actual products and services that are could be tested and refined. There are many ways to do prototyping. They could be done by making a paper model, a role play or story telling using story board or videos. 

Paper Prototype

At the early stage, prototypes are made quickly using inexpensive materials like card boards and Lego bricks.  They are sometimes called as "low-fi" prototypes. At the later stage, the prototypes become sophisticated and look very real, hence they are also called as "hi-fi" prototypes. Some are actually working models and can perform basic functions. 

Take a design thinking crash course at the d.school

The design thinking process is now refined by the d.school as the following five steps. In each step, there is a key question to address:

Source: Institute of Design at Stanford

If you want to taste a flavor of design thinking, there is a video program called "Stanford Design Thinking Virtual Crash Course". It is taken in a real life Stanford design thinking workshop. In this one hour program, you will see how participants learn to design a gift-giving experience. I have used this exercise many times in our training workshops. People love it and get so excited when they make and present their prototypes to their classmates. 

Further reading and viewing:

Stanford Design Thinking Virtual Crash Course, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FzFk3E5nxM

“Design thinking”, by Tim Brown, Harvard Business Review, 2008 June.

“Design thinking for social innovation”, by Tim Brown and Jocelyn Wyatt, Stanford Social Innovation Review, 2010 Winter.