How Design Thinking Frees Us from an Encumbered Mind?

In my nearly three decades of life on earth, I’ve developed a long list of routines, habits, and likes and dislikes. But, I’ve also discovered that these patterns, no matter how familiar and comforting, keeps us from developing a habit of looking at solutions outside the box. The challenge comes from long developed patterns of thinking that are modeled on the repetitive activities and commonly accessed knowledge we surround ourselves with.

I realized this some years ago when I was visiting a friend in Northwest Punjab during summer and both he and I were enjoying our afternoon tea on his lawn. His young son, who was playing nearby with his sister trying to play badminton with a Ping-Pong ball. 

We were engrossed in our conversation and reminiscing about our time at college when his son tugged on his sleeves and said “Abba, Abba, (daddy, daddy) the lawn took my ball.”  

 Perplexed and a bit annoyed my friend looked at his son and said, “What?” 

And the son walked us to a narrow hole in the lawn through which his Ping-Pong ball had disappeared. Despite our best efforts neither of us could reach down that narrow hole to retrieve the ball.

While we were trying our conventional wisdom to solve this unconventional problem, along came his older daughter, who was playing with him using the Ping-Pong ball. She had brought the water jug off of the central table where we were sitting and began filling the hole with the water in the jug. 

 Sure enough in a few seconds the Ping-Pong ball was floating on top of the hole filled with water. This is the simplest and the best example of unconventional thinking I’ve observed in my life as a technical person, where a problem that was perceived to be difficult and complicated was solved using the knowledge of the properties of the object involved.

 The young girl had noticed that Ping-Pong balls floated when tossed into water. So, instead of throwing the ball in the water she decided to throw water at the ball to have the ball float up.

Why is Ingrained Thinking the Enemy of Innovation?

 Being the “creatures of habit” human beings model their thinking and how they perceive problem solving as repetitive activities that uses commonly accessed knowledge. Whereas, innovation by definition requires that we seek to understand the user, challenge assumptions, and redefine problems in an attempt to identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding.

 These repetitive activities also lead us to form patterns of thinking that are often referred to as schemas, which are defined as organized sets of information and relationships between things, actions and thoughts. 

 The schemas are stimulated and initiated in the human mind when we encounter some environmental stimuli. Although, the schema we develop can be very useful in maneuvering through our day-to-day life, they inhibit us from gaining new insights into finding new and innovative ways of adopting solution-based approach to solving problems. Something that “Design Thinking” helps us achieve.

Photo by Ashley Batz on Unsplash

What is Design Thinking?

 Design thinking is a repetitive process of improvement of an idea with a deep insight into how it will impact and resolve a user’s need. This process seeks to intimately understand the user, challenge assumptions, and redefine problems in an attempt to identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be instantly apparent with conventional thinking. Simultaneously, Design Thinking presents us with a solution-based approach to solving problems. It is a well-designed toolset of hands-on methods that assists us in thinking and working with today’s user challenges and helps us design intuitive solutions.

What Separates Design Thinking from Conventional Methodologies?

Rather than simply focusing on product development, Design Thinking begins with developing a deep understanding of the people for whom we’re designing the products or services. This is known as developing Empathy with the target user by putting yourself in their shoes and understanding how our solution will impact a user’s life.  

In that realm a design thinker learns to question the problem, question the assumptions made, and questioning the implications of the designed solution. This is central to our ability to avoid ill-defining the problem by constantly re-framing the problem in human-centric ways.

This hands-on approach in prototyping and testing by sketching, prototyping, testing, and trying out concepts and ideas helps us define problems and helps find solutions that aren’t foreign to solution developers to the point of being virtual and esoteric.

In conclusion, design thinking not only makes the designers human, it also helps them interact with and find solutions to problems in human-centric ways.