Part 1 - What is Design Thinking?

Last year I had been part of an accelerator program at CIIE, IIM Ahmedabad for 4 months. During that I had a chance to attend few sessions on Design Thinking.

Coming from Software Development background design for me had a limited meaning before this session. It took me some time to grasp the concept and some research on it before being able to put my thoughts in writing.

Today, I am trying to put it in perspective with the current business practices and positioning my understanding about design thinking in 4 parts:

1. What is Design Thinking?
2. On the ground directives of practicing Design Thinking
3. Service Design Thinking & Case Study
4. CQ - Future of Design Thinking

In this article I will be writing about the first part – What is Design Thinking?

Every Human Being is a Design Thinker naturally. Abductive thinking which a part of design thinking is has been playing role in our evolution for years.

These days, all organizations claim to encourage "Innovation".However a business person is usually trained to perform "analytical thinking"; analyzing the past to predict the future, this gives a sense of "reliability". While designer creates something that is not replicable in past. This fosters “Innovation”.  Thinking derived from past is more analogous to “Prove It” which is complete opposite of “Innovation”.  A business person to encourage innovation has to be receptive to "may be", not only to the question "what or how" in the past.

Innovating is risky, not innovating is even more risky. Most of the corporations or professionals feel it risky to innovate and depend more on the research. Market research though can identify these threats, will not always reveal them, the standard business solutions are of a little help. This is because, Market Research or Analytical Thinking are linear in nature (point A to point B or from past to present).

Design thinking brings a holistic vision to innovation. Design thinking is a natural human process that relies on abilities we all have but are overlooked by more conventional problem-solving practices. It utilizes our ability of being intuitive, prone to recognize patterns, to construct ideas that are comprehensive as well as functional, and to be expressive  emotionally and through our language. Nobody wants to run an organization on intangible aspects of emotion or motivation, neither on over-reliance on rational of blinkers which can be just as risky. Design thinking a integrated third way incorporates the best of all and helps in encouraging "Innovation".

The design thinking process is best thought of as a system of inter-woven spheres rather than a sequence of orderly steps.

There are three main spheres for practicing Design Thinking:

Immersion: Problem or opportunity that encourages thinker to find a solution

Ideation: Ideation is the process of generating, developing, and testing ideas

Prototyping: Path of connecting ideas with tangible or measurable system to gauge impact on end user's life

Immersion is usually the first step, although it is not followed always in this order. You can start from any of the stages and then follow with Immersion -> Ideation -> Prototyping iteratively.

Lets compare Design thinking with conventional market research or analytical thinking to get more perspective before I end Part I. 

In my next post I will cover each stage in detail, and various practices that can be executed on the ground to get effective results.

Please write your comments if you liked the article or if you have any suggestions tweet me on my twitter handle @ecoursewiz.

Thank you Prof. Ashis Jalote Parmar for sharing this valuable knowledge with me.

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Dhaval Mandalia enjoys project management, training executives and write about management strategies. He’s also a contributing member in the local entrepreneur community in Gujarat. Follow him on Twitter and Google+.