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Design thinking is a design process that enables us to solve complex problems. It combines deep end-user experience, systems thinking, iterative rapid prototyping and multi-stakeholder feedback to guide us through the successive stages in our design.



Transcription:
Design thinking, is a design process that enables us to solve complex problems, It combines deep end-user experience, systems thinking, iterative rapid prototyping and multi-stake holder feedback to guid us through the successive stages in our design.
Design thinking like complex systems is interdisciplinary. It cuts across traditional domains by recognising that everything in our world is designed, thus it takes design out of its comfort zone of building chairs and fancy coffee cups to apply it to all areas from designing effective organisations to creating health care and financial services.
The design process is a bit like blowing up a balloon and then slowly letting all the air out of it again, it requires an initial phase of divergent thinking where we ask expansive question to explore the full context and many different possible options, before having to narrow our vision down upon a single solution and refining it through convergent thinking.
But this process is not mechanical it is more evolutionary meaning we can not fully foresee the end product from inception, it emerges and thus we need to think about the future in a open way, that means having confidence in the possibility that an unknown outcome is feasible as the whole point of the design process is that we will create something that does not yet exist and thus is unforeseen.
But we don’t have to reinvent the design process wheel every time, there are a few broad stages to it which different people will define in different ways but we are going to talk about some of the most often identified phases in the design thinking process, they include the stages of researching ideating, prototyping and testing. These steps don’t necessary follow a linear path; they can occur simultaneously and be repeated.
Firstly the researching phase, what we are doing here is not creating a thing, what we are creating is a solution, and this solution is a solution to a problem that a particular person or people have.
Thus we need to understand the context within which our system will exist and where it lies in relation to other thing within that environment, it is only when we see the given context within which a pre-existing version of the system operates that we get a full insight into why it is the way it is and from this can begin to conceive of an improved solution.
When we don’t understand the context then we will be likely to simply go round in circles, simply reacting to the pre-exists existing solution. One generation of designers decide that straight lines are the greatest thing extolling all their virtues making everything square and rectangular with pointy corners, until the next generation of designers come along who are now sick of straight lines so they start a new revolution of curves and rounded corners, until everyone gets tired of all the curves and rediscovers the straight line again and so on. By understanding the context and the history of the context to a design we can see its parameters, the advantages and disadvantages of both extremes and try to find integrative solution.
If we remember there is aways two qualitatively different level to a complex system, the local and the global, as designers of the system we will be dealing with it primary on the macro scale, but at the end of the day everything really plays out on the local level and we need to understand that local context where people interact and live out their lives through these products and services.
People can’t always express what exactly the problem is or know exactly what it is they want, so we need deep emersion to piece it together for ourselves, ethnographic studies, customer journey
maps, all forms of enduser experience and importantly empathy.