“Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the need of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success,” Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO – an international design consultancy firm, indeed said it right. People often think that design thinking is closely related to designing, but it’s not. Instead, it uses human-centered perspectives to provide creative, empathetic, and collaborative solutions for many problems. But how’s design thinking related to innovation? How does it help in creation? To understand this, let’s break it into chunks and understand it from scratch.
Understanding design thinking
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Design thinking is the observation skill and a burning desire to be curious. When it comes to design, thinking, curiosity and observation skills walk on a similar line. Once deeply, seeing into design thinking makes us realize that it’s all about being curious and a keen observer of the surrounding. To arouse curiosity and nurture your mind for the same, you need to create a whole new mindset. With this, you will have a more in-depth and better understanding of literally everything surrounding you. It will not only help you in deepening the relationship with an individual, but also will help in connecting better with them. Your perspective of looking at problems will be changed completely.
If you want to keep it simple, design thinking is nothing but the ability to think from the customer’s perspective. It is necessary to consider the customer’s point of view because it helps in knowing what the customer thinks or feels; why they behave the way they are acting, especially in a situation related to your product or service.
Every great innovator – be it in music, literature, engineering, art, science, or business needs to practice design thinking. It is called “design” thinking when it’s usually associated with extracting solutions with a scientific approach. The reason is that it provides a creative and innovative solution using a human-centered point of view or system.
The design thinking for innovation addresses a wide range of problems.
- Redefining value,
- quality of life,
- involves multiple systems,
- coping with rapid social or market changes,
- issues relating to new technology,
- addressing rapid changes in society,
- scenarios involving multidisciplinary teams,
- educational advances,
- human-centered innovation,
- problems affecting diverse groups of people,
- shifting markets and behaviors,
- issues relating to corporate culture,
- re-inventing business models,
- complex unsolved societal challenges,
- entrepreneurial initiatives,
- medical breakthroughs,
- problems that data can’t solve,
And many more.
Is design thinking as good as thinking “out of the box”?
Design thinking is usually called thinking “out of the box.” The designers and innovators are developing new ways of design thinking such that design thinking doesn’t resemble the problem-solving skills or methods. In design thinking, your core purpose is to improve the product with the help of analysis and understand the user’s perspective regarding a product or service. You must also be interested in challenging the assumptions and asking relevant and significant questions in design thinking.
Falsifying the previous assumptions is an essential element in thinking out of the box. In layman’s terms, the ability to prove whether or not the previous assumptions are valid. Once the problem statement is analyzed, your solution generation process will righteously reflect the genuine limitation and solution. Design thinking for innovation will let you think a little deeper and help you do the right kind of research in testing the products or services and developing new ways to improve them.
Innovation and design thinking
The innovation in today’s date is not just a selected individual; it is everyone’s business. Irrespective of you being a teacher, musician, engineer, or start-up enthusiast – each one is expected to do the most out of the least. This justifies why design thinking is a need for every one of us. Irrespective of the organization and the level, design thinking provides the skills required to become an innovative thinker and reveal the creative opportunities you did not notice before.
Today, design thinking is taught even in various top universities. Significantly, the success rate for innovation improves when strategies are made using design thinking for innovation. The companies that are design-led like Apple, IBM, SAP, Nike have outperformed S&P 500 with 211% growth in over ten years. You must have noticed yourself going “wow” when you see their products. Proper implementation of design thinking adds that wow factor to the products, makes it more desirable and palpable to the service.
The innovation is no longer engineering-driven, product-centric, and marketing focused but is design-driven, user-centric, and user experience focused. The design thinking skill is to figure out what is desirable with a customer’s view, is economically viable, and technically feasible. Design thinking draws on creativity and imagination, logic, systemic reasoning, and intuition to realize the possibility of getting the desired outcome, which will benefit the end-user.
Design thinking is associated with improving the future of a product or service by developing new ideas. It is unlike critical thinking and not exactly but a little similar to problem-solving. The design aims to focus on bettering the quality of life for the people and the globe. Most of the companies are optimized to solve the stated problem. However, finding an issue that would be worth solving is a creativity factor. The organizations should aim for groundbreaking innovation, and they should strive to level up the creativity across the organization.
Conclusion
A trusted ATO will help you get trained in various skills like,
- 5D design thinking framework,
- discovering define Dream Design Dry run phases,
- ideating workshops,
- creating innovative solutions,
- increasing conversion rates,
- performing iterative tests,
- creative interactive prototypes,
- performing behavioral user testing
All these skills are specially required in design thinking for innovation. These skills will help you get expertise in design thinking. We can say that design thinking is an interesting topic in itself.
