DESIGN THINKING

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 Design thinking is a non-
linear, iterative process
WHAT IS that teams use to
understand users,

DESIGN challenge assumptions,

redefine problems and
create innovative
THINKING? solutions to prototype
and test. Involving five
phases—Empathize,
Define, Ideate,
Prototype and Test—it is
most useful to tackle
problems that are ill-
defined or unknown.

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 THE FIVE STAGES OF DESIGN THINKING
The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (aka the
d.school) describes design thinking as a five-stage process.
Note: These stages are not always sequential, and teams
often run them in parallel, out of order and repeat them in an
iterative fashion.

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If you describe something
as non-linear, you mean
that it does not progress
or develop smoothly from
one stage to the next in a
logical way. Instead, it
makes sudden changes, or
seems to develop in
different directions at the
same time.

In mathematics and science,

a nonlinear system is a
system in which the change
of the output is not
proportional to the change of
the input. Nonlinear problems
are of interest to engineers,
biologists, physicists,
mathematicians, and many
other scientists because most
systems are
inherently nonlinear in
nature.
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1. Stage 1: Empathize—Research Your Users'
Needs
• Here, you should gain an empathetic
understanding of the problem you’re trying
to solve, typically through user research.
Empathy is crucial to a human-centered
design process such as design thinking
because it allows you to set aside your own
assumptions about the world and gain real
insight into users and their needs.
2. Stage 2: Define—State Your Users' Needs and
Problems
• It’s time to accumulate the information
gathered during the Empathize stage. You
then analyze your observations and
synthesize them to define the core problems
you and your team have identified. These
definitions are called problem statements.
You can create personas to help keep your
efforts human-centered before proceeding
to ideation.
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3. Stage 3: Ideate—Challenge Assumptions
and Create Ideas
• Now, you’re ready to generate ideas.
The solid background of knowledge from
the first two phases means you can start
to “think outside the box”, look for
alternative ways to view the problem
and identify innovative solutions to the
problem statement you’ve
created. Brainstorming is particularly
useful here.. (Brainwrite, Worst Possible
Idea and Scamper)
Worst Possible Idea is an ideation method where
team members purposefully seek the worst
solutions in ideation sessions. The “inverted”
search process relaxes them, boosts their
confidence and stokes their creativity so they can
examine these ideas, challenge their assumptions
and gain insights towards great ideas.
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Brainstorming is a group creativity technique by which efforts are made to find a conclusion
for a specific problem by gathering a list of ideas spontaneously contributed by its members.
In other words, brainstorming is a situation where a group of people meet to generate new
ideas and solutions around a specific domain of interest by removing inhibitions. People are
able to think more freely and they suggest as many spontaneous new ideas as possible. All
the ideas are noted down without criticism and after the brainstorming session the ideas are
evaluated. The term was popularized by Alex Faickney Osborn in the 1967 book Applied
Imagination. ➢ Worst Possible Idea is an ideation method where team members purposefully seek the
worst solutions in ideation sessions. The “inverted” search process relaxes them, boosts
their confidence and stokes their creativity so they can examine these ideas,
challenge their assumptions and gain insights towards great ideas.

➢ SCAMPER is an activity-based thinking process that can be performed by Cooperative

learning. Here the teacher assists the students in choosing a particular topic and helps
them to develop it through a structured process. After choosing an idea, the students are
given a tale where they perform the activity in steps corresponding to the letters in the
name.
➢ Substitute comes up with another topic that is equivalent to the present topics.
➢ Combine adds information to the original topic.
➢ Adjust identifies ways to construct the topic in a more flexible and adjusted material.
➢ Modify, magnify, minify creatively changes the topic or makes a feature/idea bigger or
smaller.
➢ Put to other uses identifies the possible scenarios and situations where this topic can be
used.
➢ Eliminate removes ideas or elements from the topic that are not valuable.
➢ Reverse, rearrange evolves a new concept from the original concept.
➢ Hence, SCAMPER as a teaching strategy helps the students to analyze the knowledge in its
creative form and helps the teacher to make teaching creative and interesting.

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4. Stage 4: Prototype—Start to Create 5. Stage 5: Test—Try Your Solutions Out
Solutions
• Evaluators rigorously test the prototypes.
• This is an experimental phase. The aim is to Although this is the final phase, design
identify the best possible solution for each thinking is iterative: Teams often use the
problem found. Your team should produce
results to redefine one or more further
some inexpensive, scaled-down versions of
problems. So, you can return to previous
the product (or specific features found
stages to make further iterations,
within the product) to investigate the ideas
alterations and refinements – to find or
you’ve generated. This could involve
rule out alternative solutions.
simply paper prototyping.

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 WHY IS DESIGN THINKING
SO IMPORTANT?
Professionals from a variety of fields, including architecture and
engineering, subsequently advanced this highly creative process to
address human needs in the modern age. Twenty-first-century
organizations from a wide range of industries find design thinking a
valuable means to problem-solve for the users of their products and
services. Design teams use design thinking to tackle ill-defined/unknown
problems (aka wicked problems) because they can reframe these
in human-centric ways and focus on what’s most important for users. Of
all design processes, design thinking is almost certainly the best for
“thinking outside the box”. With it, teams can do better UX
research, prototyping and usability testing to uncover new ways to meet
users’ needs.

Design thinking’s value as a world-improving, driving force in business

(global heavyweights such as Google, Apple and Airbnb have wielded it
to notable effect) matches its status as a popular subject at leading
international universities. With design thinking, teams have the freedom
to generate ground-breaking solutions. Using it, your team can get
behind hard-to-access insights and apply a collection of hands-on
methods to help find innovative answers.

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 5 STAGES OF DESIGN THINKING

Overall, you should understand that these stages are

different modes which contribute to the entire design project,
rather than sequential steps. Your goal throughout is to gain
the deepest understanding of the users and what their ideal
solution/product would be..

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 ATTRIBUTES OF DESIGN THINKING

Table 1 below lists the summary of Design Thinking CORE ATTRIBUTES, together with their descritptions. To
provide a better view of the attributes, some comments based on the definitions were also given.

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 CHARACTERISTICS OF DESIGN THINKERS

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 ENGINEERING “THINKING” VS DESIGN THINKING

Engineering relies on deductive reasoning while Design Inductive reasoning is a type of logical
thinking that involves forming
Thinking relies on inductive and/or abductive reasoning. The generalizations based on specific incidents
other main difference is that the main agent/actors inherent you've experienced, observations you've
made, or facts you know to be true or false.
in a Design Thinking problem are people, who are
unpredictable, irrational and don't always do what they say.

The main difference between inductive and deductive

Deductive reasoning is a basic form of
valid reasoning. Deductive reasoning, or
deduction, starts out with a general
statement, or hypothesis, and examines the
possibilities to reach a specific, logical
conclusion, according to California State
University.
reasoning is that inductive reasoning aims at developing a
theory while deductive reasoning aims at testing an existing
theory. Inductive reasoning moves from specific observations to
broad generalizations, and deductive reasoning the other way
around.

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 ENGINEERING “THINKING” VS DESIGN THINKING

There is a huge difference between

“engineering” and “design thinking”. It
comes down to that engineers are
problem-oriented, a design thinker is
need oriented. That’s a fundamental
another approach. For an engineer the
problem is obvious, As you can see in the
image below, it is even not mentioned at
all!

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 ENGINEERING “THINKING” VS DESIGN THINKING

Design thinking does not focus on the

(technical) problem but focuses on the
user of a yet to be invented solution
that meets his needs optimally. As you
can see below, a central verb is
empathizing.

The conceptual distinction between

design thinking and engineering makes us
clear why some technical solutions don’t
work at all, or are actually simply not used.
We should be happy that there is a
solution, but we are not: the solution works,
but is highly irritating. There is a satisfying
solution, but it is badly designed. The
thinking behind has been problem-
oriented, not user oriented.

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 ENGINEERING “THINKING” VS DESIGN THINKING

Examples of brilliant engineering but bad design:

•A wheelchair
•Governmental websites
•Electrical supplies for electronic equipment
•Boarding aircrafts
•Crossing streets safely for the blind
•Ticket systems for public transport
•Supply of stores
•Microwaves and other devices that you can not operate without
studying the manual

Remember: existing but poorly designed solutions are low-hanging

fruit for new ideas that really generate value. They are
opportunities easy to spot as riggers for a creative thinking effort.

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 THANK YOU!

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