What challenges and opportunities of design thinking are there in the Virtual World.?

Design thinking is a methodology used to make the best use of and encourage creativity in workplace in
order to be innovative

It has steps that can be followed in any order which are,

Framing: looking at problems from different angles

Empathy: Do it for your consumers see what they would want in any decision

Story: make a story of your customer to see what you could provide them with so they can achieve their
dreams/objectives

Prototyping: Bring your ideas into physical tangible form so as to best be able to present them and take
feedback

And Collective Curiosity: Encourage creativity encourage failure it’s okay to fail but do things differently
matters

There are opportunities as well as challenges in virtual context that design thinking possesses

Opportunities:
Advertising/Communication: Advertising digitally can help in various ways including,
 Setting up Virtual Flagship stores to digitally present your products
 Buying advertising space in virtual malls social media spaces as well as radios
 Sponsor gaming or eSports events as well as other events to advertise your brand

E-commerce/V-Commerce virtual product sales:

Can sell digital version of the real life products example was given of telecom italia which made First Life
Communicator to allow avatars to call and text eachother

Organizations can also Bridge Virtual And Real life by providing platforms where people can experience
real life products virtually before ordering them in real life

Online Market Research:

Organizatons can conduct market research virtually to save costs like youtube sometimes takes surveys
when we open a video as to which product are we most familiar with…this could allow them to associate
users with products and market them accordingly

Also creativity of your virtual audience can be channeled like for example a game I used to play
conducted an art competition to generate posters for their recent advertisement and whoever won the
competition will not only get to represent the game with their art but also receive in game rewards this
is very cheap creativity leveraged as not only did they receive free advertising posters but also were bale
to see exactly what the users loved about their games from their arts and what could they do better…by
the way they also conduct in game surveys every month with each update

Human Resource Managemnet:

Recruitment can be done virtually as was the case with TMP world wide which conducted recruitment
virtually on their 2 islands in secondlife specifically bought to conduct recruitments

Also organizations could devlop apps to give a HR easy access portal to its employees so as to better
manage their employees and cater to their training and professional needs

Internal Process Management:

Virtual worlds can be utilized to conduct meetings online specially like in post covid era we can see that
a lot of work at home employees manage to attend their meetings in shorts from the comfort of their
home sipping tea and still be as productive and active in their mettings as they would have been
physically so yes Virtual worlds are great opportunities for virtual meetings to better conduct internal
processes of organizations to the point ohysical meetings might become obsolete soon

Challenges:
Uncertainity”

Virtually being creative has its uncetainity with it as it can be very ambiguous at times and impossibles
sometimes to see how much value will be delivered by a new creative way of doing things which has not
been done earlier…everyone expects guaranteed results so this is a big challenge for design thinking in a
virtual context as well as physical context

Risky:

If something has not been earlier done there is obviously no way of knowing its results right or wether it
would be worth the effort put in it however design thinking needs to be encouraged even at the cost of
failure so yes being creative virtually has its risks but it’s a high risk high reward game

Too much Expectations:

A lot of people view design thinking as a solution to all their problmes however it maybe great for
innovation and for reimagining the world virtually through things like virtual reality and augmented
reality but sadly its not a great tool for streamling company operations so expecting everything to be
solved by design thinking is a big challenge