UNIT II - CREATIVITY & DESIGN THINKING

Out of box thinking, Lateral Thinking. Design Thinking Process: Introduction to design thinking,
history of design thinking, case studies in design thinking, design thinking process,
implementing the process in driving innovation, design thinking in social innovations. Tools of
design thinking. Design Thinking in Various Sectors (Health sector, Finance, Education,
Infrastructure) Design thinking case studies in retail, design thinking case studies in banking,
design thinking case studies in management decisions
How to think out of the box?
To come with strategies which are new and effective is a big deal in itself and requires a calm
and focussed mind. Here are tips for you to think creative and as they say, 'out of box'.

How to think out of the box

A famous quote by Albert Einstein goes as follows, “Creativity is seeing what everyone else has
seen, and thinking what no one else has thought.” The ability to see a thing in a way that most
people don't is basically what creativity is. And as it happens 'Creativity is one of the most
desired skills in today's workforce. You must have often heard people saying that you need to
think out of the box. But what exactly is this thinking out of the box? Well, thinking out of the
box means coming up with ideas that are unique and have never been proposed before in the
situation. If you are of the belief that, 'that's easy' well then, you are in for a hard reality check.
What is lateral thinking?
It essentially means being able to think creatively or "outside the box" in order to solve a
problem.
Usually, logical thinking is used to solve problems in a direct, straightforward way (also known
as vertical thinking). Lateral thinking however, looks at things from a sideways perspective (also
known as horizontal thinking), in order to find answers that aren't immediately apparent.

Examples of lateral thinking interview questions

These questions are particularly popular with job interviewers. Not only do they test your ability
to think creatively, but they can also reveal your problem solving skills as well. If you're
someone who enjoys playing puzzles or working out brain teasers, then you may already be good
at answering these types of interview questions.
This type of interview question can sometimes be difficult to identify. If you're ever asked a
question in an interview that seems a bit odd, or perhaps doesn't make sense upon first hearing,
there's a chance it could be a lateral thinking question. Here are some examples of lateral
thinking based questions:
 Name an ancient invention still in use in most parts of the world today that allows people
to see through walls. Answer: The window.
 An Australian woman was born in 1948 but only celebrated her 16th birthday quite
recently. Why? Answer: She was born on February the 29th.
 Or you may simply be asked: Can you give us an example of a difficult situation where
you had to think laterally to get out of it?
This question is actually more difficult that it might seem. A good place to start could be to think
of a time when you did something creative and came across a problem, then explain how you
resolved it by using some sideways thinking.
How to improve your lateral thinking skills

Mind mapping can be a great way to improve your lateral

thinking skills
Improving these skills can be challenging as lateral thinking comes more naturally to some
people than others.
However, like everything else, practice makes perfect, and setting yourself lateral thinking
examples can help.
Because this type of skill is "situational" and displays a thought process rather than something
physical (like IT skills for example), it can be tough to come up with ways of boosting your
ability.
Mind mapping
Mind maps can be a great way of solving a problem when logical thinking just doesn't help.
Because mind maps are visual aids, they require your brain to adjust its thought processes, which
can often help you find answers unexpectedly. Mind maps give you the opportunity to put all
your ideas down on paper and then take a step back to gather your thoughts.

Using your senses

We all have five senses – sight, touch, hearing, smell and taste – yet we very rarely use all of
them to solve problems. Typically, you use our visual senses to work things out but making use
of our other senses can sometimes have useful results.
For example, when faced with a problem, why not speak your thoughts aloud and record them on
your mobile phone? When you listen back, you may find something that you would have missed
otherwise.
Reverse thinking
Reverse thinking involves analysing what people normally do in a situation and then doing the
opposite. If you find yourself only getting so far into a problem and them becoming stuck, you
might want to start at the end and work backwards. For example, look at the problem and then
describe what you'd ideally like the solution to be. From there, you can begin working backwards
to find the starting point to your solution.
What careers use lateral thinking?
Lateral thinking is a useful skill whatever job you end up doing, but there are some career
paths where it can really come in handy. Here are some examples of lateral thinking career
choices:
Advertising
People who work in advertising use this type of thinking to persuade us to buy products. If it's
often those adverts that make us think or a little different that we remember the most.
Marketing
Marketers often have to come up with novel or creative ways to promote products and services.
Although there are some rules in marketing, it's often the campaigns that bend the rules slightly
that are successful.
Media
Working in the media, you may have to use these thinking skills to deliver a message in a
creative way. Whether you're a journalist, filmmaker or press release writer, some sideways
thinking can come in handy.
Design Thinking Process and Its Phases
 Design plays a crucial role in a product’s success. A product that fails to meet its customers’ needs cannot
be successful on the market. In order to increase chances of success, more and more companies are
focusing on human-centered design—they put the end user at the heart of product design and evaluate
every design decision according to the user’s needs and wants. Design thinking is one type of human-
centered design methodology that enables companies to solve design challenges in innovative ways. 
This article will describe the design thinking methodology and walk you through each step of this
methodology.
What is design thinking?
Design thinking is a methodology that attempts to solve complex problems in a creative and user-centric
way. Core features of the design thinking methodology include:
 Focus on end-users. The end-user plays a key role in the design thinking process—all key product
design decisions are evaluated according to the end user’s needs and wants.
 Solid problem framing. Rather than accepting the problem as given, designers explore the problem
space to find a root cause of the problem. The insights they gain can help designers reinterpret the
given problem.
 Creating tangible solutions. Convey design solutions using sketching and prototyping as opposed to
presentations and slide decks.
Who can participate in design thinking?
Design thinking is focused on collaboration between designers and users; but does it mean that only
designers can participate in this process? Absolutely not. In fact, it’s recommended to invite colleagues
from various disciplines to participate in design thinking because it can produce a range of ideas. Different
perspectives on the problem will ultimately lead to better solutions.
Does design thinking work only for digital products?
No. Design thinking is a universal methodology that works equally well for physical and digital design. No
matter what you design, whether it’s a digital app or a physical chair, design thinking allows you to set
your assumptions aside and build products tailored specifically for your users’ needs.
Five phases of the design thinking process
The five-stage design thinking model was originally posited by the Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at
Stanford (d.school). The design thinking stages are:
 Empathize. Understand the problem of the user for whom you are designing.
 Define. Form a problem statement.
 Ideate. Generate creative solutions to this problem.
 Prototype. Build a tangible representation of this solution.
 Test. Validate this solution with your target audience.
 The five phases of the design thinking process are to empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and
test. Image credit D.School.
Empathize
The design thinking process starts with empathy. In order to design user-centered products and services,
you need to understand who your users are and what they need. To achieve this goal, product designers
immerse themselves in the context of the problem. During this phase, designers observe and engage with
real users or people who represent the target audience.
Try these useful techniques to empathize with users:
 User interviews. During user interviewers, interviewees are asked to tell a story about the last time they
experienced the problem. The answer will help product creators understand how people currently solve the
same or similar issues.
 Contextual inquiry. This is a technique of immersing yourself in your target users’ physical environment
so you can see how they interact with an existing product and gain a deeper personal understanding of the
problems they face.
 Empathy map. An empathy map is a visualization tool used to summarize what a product team knows
about its user. It describes what the user says, thinks, does, and feels. This information leads to a better
understanding of the target audience.
As you continue developing empathy for your users, focus on the emotional part of interactions (how do
products make users feel?). Emotions play a tremendous role in how we think about products. When users
develop positive associations with products, they are more likely to continue using them. That’s why it’s
essential to collect emotional responses (both positive and negative) that test participants’ experience when
performing a particular task in a product.
Define
At this stage, we analyze the qualitative and quantitative data we obtained during the empathize stage to
draw insights from it. This information will be used both to define a problem statement and guide the
ideation process. Clear problem statements will guide the product team throughout the design process—
those statements will help you understand what features and functions your users need in order to solve
their problems.
Try these useful techniques to help define the problem and guide your process:
 User journey analysis. A user journey is a visual depiction of the trip the user takes across the solution.
The user journey considers the steps that a user takes as well as their feelings, pain points, and moments of
delight. User journey analysis will help you to identify key pain points in a journey.
 How might we technique. Try rephrasing questions by adding “How might we…” at the beginning. The
phrase “how might we” followed by a particular pain point can encourage team members to think more
about problem space.
To help you define the problem, take a human-centered approach. For example, if you redesign an online
book subscription service and need to acquire new users, do not define the problem as, “We need to
increase the percentage of teenage readers by 30%.” Frame it from the user’s perspective: “Teenagers need
to have affordable access to educational literature in order to learn more about the world.”
Ideate
Ideation, or generating ideas, is a phase in which you go from understanding problems to exploring
solutions. The ideas that are identified will be prototyped and tested with people who represent your target
audience.
Try these useful techniques during the ideation phase:
 Worst Possible Idea. Worst Possible Idea is an ideation method where team members purposefully seek
the worst solutions. This technique can stimulate free thinking.
 Sketching. Sketching is a fast and efficient way to visualize your ideas. You don’t need to be a skilled
artist to create sketches. As long as you can draw boxes and arrows, you can communicate your ideas to
other people.
During this stage, do not judge the ideas. When it’s time to generate ideas, you should give yourself and
your team creative freedom. The more ideas you generate, the better. Don’t judge technical feasibility or
quality of your ideas in this step.
Prototype
Prototyping allows you to turn ideas generated in the previous phase into tangible artifacts that can be
tested later with real users. Most of the time, you start with low-fidelity prototypes (prototypes that convey
the basic idea of the intended solution) and move towards high-fidelity as you get more user feedback.
Try these useful techniques during the prototyping phase:
 Paper prototyping. Paper prototypes can help you quickly build and validate your design hypothesis with
minimal effort. Build rough paper prototypes to find what’s working and what’s not.
 High-fidelity digital prototyping. Hi-fi prototypes are great for validating user flows and identify areas
that require further attention. You can collect more detailed feedback using hi-fi prototypes.
Consider the following during this stage:
 Do not limit yourself only to one prototype. Prototype multiple solutions to understand which one
performs better.
 Create a library of common elements. Use a design system manager to create a library of common UI
elements and try to reuse them as you design individual screens. This approach will help you achieve
visual and functional consistency in your design.
 Think about technical feasibility and business viability. At this stage, you need to rely on data informed
decision making—use qualitative and quantitative data to evaluate your design solutions against the
technical feasibility and the business viability.

Design thinking compares what is desirable from a user’s point of view with what is both
technologically feasible and business viable. Image credit IDEO.
Test
The goal of this phase is to understand what parts of your design are effective and which are not. During
the testing phase, a product team gives a prototype to test participants and encourages them to complete
some common tasks with it. Testing will give a product team a clearer understanding of how real users
interact with a product, what problems they face, and how they feel.
Try these useful techniques during the test phase:
 Moderated usability testing. You conduct a series of testing sessions with your solution so you can get
feedback from people who represent your target audience. Moderators can ask clarifying questions and
collect more detailed feedback from participants (i.e., why exactly do test participants act the way they do).
 Focus groups. Focus groups are typically small groups of people (six to nine participants) who come
together to review and discuss a particular solution. Focus groups are great when you have a specific topic
you want to explore (say, understanding how user onboarding makes users feel). Here’s how to conduct
focus groups.
Consider the following during this stage:
 Learn how to critically evaluate design. Constructive criticism is a way of giving feedback that provides
specific, actionable suggestions. It’s the best way to provide feedback on design solutions. Here’s how to
critique product design or website.
 Focus on minimizing cognitive load in UX. Cognitive load is the amount of brainpower that users have to
invest in order to interact with your product. The more cognitive load users need to invest, the less
enjoyable a product experience becomes. Testing should help you to identify areas that can cause a high
cognitive load.
Design thinking isn’t always a linear process
It is important to mention that the five phases of the design process defined above are not always
sequential. In many cases, it’s a highly iterative loop. Depending on the needs of a project, individual steps
can occur in parallel, or the product team can move between phases as they design a product.
Embrace the iterative nature of the product design process. It’s rare to design a perfect solution right from
the start. A very common situation happens when insights acquired at later stages can influence decisions
made in earlier stages. For example, when a testing phase reveals new information about user behavior, the
team might want to run another brainstorming session and based on insights from the session, they may
decide to design a new prototype.

The key today is to think like a designer in the way you lead, explore, create and innovate
If you want to change something from the present situation into a preferred one, design thinking
helps you achieve this. It takes you through a process. It helps you reduce the risks by engaging
with internal and external people seeking out a new solution that solves a need, problem or
challenge. This comes through a series of prototypes to learn from, to test and then continually
refine concepts to get them to the finished value adding point, taking away the issues.
One of the best illustrations of the design thinking process is shown here: 
Design thinking helps the innovator to gain greater clarity, to find viable, feasible and desirable
ideas, design thinking should force user-centricity as central to innovators thinking. In its most
simple form, design thinking can be thought of as building the series of conversions that draw
out the needs, that eventually becomes the solution.
Design thinking can be highly supportive for continuously finding new meanings, both to
products and new usages or services. It can help answer why a customer will buy (or why they
will change behavior), it can clarify and make sense of things, and it can be the catalyst
to bringing insights and concepts together. So, Design Thinking is an approach for Creative
Problem Solving that is inspired by the way designers work.
What makes up the design thinking process to help innovators?
Managing New Product Development (NPD) can be a daunting challenge and so it is critical to
focus on what is important. Design thinking becomes a highly useful and effective collaborative
strategy to identify and solve problems creatively. As it is a non-linear, iterative approach that
focuses on user needs, articulating frameworks, and formulating a strategy its constantly
addressing the direction, design, and development and encourages a “fast acting-learning” cycle.
To quote Soren Petersen and provide his visual below, “Better design metrics and decision-
making in the product selection process could significantly reduce new product development
failure rates. In addition, including design considerations before marketing investments are made
would qualify as a game changer.”
 Recognizing that the direction, design, and development needs are constantly looping back to
validate against the user needs is central to design thinking. The earlier you involve design
thinkers, and specifically in contributing to any product brief, the more you can provide valuable
support in the NPD process.
A series of excellent posts by Peterson, such as “Design Thinking - What Is It in Practice,” Or
“How to Manage Innovation With Design Thinking,” raise the importance of the value of design
thinking within the innovation development process.
The value of design thinking hinges on how involved it becomes within any new
development thinking 
Establishing an inspirational design brief early on can help guide the process. Having part of any
brief include the design strategy can assist in facilitating innovation strategy, diagnosis,
formulation, and implementation.
Design thinking does have its limitations applied to innovation work.
Design thinking’s primary use, to date, has been in developing incremental innovation or help
resolve specific problems or challenges. There are often recognized needs established or can be
quickly found out, but if the requirement has a more open brief then design thinking needs to
shift from a tactical part to play into a more strategically designed one, where problem definition,
placing it in the appropriate context sometimes becomes as complex to understand as the
thinking that goes into achieving the potential solutions. There can be a lot of ‘push back’ if the
problem has not been fully framed, as the solution might only have many unintended
consequences.
The critical point is that design thinking is human-centered
It stands in service of creating positive outcomes for people, then its value is through a series of
activities to inspire the essential elements of creativity, to be able to take an abstract idea and
create something with it. It helps you to actualize your concepts and results, to drive increased
adoption, help design the behavioral change and ease in ongoing use. So, it becomes the tool to
engage with people, find the purpose that ‘it’ is meaningful and as a result, it should generate
positive cash flow. Value, meaning, and profit.
The five phases of design thinking, according to d.school, are as follows:
 Empathize – with your users
 Define – your users’ needs, their problem, and your insights
 Ideate – by challenging assumptions and creating ideas for innovative solutions
 Prototype – to start creating solutions
 Test – solutions
It is important to note that the five phases, stages, or modes are not always sequential.

Design thinking with services in mind

Design thinking is not just for products; it can help across services, and in designing new
business models. As we combine product and service far more then design thinking is focusing
even further on meeting the user’s and customer’s needs for that service. Service design needs to
‘feed’ into creating those great customer experiences.
Today many organizations, capitalizing on technology are looking to build a
comprehensive customer journey map, covering all the touch-points that a customer has with the
organization. Each of these becomes a potential engagement point, but so often organizations
struggle as they lack a complete understanding.
Design thinking can help and become as valuable to be part of any process, organizational
information, and technology (re-)design. One of its critical roles to play is to keep the
organization clear it is not internal design needs; it is customer needs as central. Often customer
journey understandings become component-by-component built by the specific team engaged in
that touch-point (customer service, spare or replacement part, billing) but the total delivery of
any service-oriented solution needs a holistic approach, and design thinking can greatly help in
this.
Service design tends to have a higher planning and organizing level. The focus is on
understanding infrastructure, communications, and material components increases. The service
design has a higher “quality, time, and interaction” emphasis for the response outcomes.
A constant questioning with any design thinking process revolves around “is it useful, usable,
desirable, efficient, and effective?” The more you involve the customer, the more you design the
solutions to match these requirements.
How design thinking can transform a service industry provider and how it engages and
designs
Software provider SAP has become deeply involved in design thinking. It saw design thinking as
a way to tackle complex challenges and make its software more intuitive and easier to use
through engaging internally and externally gathered around design thinking principles. SAP’s co-
founder Hasso Plattner founded the SAP Design Services Team as an organizational
transformation incubator and made a personal donation of $35 million to found the Hasso
Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, now known worldwide as simply “the d.school.”
The company made a deep, ongoing commitment to reinforce design thinking and trained
thousands of design thinking coaches, offering SAP design services to enable customers to
equally engage in experience design, and went on to create co-creation centers in different
locations around the world.
SAP’s global design function, with a Chief Design Officer, has won numerous awards including
seven Red Dot awards that "judges" design in product design, general design concepts, and
communication designs from agency work.
SAP offers design thinking through numerous educational platforms, such as "massive open
online courses" (MOOCs), to train software engineers and co-innovate with its customers at
different centers. The company makes available a raft of useful design tools and has a dedicated
website, www.build.me, where you can design enterprise apps. SAP also has a dedicated design
thinking website https://designthinkingwithsap.com/en/
Three examples of top design organizations
The Design Management Institute has a design value index based on 16 publicly-traded stocks
considered as “design-centric.” The criteria reflect best design management practice and these
companies show a 211 percent return over the S&P 500. These exemplars are building highly-
functional design organizations in less time than the past.
How to integrate design thinking into your innovation process
What is critically important, is that design thinking becomes recognized as a potential
organization capability building methodology. Of course, design thinkers take years to get to a
real experience level, most are probably passing through numerous design school courses. But,
within each organization, the general understanding of basic design thinking has its place.
1. Discovery
Choose a strategic topic to focus on and learn about. Design thinking starts with an end goal, a
desired future, and approaches to how you can make it happen. The topic should be one you find
compelling and motivating. Research your topic for insights. What do you need to understand?
What are the opportunities embedded in problems? Ask “why” questions to dig deeper.
Leverage stories to discover insights. What stories are your customers telling about their
experiences? What are the hopes, fears, and goals that motivate them? What insights can you
draw from their problems and aspirations?
2. Frame and reframe
Framing the right problem is the only way to create the right solution. Make sense of research by
seeing patterns, themes, and larger relationships between the pieces of information. Uncover
customer insights to reframe problem areas into opportunities.
3. Incubate
Creativity comes from a blend of individual and group ideation. Give people time to reflect on
ideas and incubate on their own before running a group ideation session.
4. Ideate
Now that you have some deep insights about your customers or users, generate ideas for
offerings that will deliver value to your customers. Build on ideas by asking “What else?” The
goal is to push beyond the obvious and generate a set of really good options for consideration.
5. Decide
Display your ideas on a wall and look for ideas that have "wow" power. This will save you from
draining everyone’s energy by debating every single idea. Vote for the best options based on
criteria such as desirability, technical feasibility, and business viability. The team can then
choose one to three ideas to prototype and test.
6. Prototype
Combine, expand, and refine ideas in the form of rough models or sketches. Invite users to test
out and respond to your prototype. How do they feel about your ideas? What feedback do they
have? Their responses will inform whether you move forward or kill your idea before investing
additional resources.
7. Deliver
The prototypes you have tested, built and launched will have a better chance of succeeding in the
marketplace.
8. Iterate
Design is not a linear. It is an iterative process. Use feedback to improve on your ideas and keep
iterating until there is nothing more to add or subtract.