My first reaction as I learnt design thinking was – ” aren’t we talking about common sense here” . Seemed the whole paradigm of design thinking is just another hype from self appointed consultants , experts and self proclaimed practitioners.
But more I read and slowly starting to practice it – I realised that it gives a disciplined approach to one’s thought process and more than often it’s beyond common sense .
Mainly used to accelerate innovation and growth , let me explain the key 4 stages that one goes through using Design thinking are :-
What is – what is the current state & Reality , Attending to the present , unarticulated needs
What if – what if anything were possible , brainstorm without worrying about constraints , recombinant creations called business concepts are created
What Wows – testing , hypothesis of business concepts – make hard choices and find the wow zone
What works – Trying prototypes with fast feedback cycles , refine and iterate
Design thinking is a problem solving approach that asks four questions ( mentioned above ) and that is human-centered, possibility-driven, option-focused, and iterative in its approach. Let ‘s think about this :-
Human-centered :- for whom we want to generate value , innovate and hence user driven design . Need to engage them and do deep exploration of what the needs are
Possibility-driven :- It uses this information we’ve learned to ask the question, what if anything, were possible? As we begin to create new ideas about how to serve them.
Options :- generating multiple option, multiple solution basket.
Iterative :- Iterate your way to success by conducting cycles of real world experiments rather than running analysis using historical data.
Nishant Govil 