Design Thinking
Adding a process to our thinking can elevate our ideas
What is Design Thinking?
Design Thinking is a process that can be used in designing products, services, businesses, processes, values and more. At it’s core design thinking is an iterative process that relies on rapid prototyping and testing. On each iteration, assumptions are challenged and new ideas added, while problems are fixed and poor functionality is dispensed with.
Design Thinking is also a non-linear process, which allows the redefining of the problem at any stage, so may lower costs of launching new services, products and businesses.
How does the process work?
The d.school at Stanford University defines Design Thinking as a process of 5 parts. These are:
- Empathise – Identifying the user and their needs through research. This element of design thinking is all about surfacing your empathetic understanding to fully understand the problem. This can be achieved through research and using elements from our Lego Serious Play, Comedy Improv and Game Storming workshops.
- Define – This element involves gathering the research and issues that emerged in the Empathise process in order to create a well defined problem statement.
- Ideate – This stage allows us to come up with ideas. This can be enhanced through the use of our other workshops.
- Prototype – This element is where we can get experimental and start creating some of our ideas into basic versions of our solution. This can be through creating single elements, grouped elements or even whole solutions.
- Test – Testing is the phase that allows us to test our assumptions and ideas or prototype solutions. This stage can help us refine our ideas and even redefine the problem.
This process can be gone through linearly or non-linearly as needed.
Design Thinking may create disruptive innovations, get in touch to talk to us about your needs, a design thinking workshops might work for you…