What Is Design Thinking And Why Is It Important?

As time passes by, the importance of design thinking has been consistently increasing in the modern world. The consumers of today’s world can access global markets quickly. Design Thinking has evaded the differences between physical and digital experiences.

Suppose your company focuses on a design-driven culture that makes customers the highest priority. It provides accurate and meaningful results and provides you with a competitive advantage. This helps in encouraging all functions, focussing more on the customers.

The consulting firm IDEO has made Design Thinking popular in this emerging market. Its CEO, Tim Brown, has helped design thinking methods gain momentum in the business world. 

Also, check out the design thinking online course certification from Great Learning. This course is the Stanford design thinking certificate, and the faculty of Stanford University developed the curriculum covering the entire framework of the design thinking process. In this course, you will learn Design Thinking from scratch to the advanced level.

So, let’s move forward and discuss what exactly is Design Thinking.

1. What is Design Thinking?
2. History of Design Thinking
3. Why is Design Thinking Important?
4. The Four Principles of Design Thinking
5. The Five Phases of Design Thinking
6. Why does Design Thinking Appeals to Top Businesses?
7. Benefits of the Design Thinking Approach
8. Applications of Design Thinking 
9. Industries in Design Thinking
10. Learning Design Thinking
11. Skills and Concepts
12. Importance of Design thinking

What is Design Thinking?

Tim Brown presented a fantastic definition of Design Thinking: 

“Design Thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.”

Design Thinking is a strategy for creative problem solving by prioritizing customers’ requirements above everything else. It helps to engage a person in several opportunities like experimenting and creating a prototype model, gathering feedback from customers and redesigning the product using innovative solutions. You can apply design thinking to various fields such as architecture, engineering, business, etc. 

Design Thinking is a solution-based approach where you focus on finding solutions to the problems in contrast to the problem-based approach. The problem-based thinking approach focuses on finding obstacles and limitations on why a problem exists.

History of Design Thinking

Design thinking essentially came into view between the 50s and 60s. While there is no particular event that can pinpoint the origins of this concept, both the industrial revolution and World War II pushed the boundaries of the emergence of Design thinking. Engineers, architects, industrial designers, and cognitive scientists, at the time, came together in understanding creative and collective problem solving – which was driven by the significant societal changes then.

The first authors that discussed the idea of design thinking were John E. Arnold in Creative Engineering (1959) and L. Bruce Archer in Systematic Method for Designers (1965). However, a cognitive scientist and Nobel Prize laureate, Herbert A. Simon was the first individual to mention design thinking as a ‘way of thinking’ and as an approach. This was seen in 1969, in his book, The Sciences of the Artificial. He continued to contribute many ideas throughout the 70s which are now regarded as principles of design thinking.

By the 1970s, design thinking combined human resources, and technological and strategic needs of our times and progressively managed to develop over the decades. It has now become one of the leading innovative methodologies existing today.

Why is Design Thinking Important?

If you think like a designer, it can transform how your organisation develops products, services, processes, and strategies. It brings together the desirability from the customer’s perspective with what is technologically feasible and economically viable. It also provides various opportunities for people who aren’t trained as designers to utilise creative tools so that they can tackle a vast range of problems/challenges.

There are also some essential aspects in which design thinking helps, and they are:

• The main objective is to solve the customer’s requirements
• Helps in tackling ambiguous and challenging problems
• Drives people to create innovative solutions
• It helps organisations to run faster with more efficiency

The Four Principles of Design Thinking

Christoph Meinel of the Hasso-Plattner Institute and Larry Leifer of Stanford University proposed four universal principles of design thinking:

1. The Human Rule: “All design is social in nature.” The problems must be solved by satisfying the human requirements and recognizing the human element in all technologies.

2. The Ambiguity Rule: “Ambiguity is inevitable.” We perform experiments to the limits based on our knowledge, control events based on our limits, and liberty to see things from different perspectives.

3. The Redesign Rule: “All design is redesign.” In today’s world, technology and social events have been consistently evolving. We must study and analyze how the requirements of humans were met in earlier times.

4. The Tangibility Rule: “Making ideas tangible facilitates communication.” If we make our ideas tangible for prototypes, it facilitates designers to communicate effectively.

The Five Phases of Design Thinking

The Hasso-Plattner Institute at Stanford proposed the five universal phases of design thinking:

Empathize: Design thinking begins with empathy – to gain an insight into the problem that it sets out to resolve. However, more than understanding the problem, this step is crucial to understanding the requirements of the user, to deliver a more customized solution. This step involves observing and engaging with the user to understand their behavior patterns, inclinations, preferences, and likely reactions to situations. Only when businesses have fully grasped the user environment and behavioral patterns, will they be able to tailor solutions to fit user needs. 

Define: The next step in the process is organizing all the information collected during the previous phase. This will eventually help you to define the problem statement from a more human-centric perspective. Define stage not only helps in breaking down obscure ideas and issues but also helps to form a structured approach towards solving it. This is when you lay down the plan and frame questions that need to be answered in order to resolve the issue at hand.

Ideate: This is probably the most crucial phase of all and interestingly, allows a lot of room for creativity. This is when you think radically and prepare for experimentation to champion the user experience. It’s important to bring fresh perspectives to the table at this stage and think of new ways of resolving the issue. It’s also equally important to consider probable obstacles both from the user’s end and environmental while suggesting these solutions. 

Prototype: Prototyping involves curating your best ideas and putting them into shape. This stage allows designers to test the effectiveness of the solution internally in a small-scale environment before presenting it for implementation. This could also mean executing all the probable solutions and checking for their effectiveness. An important part of this phase is eliminating all the failed/ less effective options and moving forward with the best ones. Prototyping allows designers to understand how users would typically behave or react to any particular solution, thereby helping them form a more realistic solution that can be adopted on a larger scale.

Testing: The final stage of design thinking involves testing the best solutions of the previous stage. Since this is an iterative methodology, the results of this stage are used to refine the end solution further. More often than not, the solutions identified in the prototyping phase undergo major changes or are even discarded to fit the real environment user needs. The end result of this phase is then a tried and tested solution that will endure the environmental hindrances and user expectations. 

Why does Design Thinking Appeals to Top Businesses?

An empathy-driven approach toward problem-solving through experimentation and innovation makes design thinking a solution-oriented methodology, rather than that of problem identification. This particular ideology has made design thinking a favorite among business leaders since companies are always looking for ways to step into the future. See how PepsiCo reintroduced its brand and won back the market with design thinking. 

Recent times have thrown an increasing number of unprecedented problems at us, compelling us to consider human behavior and reactions to change and solutions. Design thinking is a framework to do just that, in a structured manner. It is a nonlinear methodology that involves empathy, ideation, prototyping, and implementation to tackle complex issues seamlessly. Qualities like empathy and curiosity are what make design thinking a unique problem-solving methodology, but it is perhaps the emphasis on human behavior that makes it the most effective. 

Benefits of the Design Thinking Approach

The following are some significant benefits of following the design thinking process or approach:

• It helps to overcome the creative challenges: Design Thinking provides you with the freedom to have a look at problems from several perspectives. It involves a lot of brainwork to bring out the best ideas, which helps broaden the learner’s knowledge. 

• It helps to effectively meet the customers’ requirements: As we discussed earlier, design thinking involves developing prototypes where you perform testing and implement the customer’s feedback iteratively for quality assurance. By following the design thinking approach effectively, your product will eventually meet the customers’ requirements.

• It helps broaden your knowledge of Design Thinking: You will perform numerous evaluations in the design thinking process. You will always try to improvise your model by implementing the customer’s feedback to ensure that the customer is satisfied. 

Applications of Design Thinking 

Design thinking has its applications in a range of professions. In sports, education, study, and research to business and management, design thinking is widely used by several organisations around the world.

Business

Design thinking is most popular in businesses. It helps them in optimization processes, especially with respect to product creation, marketing, and contract renewal. Considering that these processes require a good amount of focus on their customers, design thinking proves to be immensely useful in their assistance. In businesses, design thinking helps design thinkers not only develop deep empathy for their customers but also to create solutions that tend to their specific needs.

Information Technology

The IT industry makes a lot of products that require trials and proof of concepts. The industry needs to empathize with its users and not simply deploy technologies. IT is not only about technology or products, but also processes. The developers, analysts, consultants, and managers have to brainstorm possible ideas for solving the problems of the clients. This is where design thinking helps a lot.

Education

The education sector in our economy demands the most when it comes to creative solutions. It essentially can make the best use of design thinking through student feedback. Feedback from students on their requirements, goals, and challenges in the classroom can prove to be useful in easy problem-solving. That is, by working on their feedback, the design thinks can come up with relevant and creative solutions to address their issues. 

For instance, Michael Schurr, a 2nd-grade teacher in New York realized that his students would be more comfortable with lowered bulletin boards. He also came up with the idea of creating a comfortable semi-private lounge for working students as a space to study. As a result, his students not only became more engaged with each other but also had a good amount of space to store books and study.  

Healthcare

Design thinking plays a vital role in the healthcare industry as well. The expenditure in this sector is healthcare is continuing to increase by the day. A major concern of the experts worldwide is about bringing quality healthcare to people at lower costs.

The Venice Family Clinic in Venice, California has managed to come up with innovative solutions in opening a low-cost children’s clinic that serves low-income families. A major challenge included the problems of finance and language barriers at lower costs for underprivileged children. Fostering good health along with profits did not entirely sound sustainable. However, using design thinking, the inefficiencies in the system and the perennial challenges were addressed and solved.

Industries in Design Thinking

Design thinking has become a pet phrase for many successful businesses today but its impacts are very circumstantial and differ for each industry. It helps brands stay ahead of the curve by driving innovation in a business environment. A human-centric approach to problem-solving makes it an effective bridge between brands and customers. 

Experts use it for enhancing both physical and digital experiences of products and services. Companies resorting to design thinking consider design much more than a phase or a department –  in fact, it shapes the entire thought behind business goals. Building a design-optimized company culture will certainly drive more innovation and customer satisfaction. The five most prominent industries that were revolutionized by design thinking are:

• Entertainment
• Consumables 
• Banking
• Travel and lodging
• Technology and communication

If you are wondering how different industries benefit from design thinking, read in-depth on the prominent industries of design thinking.

Learning Design Thinking

How to start

Before you dive into the deep ends of design thinking, there are a couple of things to keep in mind. Here’s how you can get started.

1. Gather insights and have a keen observation

One of the first steps to start design thinking would be to gather insights by practicing Empathy, Observation, and/or Interviewing your customers. Knowing what your customers want is the first step toward creating products or services for them. We must never assume how they think or feel, instead, we should gather insights into their requirements. Keen observation and gaining insights is thus a critical part of the design thinking approach.

2. Build and plan a framework to learn about unmet needs

An essential step, in the beginning, is to build and plan a framework of ideas to understand the required needs. This can either be through a prototype or just a simple blueprint even. Resources such as pen and paper or a slide deck are easily accessible and can be used to create a mock-up of ideas and get feedback. This will help better understand the needs of your customers before investing in production. Companies can get a better understanding and gain insights which would, in turn, help them frame a better design thinking structure.

3. Turning our problems into questions

Our first response, when presented with a problem, is to try and find a solution right away. If we learn how to shift our mindset and try asking questions, this might lead us closer to the root of the challenge and provide incremental improvement. If we take the example of a company struggling with retention rates. They can ask “How can we improve our employee experience?”. This would uncover insights that focus on real human needs and thus drive us to a better solution.

4. Use reach to understand past, present, and future

A lot of different research techniques are used to generate insights into the needs of people. Observation, interviewing and empathy are few among these research techniques. Types of research can be classified into mainly three groups. Generative research helps in identifying new opportunities. Evaluative research focuses on gathering feedback on experiments and helps in moving forward. And lastly, traditional market research, or validating research, is intended to understand what is currently happening. Ensuring that we maintain a balance between the different research types would help us focus on the present and look forward to the future. 

Skills and Concepts

There are a couple of skills and concepts which are necessary for you to learn in order to become successful in this field. Multiple resources are available through which you could learn the following skills in order to better yourself. A few of the skills and concepts are as follows-

• Human-centered Design
• Finding what your needs are
• Interviewing and Empathy-Building Techniques
• Making sense of Observations and Insights
• Defining a Point of View
• Ideation
• Developing and Testing Prototypes
• Minimal Viable Products
• Defining and Testing Business Models and Business Cases

Importance of Design thinking

In recent decades, it has become beyond vital to develop and refine skills to not only understand but also act upon the constant changes in this dynamic economy. Considering the rapid developments in technology today, the world has become increasingly interconnected and complex, and design thinking provides a means to cope in a widely human-centric manner. It allows us to think outside the box and understand problem-solving on a slightly deeper level. 

Design thinking has proven to improve the world around. Considering its ability to generate ground-breaking solutions in a less disruptive, yet creative way, it is more than just a process – it is an innovation. 

One effective way to apply design thinking is by gaining a solid foundation in user interface and user experience design. This free UI/UX design course is an excellent resource for learning how to build designs that truly resonate with users

While design thinking has been around for a while now, many businesses are yet to adopt it. As an increasing number of brands keep looking for ways to weave design thinking into their business strategies, marketers, product engineers, and business leaders keep looking for ways to master this methodology. Fortunately, for those interested, top international business schools are offering courses that aim at equipping future business strategists with the knowledge that helps brands prioritize user experience. You can enroll in these courses through Great Learning – India’s premier institute of e-learning. Check out the Design Thinking course syllabus for a better understanding of the course formats.