Even if you think you have never engaged in Design Thinking, it could be that you have already done it unconsciously. A consulting colleague, who took this picture, was at a customer project in the countryside, with no cafeteria on the customer site. They ordered pizzas for lunch, but pizzas in Great Britain are twice as big as the ones in Germany. So half of it was always left in the evening.
This led to the following challenge: How to get a pizza warm in the evening in a hotel room with no kitchen equipment?
A rational brain would say: "No oven, no hot pizza".
A design thinking brain starts to combine things that might have nothing to do with each other at first thought.
The picture shows the consultant’s unusual solution.
Design Thinking is a lot about combining things that may not have a direct relationship to begin with. Throughout the workshop you might think about the iron and the pizza.
Design Thinking can happen everywhere. It just needs a fertile ground.
Let's Set Some Expectations
Design Thinking is Not a Single Workshop:
- Design Thinking is not a single workshop. It is a way of thinking throughout an engagement or project. That is why "thinking" is part of the term.
- You will not become a Design Thinking professional within a single one-day workshop. The topic is by far too broad.
Design Thinking is No Rocket Science:
- However, it is not rocket science. To apply Design Thinking techniques, you do not need a PHD. Some Design Thinking techniques have been commonly used, in various contexts, for quite a long time.
- Design Thinking is just the umbrella that bundles them into a more meaningful approach.
Design Think is People Centric:
- Design Thinking is not just a technique or methodology.
- It is very people-centric, both in the way it is executed and in its key principles and goals.
- In the end, it's all about people. If people do not accept a solution, they might find very innovative workarounds.
Design Think is Hard to Understand in a Theoretical Training:
- A large proportion of Design Thinking is based on group dynamics. This is because you cannot build trust in these functions without experiencing them.
- People say: "You know what, I've read a book about Design Thinking, but these two hours were a better way of learning."
Design Thinking Need to be Experienced:
- Design Thinking needs to be experienced to understand it fully. That is what this training is about.
- We want to create a Design Thinking experience for you.
What to Expect...:
- In this training, we will apply the Design Thinking process and principles to solve a concrete challenge.
- At the end of this training, you should be able to do the following:
- Understand Design Thinking concepts and methodology.
- Build on this knowledge, and further explore the Design Thinking knowledge area.
- Understand the Design Thinking mindset and feel like a Design Thinker.
- Co-moderate Design Thinking inspired workshops.
What we expect is that participants are open and try it out.
Design Thinking Introduction: What is Design Thinking?
Source: Author Unknown
This well-known IT cartoon shows that there is often a huge functional gap between user needs and the final solution, which is delivered to address the needs.
This picture shows another well-known phenomena.
Often there is a huge time gap between the occurrence of needs and the delivery of satisfying solutions.
Both types of gaps can be approached by leveraging Design Thinking as a solution innovation method.
First, a few words regarding the history of Design Thinking:
Design Thinking is originated in the „Product Design" area and David Kelley, one of the founders of IDEO is considered as father of the Design Thinking approach.
IDEO is a well-known design and innovation consulting firm in the US (Palo Alto) which, for instance, designed the first Apple mouse (1980, Lisa Mouse).
Over time, people recognized that the Design Thinking approach can applied to other areas as well, especially to many business problems.
Hasso Plattner, together with David Kelley, founded the so-called d-schools in Stanford and Potsdam.
SAP Development has adopted the Design Thinking approach and integrated it into the Standard SAP software development process.
The SAP field organization offers Design Thinking services to customers, which enables them to solve individual customer challenges.
The three executive quotes (Apple, SAP, PepsiCo) on the picture above indicate that Design and Innovation are two separate things, which belong together.
Additional Learning Resource: Design Thinking in a Nutshell
You can check out the course Design Thinking in a Nutshell for an additional deep-dive into design thinking.
Design Thinking: One Possible Definition
What is Design Thinking?
Generally speaking, Design Thinking is an approach for solving problems, or in Design Thinking terminology, solving challenges.
The approach has two core characteristics:
Firstly, the approach is human-centric.
This means that the needs of people impacted by the problem solution (customers of a product) are in the foreground of everything.
It also means that the team working on the design challenge consider human values to be a key working principle.
Secondly, the approach is based on creativity and the generation of new ideas by the design team.
Hereby, the design team does not only use the left, analytical half of the brain, but in the same intensity the right, creative-intuitive part.
Successful innovations require both sides. We have to design in a creative manner and, at the same time, stay rational to a certain degree.
As a consequence, Design Thinking is not an exercise where you build the solution block-by-block, purely by figuring out the root cause of a problem. Trying out and iterating plays an important role.
Scientists and business people often tackle problems through theories, taxonomies, and models to depict a problem in all its dimensions. This reduces the complexity of a problem until it is finally entirely describable.
In contradiction to this, Designers have to deal with problems pragmatically in much shorter time and cannot follow a purely analytical approach.
Design Thinking is a method based on design principles, but the thinking means that there is a specific mindset on top.
As already outlined, this mindset requires a combination of analytical and intuitive thinking.
You could also say that it brings the world of design, which is more associated with intuitive thinking, into the world of business, which is traditionally associated with analytical thinking.
In a nutshell, Design Thinking brings together the best of both worlds.
As outlined before, Design Thinking is heavily based on people’s creativity.
But what is creativity? Some people believe that creativity is something that comes out of the blue or can even be forced to occur. They are wrong.
Up to today, science does not know where it comes from. However there are circumstances that foster creativity.
John Cleese (Head of Monty Python) has described this perfectly in a speech, which he held back in 1991 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g):
- You need an oasis of space and time.
- You need to be willing to invest time into a problem, as creativity is also a matter of patience.
- You need to be confident, as failing and re-iterating is typical for a creative process.
- You need to have and allow humor. You could even say: A strict and formal business environment is one way to kill creativity.You need to have and allow humor. You could even say: A strict and formal business environment is one way to kill creativity.
- Most importantly, creativity is not an inherited talent or reserved for creative-looking people.
Instead, everybody can be creative. Those who claim not to be creative sometimes have the best ideas to solve a problem, so long as they are in the right environment and willing to play.
Solving challenges and problems by generating ideas is equivalent to being innovative. This means that Design Thinking is an innovation approach.
Hereby, Design Thinking seeks to identify the optimal solution in the intersection between peoples desires, technological feasibility, and business viability.
The core focus of Design Thinking lies in the desirability section. Other techniques can complement Design Thinking to cover viability and feasibility.
A consequence of this strong focus on people’s desires is a higher investment in the early stages of product/solution development.
The problem space has to be deeply explored before solution ideas can be generated.
This ensures that the problem is really understood, and that solution ideas are validated, before faulty designs run into implementation.
Finally, this avoids expensive redesigns in later stages.
What is Innovation?
There are many different definitions of the term Innovation.
One common key aspect of innovation is as follows:
It is not just an invention or an idea somebody has. Instead, the idea or invention has to be transformed into something tangible and valuable for customers, or other kind of consumers.
There are various ways of clustering innovation types.
One way of building innovation types is to cluster them according to the subject of innovation.
An innovation can be based on new products, services, business processes, or business models.
Another way is to cluster them according to the newness of an innovation, from the perspective of the innovating company.
Core innovations optimize existing products for existing customers.
Adjacent innovations expand the business of a company into territories, which are new for the company.
Transformational innovations develop breakthroughs and invent things for markets that do not exist yet.
Design Thinking: Where Does it Work?
But where can Design Thinking be applied?
Generally speaking, Design Thinking can be applied to all kinds of challenges or problems. Of course, Design Thinking has certain strengths for certain kinds of challenges.
It is especially useful for problem fields, where no best practices exist or are applicable, and existing knowledge within the company about user needs and problem context is relatively low.
In those cases, everything appears as a bit of a mystery and the problem space has to be explored like new terrain.
Failures are natural in such a situation and should be considered as learning investment.
This is a list of typical use cases for Design Thinking, within an IT and Business context.
The use cases shown might overlap. For instance, an IT application might get part of a solution/ product offering (blurring line between business and IT).
Obviously, applications and business process are correlated. The same is true for business models and products/ solutions.
Of course, this list is extensible.
These are some samples of design challenges with a business/IT context.
The picture above is an inspiring example of a Design Thinking project carried out by IDEO for General Electric.
It shows that creating deep empathy for the user really makes a difference.
See/source:
http://blog.ted.com/2012/03/01/building-creative-confidence-david-kelley-at-ted2012/
Design Thinking: Core Components
So, what is it that makes up Design Thinking and what do you need to tackle a problem with Design Thinking?
Basically, there are three major components:
A multidisciplinary team of T-shaped people (experts in one area but also knowledgeable in broader spaces), with a culture of empathy and a creative, playful state of mind. Typically the team size is something between 5 and 10.
Ideally, the team includes people with knowledge about the three innovation dimensions:
Peoples Desires
Technological Feasibility
Business Viability
Furthermore, an environment that encourages a culture of trust and the space/material for creative teamwork.
Please be aware that a typical meeting room, with a large table in the middle and people sitting around the table, is not a Design Thinking space. When you were 6 years old, did you ever enter a garage or cellar of your (grand)parents house, and see some great tools and material, that made you think: "Wow, I want to create something with all this stuff, but what?". And then you just started to build something? That is the environment and atmosphere you need to create for Design Thinking.
Finally, there is a methodology consisting of iterative activities, with a people-centric focus.
