What is Design Thinking and how can businesses benefit from it ?
Through this academic essay I critically review, reflect and analyse design thinking and then critically reflect on our practice of using various design thinking methodologies, tools and processes on our working process of solving clients brief of homelessness issue in UK.
The act of design devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. (Herbert Simon, 1988)
Understanding Design thinking and its phases
Recently made famous by the likes of Stanford University’s d.school, the roots of Design Thinking hail back to the mid-1950s with the introduction of the subject, Design Science, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This was a somewhat clinical and technical approach to problem-solving. As it spread outwards it was challenged by the ever-so-clever Scandinavians who, in the 1960s, introduced to the concept of Cooperative Design. This is now more widely referred to as Participatory Design or Co-Design.
Design Thinking is defined in different ways by various academics, industry leaders but somehow all believe in keeping the customer at the core while designing a new product/ service or improving an existing product/service. I would like to talk through some of the most popular and widely accepted thoughts surrounding design thinking, its various phases and it’s application to problem-solving.
Design Council, a British organisation, in 2005 created a process model called Double Diamond. Divided into four distinct phases, Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver, it maps the divergent and convergent stages of the design process, showing the different modes of thinking that designers use.
In the first diamond, it starts with building empathy with users by research and gathering as much information in Discover phase. This is converged to find users motivations, frustrations and build opportunity areas in the Define phase. In the second diamond, the ideas are built, prototyped and tested in Develop phase and then these are converged to a finalised product/service in Deliver phase.
(Brown, 2008) expands to this that thinking like a designer can transform the way organisations develop products, services, processes, and strategy. Deep empathy for people makes observations powerful sources of inspiration and innovation in Design Thinking occurs when a perfect balance between the business, technical factors and minding the highly important human factors. This balance is known as sweet spot in innovation and is illustrated in the below diagram where the areas overlap.
In one of his TED talks (Brown, 2008) says that Design thinking can be applied to all fields. By being human-centred it is a means to identify a problem which explores peoples motivations and inspirations behind using a particular product/service. The end product or solution should strive to make life easier and enjoyable and make technology more viable. It can start with empathising with people. He adds that by keeping oneself in customer’s shoes can lead to better design of touch-points or experiences of a service or a product. (Kilian, 2009) feels using empathy to put customers, clients, and end users at the centre of the problem-solving equation are the foundation of design thinking.
(Brown, 2009) says that the best way to start is to do intensive research with empathy followed by ideation which is idea forming and then rapid prototyping. Prototyping is nothing but creating a physical output of a service or product. The same steps can be seen in Figure 3 below. Prototyping is followed by testing and getting feedback from the users and again iterating back and forth till the best service/product is born. This process allows changing service faster and helps builds in a culture which is ready to adapt as per customer needs. This process will not help to strive for perfection from the word go. Rather this approach helps organisations to have a cohesive design and closer to what people want rather than forcing a product which was designed in closed rooms.
(Norman, 2013) one of the founders of Nielsen Norman Group group feels that designers take the original problem as a suggestion, not as a final statement, then they think broadly about what the real issues underlying this problem statement might really be. Most important of all, this process is iterative and expansive.
Figure 3 from Stanford d.school talks about the phases of Design Thinking and it shows a linear progression from one phase to another whereas. Figure 4 from Nielsen Norman group shows back and forth steps that Tim Brown and Don Norman touch upon. From personal experience, I experienced that Design Thinking is not a linear process rather it is a series of back and forth steps. This accounts for real-time feedback which allows changes to be incorporated into a service or product in order to adapt to constantly changing customers needs.
(Norman, 2013) touches upon asking stupid questions as important to Design Thinking. So, What is a stupid question? It is one which questions the obvious. Usually, it refers to some common belief or practice that has been around for so long that it has not been questioned. It is by questioning the obvious to make great progress and have breakthroughs. It can help reformulate our beliefs, and to redefine existing solutions, approaches, and beliefs.
(Brown, 2009) also an emphasis on Storytelling as one of the best tools in the implementation phase. It can be used for communication a proposed solution in an effective and engaging way and is used widely across businesses as one of their proposed way of marketing or reaching out to end customer.
(Knapp, 2016) says the big idea of the sprint is to take a small team, clear the schedule for a week, and rapidly progress from problem to tested solution. On Monday, you make a map of the problem. On Tuesday, each individual sketches solutions. On Wednesday, you decide which sketches are strongest. On Thursday, you build a realistic prototype. And on Friday, you test that prototype with five target customers. It’s like fast-forwarding into the future to see your finished product in the market. The same is illustrated in the figure below.
I believe that conventional thinking looks at finding solutions from best available resources, whereas Design Thinking pushes people to question an existing system and create a new idea or innovate.
(Norman, 2013) best summarises two powerful tools of design thinking: the British Design Council’s “Double-Diamond, Diverge-Converge Model of Design”; and the iterative process of Observation, Ideation, Prototype, and Test called “Human-Centred Design. One has to do with a deep understanding of the people for whom the product is intended, which means observation — not questionnaires, not focus groups, but observation and deep empathy with the target users. Another is ongoing experimentation — continual sketching, testing and trying out concepts and ideas. Another is the process of critiquing, whether of one’s own work or of others. And yet another is the emphasis on questioning: question the problem, question the assumptions and implications.
Ethical Issues Surrounding Design Thinking
Important lessons about environmental ethics can be learned from the world’s traditional/ indigenous cultures. Many of them managed to create regenerative systems that allowed them to live in a particular place for millennia. In Western culture, it was the conservation ecologist Aldo Leopold who provided the first modern formulation of an ecological and environmental ethics
A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community; it is wrong when it does otherwise. (Aldo Leopold, 1949)
Stanford Social Innovation talks about an ethical framework — “a way of structuring your deliberation about ethical questions” — can help to bridge disparate worlds and discourses and help them work well together. Ethical questions might include: “Is this platform/product actually providing a social good?” or “Am I harming/including the user in the creation of this new solution?” or even “Do I have a right to be taking claim of this space at all?”
By finding key people on the ground to mediate and be a voice for the community, the nuances of language, non-verbal cues, and local customs are able to be considered. This adds immense value and avoids leading to the wrong assumption based on what the team thinks would be an improvement.
(Brunette, 2013) suggests that moral and ethical values are grounded in and reinforced by specific modes of thought that have evolved to resolve recurring aspects of the experience. This places moral philosophy in the realm of purposeful mental functioning and emancipates it from the dogmas and narratives on which religious and cultural beliefs depend
A Theory of Design Thinking recognises that particular agents and agencies have specific responsibilities in the exercise and outcomes of purposeful thought. Responsibility for what results from the actions of independently responsible and collaborating agents of thought are inherent to design thinking They are accountable for fulfilling their moral and ethical responsibilities regarding that aspect of experience in which they specialise and act. Both individual thinkers and collaborating groups have responsibility to recognize needs and desires that arise from a problematic situation and to recognize the focus of intentional responsibility in others
I hold the belief that we should not assume that designers, can solve this alone, but only through collaboration and ultimately giving the community a sense of ownership so that the project gets a life of its own.
Reflection on few of the tools of Design thinking to solve our brief
We as a group started the Sprint exercise of running through all the tools and reaching ideation phase in two days. It was difficult to cope up with the timelines as it was so fast paced and nor did everyone in the group participate in all the phases in its entirety. At times we were all frustrated and were not satisfied with the end results in each phase. I believe that sprinting makes us uncomfortable and prepares us for the rollercoaster ride that we had in front of us. I feel that the whole point was to make our brains function faster
This activity can unsettle any prejudgements as it does not give time to think, which can propel creativity among the most analytical minds. Maybe creativity arises from the unsettling of minds.
Personas: We did research and created personas around our user interviews. I felt building personas did not help with the brief. The agenda of personas is to create a target segment but I felt, it narrowed our ideation process. I believe building personas converged our mind and we started focussing ideation around that persona. To build personas, there needs to be significant user interactions and data. Also every team member needs to build empathy to build the right questionnaire before going out to reach out to people. Without these things into consideration, persona could be very vague and may lead to improper solution, which might not fall in line with the real problem. I feel alignment of thought process of building empathy with every user for every member in team is nearly impossible and can lead to invalid Personas.
Storytelling: After building personas, before ideation, we did storytelling. I found this to be a great tool as storytelling could be a great way to ideate the solution in front of the end user. It is a great tool to communicate the idea, which can bring in real emotions. What I also observed during my research phase that a lot of companies across centuries have used this tool to present their service/product by storytelling during their marketing phase. Storytelling is tricky but if research across touchpoint was done keeping the customer at the centre point, with the insights gathered it can lead to great storytelling.
Prototyping: After ideation, we did rapid prototyping. We as a group were excited about our prototype and wanted to show it to businesses. We did show it to five to six people but the responses demotivated us. We as a group had developed a product for a target segment because of our restricted persona but while taking the feedback we did not segment our customer base to take feedback. We as a group got back on track when Andy Young our program coordinator helped us identify this flaw. After reading and researching and listening to various academic and people of influence, I understood that the first prototype might not be the best solution but it is back and forth steps of prototyping, taking feedback and ideation. These constant back and forth steps is a part and parcel of every product/service and that is when I learnt that the phases in Design Thinking are not linear but rather connected. This includes constant feedback and helps businesses stay closer to customers needs, aspirations and motivations and helps build a culture of embracing feedback by empathising.
How Design Thinking can be effectively used in businesses to foster growth and innovation?
First I would like to reflect on how few advocates of Design Thinking reciprocate that it is not effective if not understood thoroughly and applied properly. I have come to an understanding that Design Thinking can be mastered with time and works wonders once the essence of it is felt. As (Brown, 2011) says “ Whenever I’m faced with a tough business challenge, rather than trying to use some prescribed CEO logic, I tackle it as a design problem. That’s not an inborn ability, it’s a skill — OK, a mastery — learned over many years of doing”
(Nussbaum, 2011) one of Design Thinking’s biggest advocates says that Design Thinking has given the design profession and society at large all the benefits it has to offer and is beginning to ossify and actually do harm. He says that by packaging within a process businesses see it as a linear, gated by the book methodology. He adds CEO’s especially took to the process side of Design Thinking as an efficiency based process hoping that a process trick would significant cultural and organisational change. In order to appeal to business culture process, it is often denuded of the mess, the conflict, failure, emotions and looping circularity which is part and parcel of creative process. (Kilian, 2015) says that by conducting contextual one-on-one interviews, shopper-shadowing exercises, and “follow me homes” to observe, listen, and learn how people actually use and experience products, plot out customer decision journeys helps businesses understand exactly what motivates people, what bothers them, and where there are opportunities for creating delightful experiences.
(Sarrazin, 2015) director McKinsey’s Silicon Valley says Design thinking and everything associated with it is now more central to business strategy. He adds that good design can be very smart once measurement tools are in place to provide the feedback to the designers. This is just good business sense, and it’s exciting that we’re bringing an extra layer of thinking around what the customer is experiencing, or what the customer is expecting.
(Nooyi, 2015) PepsiCo’s CEO says that in order to have the sustainable competitive advantage you have to reinvent every two to three years, as opposed to an earlier period of eight to ten years. She wants to bring in a cultural change to push Design Thinking into business strategy. Design Thinking actually helps accelerates the process to build new products, fail and learn faster. PepsiCo could achieve double digits bottomline growth with this. In organisations like Amazon, the executive team is required to call in and visit the call
centres and listen to customer needs firsthand. That’s a great example where everybody is in charge of understanding what customers’ needs, motivations, pain points, and behaviours are, and for making them paramount in solving business problems. Apple or Uber or even Airbnb have different ways of bringing the user experience to the forefront, it is a way to fundamentally compete. Deutsche Bank, for example, required all employees to use products that its customers used as a way to understand what customers were experiencing.
I believe that design is about learning, and what could be a greater gift than to have an organisation that’s constantly learning? I also believe that human’s constantly evolve and so should the products and services revolving around them. If businesses are able to understand the needs of the customer and have an organization that’s good at doing this on an ongoing basis, it can create engagement and loyalty and something truly special bond between a company, its customers and its employees. Understanding the customer is everyone’s job, keeping empathy as central to the organization, designing in real time, and being able to act quickly are the main pieces of the design-driven culture. Of course, there are the trappings that make those things easier to embody. Things like flexible workspaces that have great areas for collaboration, making it easy to come together quickly. Rooms that can be set up so that there are hybrid teams sitting together that are cross-functional. Thinking about breaking down any traditional barriers and walls to make it easier to collaborate, easier to keep humans first, and easier to think about how we learn, and test, and fail, and get things to market quickly. That’s how design thinking and design- driven cultures can allow businesses to be more successful and have a greater impact.It is a strategic weapon businesses can include in their arsenal.
Conclusion
These tools have always existed for the successful business across the world where they put the customer at the core. Successful businesses have feedback tools and strategy to constantly innovate in this efficiency-based changing world. Design Thinking can become all the more relevant today as times are changing fast but it only stays effective if understood and mastered and this takes time. As discussed that nowadays it hardly takes two to three years for a successful product to become boring and the danger of becoming obsolete and that is why Design Thinking methodology can help businesses thrive because it puts the customer at the core of evolving, changing or designing something new. As I have already discussed that if made a habit to incorporate Design Thinking into the culture, it can help organisations change faster than the likes of Nokia who could not adapt to the changing customers needs, wants and motivations. It is way of thinking and approaching a problem and once understood can do wonders. For management to actually imbibe Design Thinking into their culture requires top management to explore in a holistic way as a part of their business strategy rather than some tool used by some fancy design agencies.
