Some weeks ago, I found myself as a participant in a workshop touted to be one that was focussed on solving a problem by use of ‘design thinking’
Unfortunately, it was a waste of everyone’s time. Partly this was because the problem we were supposed to be solving was inadequately and inaccurately defined, and partly because the person running it had no practical idea of what ‘design thinking’ really was.
Spoiler alert: it has nothing to do with the visual definition of ‘design’
‘Design thinking’ is no more than a process that starts and ends with delivering value to the customer.
The typical stages are:
- Understanding of customer behaviour.
- Ideation based on that understanding
- Prototyping and testing of solutions to the challenges faced by customers
- Continuous and Intense feedback during testing and prototyping
- Integration of the finished prototypes into the final product offering
- ‘Shipping’ the solution to customers.
The greater the involvement of customers during this process the better.
Simple to say, very hard to do well.
PS. The fails in design thinking are rarely as obvious as the example in the header.
