Design Thinking

I first came across the words Design Thinking in 2015 in an article. At the time I did not understand what design thinking was at all. Didn’t understand the article and didn’t understand the concept. In 2016, I started coming across the words “Design Thinking” more and more frequently. Saw people on LinkedIn raving about how it has led to innovation in their company and how it has completely changed how they used to approach things. Words like paradigm, fostering innovation and cultural change were routinely used wherever a mention of design thinking was made. So, I tried to take some more interest and a few things started to make sense about design thinking and gradually I started to understand what the excitement is all about. I will share my understanding of this concept below.

Design thinking is a concept that is very much used in several fields but has especially been embraced in the related fields of instructional/learning design and user experience. Design thinking is a concept that focuses on the end user of the product and/or service and tries to understand how to develop the product and/or service in a manner that would be of most benefit to the end user. Basically, it’s all about how to solve a problem that the user is facing. Like traditional instructional design processes design thinking is also an iterative process. Unlike the traditional instructional design processes design thinking relies and focuses quite heavily on Empathy. Empathy here means you need to understand the user’s situation, what are their needs, requirements and motivations are and how they feel about certain things which the product or service is hopefully trying to address.

Focusing on empathy is singularly important because empathy is the ability to understand how another person is feeling. If we can truly empathise with someone we gain an insight into their feelings, thoughts and perceptions which then gives us a much better understanding of what is going to work for that person. This is diametrically opposite to the traditional marketing approaches that were more about how people look and act. Because of this empathising with someone can be subjective because we do not have hard facts to go by and are merely interpreting (to the best of our ability) what the other person is thinking or feeling. This is where the challenge in design thinking comes and there will often be instances where an approach being taken in the design and development of a product or service might be completely off or not viable. This is also the reason why design thinking encourages that a number of options be considered without prejudice or judgments. Empathising with the user for design thinking purposes is achieved by conducting interviews and discussions with users and other stakeholders, observing users, building personas, using learning analytics, asking “why” to everything like a child and most importantly assume a beginner’s mindset.

Apart from empathy, design thinking involves a number of other steps as shown below:


I will discuss these steps in a future post. For now the key take away is empathise and understand with the people who will be using your products or services.

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