Design Thinking, Design Doing
Design Thinking as a process for delivering human-centred solutions has gained massive traction over the past few years. As a design practitioner and someone who has worked closely with this process ever since its early days, and while at IDEO, I am able to bring it alive across the spectrum of design strategy through design craft. To bring the maximum value of this process to the table, agile strategic thinking needs to dovetail nicely with product and service execution excellence. The ability of this process to deliver differentiated and delightful interaction experiences is most powerful when the worlds of design thinking and design doing combine together with equal intensity.
As a Design Leader and design practitioner, I have leveraged this process to create solutions that span a variety of industries, stakeholders and areas of consumer strategy i.e. Pharma, Healthcare, Nutrition, Education, Entertainment, Hospitality, Finance, Banking, Telecommunication, Retail, Digital Strategy, Brand Strategy.
The go-to aspects of this process that I believe are at the core to creating delightful empathy led products and services:
Deep qualitative design research
Rapid ideation and prototype development
Design development for deployment
Below:
The images below showcase different stages from this process, from select projects delivered by my teams and myself while at IDEO, Dr Reddy’s Labs and PwC India.
Learn.
In my experience, a journey well begun is already a solution well designed. And this journey begins with listening. Listening to one’s audience with a learner mindset, to understand their unmet and often unarticulated needs that a potential solution would be well positioned to solve for. Deep design research guided by the tenets of human centred design, allows us to lead with empathy, and uncover unique insights that enable us to deliver solutions that are immensely meaningful to their audience, and a delight to experience.
Build.
The ‘build’ phase is the essential bridge connecting research insights with the world of solution ideas. This is a critical part of the design process where design teams create tangible articulations of early ideas to address potential opportunity areas. It involves creating quick versions of tangible concepts, that people can ‘experience’ and respond to. It is the ‘show, not tell’ thinking process in action.
The value of the ‘build’ process is best captured in this quote – ”If a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousand meetings” - IDEO
Iterate.
Nothing helps accelerate the solution design process better than rapid ideation and rapid prototyping. Failing fast to succeed sooner, as the adage goes, is at the heart of the design thinking process, and something that I have learnt the great value of, through my work experience at IDEO and after. Quick iterative idea development cycles and collaborative solution development along with target users, leads to solutions that have a significantly higher potential for adoption and long term engagement.
Detail.
The rapid iteration process allows designers and business leaders to quickly identify those features of a proposed solution that are most desirable to the target customer set. This gives them good visibility into the adoption and engagement potential of proposed solution ideas. These insights are then combined with technical feasibility and business viability considerations to shape the final form of the product or service, to deliver maximum desirability to target customers and achieve excellence on business metrics too.
