aNewLeaf #10 — Is “Design Thinking”​ is a technology, tool, platform or designation ?

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Dear community members, good day. In this aNewLeaf #10 (a New Learning from this week), liked to share and try to answer what is Design Thinking ? And the Design Thinking has grown very high popular as a go-to method for any problem solving and innovation. If you go to any conference, or executive client meeting, sure you will end up with stating “we should leverage design thinking to solve this problem and bring more innovation”. That’s when i started exploring the same, and below is my findings hope it will help you to leapfrog the design thinking initiatives in daily work.

Design Thinking have multiple roles, but let’s define in to one core definition, it a way to solve the problems and it’s not only the way, and it might not be the best way always. But the solution from Design Thinking process brings us the results in effective and innovative solutions.

The term is very well popularized by IDEO and Stanford University from 2005, but its presence is from 1960’s at the time of Plato. The other history point is from “The Scandinavian Approach” where the integrated the users in the very early stage of product development, hence then introduce the a key feature of Design Thinking, which means to incorporation of user research, prototyping, testing, service, and feedback to create and evolve the solutions. And in the same time of 1960’s participatory design in the united states was particularly very popular. But in the Apple ecosystem under Advanced Technology Group, they call it and coined user-centered design.

Also, in the a same time IDEO didn’t coined the word design thinking, but it started popularizing it from 1991. So design thinking is a codification of few decades of process, tools, and approaches to solve problems by putting the focus on humans & users at the center.

With that history, according to my mind map below is the design thinking which can applied to any problem; which i learnt from the design thinking book by Ellen Siminoff, Mia Silverman, Julie Stanford, and Jennifer Mailhot.

Let’s now understand why the design thinking is effective and how it works.

Two Reason of Design Thinking Effectiveness:

1. Focus on the actual human for any given problems
2. Provides defined and replicate approach

Seven Elements of Design thinking Working principles:

1. Empathy
2. Radical Collaboration
3. Yes and …
4. Thinking by doing
5. Iteration
6. Go broad to go narrow
7. Embrace ambiguity

To conclude the design thinking is really about and how can it work in your company, for any problem. Even though the Design Thinking methods applies to any problem, but should not apply to all where there is well solution build like finding algorithm to find ascending and descending order of numbers.

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Happy Reading, Happy Sharing !

See you in the next #aNewLeaf …