Design Thinking: Creating Innovations

Creative Design Solutions: Design Thinking How do we Create and Innovate? Create: ● To turn new ideas into reality ● Make connections and problem-solving Innovate: To do something in a NEW way or develop new methods and think of the way something is accomplished. Design Thinking: The methodology used by designers to solve complex problems, and find desirable solutions for clients. The process of Design Thinking Empathize“To create meaningful innovations, you need to know your users and care about their lives.” ● the centerpiece of a human-centered design process. ● the work you do to understand people within the context of your design challenge. ● an activity that allows you to uncover the the problem that needs to be addressed by watching, listening, and discovering insights that give YOU the direction to create innovative solutions. ● a process of OBSERVING, ENGAGING, WATCHING and LISTENING. Define“Framing the right problem is the only way to create the right solution.” ● all about bringing clarity and focus into the design discussion. ● making sense of the widespread information you gathered in the Empathize mode. ● narrowing down the focused problem to create a meaningful and actionable problem statement (also known as point of view). ● a time when you synthesize scattered findings into powerful insights. Ideate “It’s not about coming up with the ‘right’ idea but about generating the broadest range of possibilities” ● the process of coming up with a number of broad ideas. ● transitioning from identifying problems to crafting solutions. ● about pushing for the widest possible range of ideas from which you can explore a ‘best’ solution later through feedback. ● stepping beyond obvious solutions to increase the possibility of innovative strategies. ● brain-storming, mind-mapping, and sketching to interact with your ideas. ● the skill of deferring judgment; separating the generation of ideas from the evaluation of ideas. Prototype “Build to think and test to learn” “Craft artifacts to get you closer to your final solution” ● intended to answer questions that you closer to a final solution based on user feedback. ● a way to start a conversation, to fail quickly and cheaply, to test possibilities, and to manage the solution-building process by breaking down a larger problem into smaller, testable chunks ● facilitated by producing multiple artifacts that can be used as visuals to get feedback and further narrow down solutions. ● not a time to invest a lot of physical and time resources on a single solution. Churn out as much as you can as quickly as possible. They don’t need to be ‘beautiful’, they simply need to illustrate your concepts from the Ideate phase. Test “Testing is an opportunity to learn about your solution and your user.” “Show, don’t tell…” ● is when you solicit feedback about the Prototypes you created. Continue to ask “why” and focus on what you can learn about the person and the problem as well as your potential solutions. ● may include the user testing a tangible object or taking on a role or task when approaching your prototype if a real-life scenario is not possible. ● informs the next iterations of prototypes. The feedback provides additional details as to what was successful and what was not. ● allows you to bring multiple prototypes to the user for comparisons that may reveal additional and better solutions. ● Sometimes you have to return to the drawing board! Iteration (change/refinement) is fundamental to good design.