What Is Design Thinking and Why Is It So Important?
What is design thinking?
Design thinking is the process and ideology in which you are are concerned with solving problems in a highly user-centric way. Its in the way that you put yourself in other people shoes or per say viewpoints. It is a method in which you try to understand the behaviors and motivations of the users that you are ultimately designing for.
What are the stages invloved in design thinking process?
Empathize
Define
Ideate
Prototype
Test
Why is understanding design thinking so important?
Understanding the background between design thinking is very important for designers to create and problem solve for future projects. In the reading Graphic Design Solutions, it mentions that design thinking is associated with the empathy and how it plays a key role. Design thinking is used to solve communication, information, industrial, and interior design problems; innovate; discover new opportunities; and aid businesses and organizations.
The process for design thinking often challenges conventional thinking, businesses, public health organizations, and many others can leverage design thinking to build ideas, innovate, and develop systems. What makes this process set apart from other processes is its emphasis on prototyping a way to learn by doing) and empathy. The design thinking processes also embraces creative risk taking and is an iterative and repeatable process (Robin Landa).
There are five important steps in this design thinking process. To start, in the empathy mode of the process one would observe; watch people and note their behavior in the specific context you are looking at. The next thing would be to engage which is involved by interviewing and interacting with users through planned and unexpected encounters. The last thing is to immerse yourself and experience what your users experience. This would consist of their challenges, thought processes, and so on, to better understand them. The next mode would be define. Basically, your empathy findings inform your thinking and point of view. Being able to define guides your exploration, providing focus, and is a better reference for your evaluation.
Using your empathy finding ensures a human-centered approach. So, this means you are designing for your users and not for a general audience. The next step is ideate, which is the mode where you explore paths of thinking and forming ideas and concepts. Use critical and creative thinking to generate as many ideas as possible. The fourth step is prototype, which is the mode that is creating a first-stage model of something from which other forms are developed. It basically gives an initial or preliminary physical for to your ideas that you have created.
Prototyping serves many purposes such as it tests functionality, is an empirical process; you learn by doing and iterate and reformulate as needs and allows a better understanding of the user and the design space. The last step to this iterative process is test. Testing is the opportunity to be able to assess your solutions, get feedback on trial run-throughs, refine, and continue to learn about the people who are your users. Testing allows learning, which leads to building effective ideas. You are able to test is so you can redesign for improvement.
In conclusion, design thinking is a very important iterative process to help create and solve problems for projects. Without knowledge of the steps to the design thinking process it could be difficult for designers to create and solve problems if they don’t know the steps behind this process.
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