The Design Thinking

Design Thinking : The first time I came across this term, the basic thing I did was to put every possible keyword on internet to learn more about it and what I found was that some said Design Thinking is a process, some said it is a methodology, a mode of thought, an expression, a cognitive activity, problem solving protocol, a human centered approach, a mindset, a concept and god knows what all. Everyone out there has a totally new perception to it which kind of made it obvious that here is no THIS definition for design thinking.

To ME Design Thinking seems like a wave which converges and diverges the no. of choices of problem solving. And the ability of creating and making these choices obviously comes out of experience. Hence, the only crux is practice thinking.. that doesn’t mean you practiced thinking all day, then had lunch.. then again did that...had your evening brunch…. again practiced it… We do not have a book on design thinking which we could solve and bang! we know design thinking in and out. It has to evolve….. evolve out of experience, out of motivation, out of observation, or might be out of inspiration.

I had a professor in my post grad who always put questions on networking.. well that was the subject he taught us.. questions we had hard times to figure out… and he always said one thing which I guess every student might remember..”…. I do not want right answers… I want you to use your brains...I want you to think...” Now when into design thinking I really gotta understand what he meant. The important aspect I see here is this includes intuition and emotional thinking. This is a holistic and explorative approach which encourages to probe and learn.

Any design has a greater impact when it is taken out from a designer’s hand to the target audience. This ultimately results in CHANGES…. letting us to new ways of tackling problems, explore new alternatives, new ideas, new perceptions, something we call as expansive view of designs.

Design thinking has come to be defined as combining empathy for the context of a problem, creativity in the generation of insights and solutions, and rationality in analyzing and fitting various solutions to the problem context. Although design is always influenced by individual preferences, the design thinking method shares a common set of traits, mainly; Creativity, Innovative Thinking,Teamwork, User-Centerdness (Empathy), Curiosity and Optimism.

It is also about upgrading within constraints, balancing three major things; Desirability which starts from humans. how can you make things usable for them? The first thing we do is we elicit the requirements, based on which we create an empathy map. This helps us create prototypes pouring our ideas and perceptions to it. The second is the feasibility, its technological limitations and the third is viability which shows how economic and functional the design is for it to survive the market.

If human need is the place to start, prototyping is the vehicle to progress then there is also some questions to ask about the destination. Instead of seeing its primary objective as consumption, design thinking is a beginning to explore the potential of participation. The shift from a passive relationship of consumption between design and consumer to an active engagement where things are more meaningful, productive and profitable.

Design Thinking draws upon logic, imagination, intuition and systematic reasoning, to explore the possibilities to create desired outcomes that benefit humans.

Design & Emotion : Well this is something which ought to happen everywhere. When I was li’l, my mother always tend to motivate ME through incentives for whatever she wanted ME to do, like scoring good grades, she would buy ME the latest scooter. Knowingly, unknowingly it made ME study better and score good. When you are anxious there are li’l transmitters in brains which help in focussing better. It makes you a breadth first problem solver from a depth first problem solver. It helps you being creative and lets you think out of ways..out of boxes. The happiness of the li’l incentive you get for every piece is an emotion which communicates the feeling to the world. Where cognition is all about understanding the world, emotion is all about interpreting it. Your designs and ideas reflect your emotion behind that product.

Positive emotional stimuli can build a sense of trust and engagement with the users. People will tend to forgive the shortcomings of the design and sing praises of the experience if they are rewarded with positive emotions. Sometimes the emotional connection we make through design is less visible but an emotional response is far better than indifference. Also, seeing the other side, in real life it is a risk as some just don’t get it. Creating personality to the product shall be a very powerful way to identify and empathize. We like mingling with people rather systems and so often we tend to forget that these businesses are just a collection of people and the system is just an organized mode of getting through those people.

The sacred secret :NO DESIGN IS SIMPLE!

We say we want a simple design but I would say there exists nothing known as a simple design. The design is always complex.

I say its not simple.. its understandable. The design should have proper signifiers (indications/ identifiers) for all its affordances (relation between a person and an object). How would you find a painting which needs a label beneath saying what it is. Simply, if you need a label against your signifier, its a big bad design.

Lets take mobile phones, the utility of a mobile phone is to make and receive calls.. as simple as that.. but how many of us here have a mobile phone which only does that?

We do not like simple things...see?.. If you are made to write ABCD all life? Would you like going to school? NO… We look forward to learn more.. better than what we know already.. but at the same time if you are in Class IV and given to read class X text books? Would you like going to school?NO...after reading a few pages perhaps, you would get frustrated and stop.

So here is a big question.. How difficult is simple?.. Well.. it depends on person to person..  Lets take another example.. facebook.. the famous social network we have up there.. my husband who is a ‘NO SOCIAL NETWORKING’ person found it really difficult to look for my name and add it to his friend list. Believe ME I am still not in his friend list :D :D!! Well… at the same time my niece who has just turned 4 plays temple run and subway surfers so well, even we could not beat her score. The crunch is, its not about simple or complex designs but its about how a design caters to the need of a novice, intermediate and expert users. Building that bridge between a variety of users is where design thinking needs to be applied. What we want is understanding, not simplicity.

Science of Design : If we say the design is never simple means it has to be complex. Yes, every design is complex and its on us designers to judge how much complexity we want the users to handle and to what level the system should be made intelligent.

I guess all of us here use Google. The page only shows a search bar on center and a few links but is that all it does? For a novice user it serves as a prime utility of being a search engine but for those intermediates and expert users out there it has a world in itself.

Like we have law of conservation of energy, we also have law of conservation of complexity for designs.

Tesler’s Law (Larry Tesler) : “Every application has an inherent amount of irreducible complexity. The only question is: Who will have to deal with it—the user, the application developer, or the platform developer?”

So, as we see the less complex the system seems, there is an increased complexity happening in transmission behind and the same complexity moves in different places of the cycle. Coping with the complexity there are a few magical words : Organization & Structure, Modularization, Conceptual Models.

The interesting part of Design Thinking is like the creativity it attempts to foster, the very concept itself is continually evolving. Every example of a design thinking process could have several stages: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test. Within these steps, problems can be framed, the right questions can be asked, more ideas can be created, and the best answers can be chosen.Ultimately everything moves onto what is known as Human CenteredNESS of Design.