How to Start on Learning about Design Thinking

Based on my research on design thinking, I will say that if you want to get quick essence and sense of Design Thinking, best article to start with will be Brown and Wyatt (2010) article. This article is available online and current link which I could find through Google Search is following - https://ojs.unbc.ca/index.php/design/article/viewFile/1272/1089. I have given more detail of this article in reference section below. I will strongly recommend this article.

Best part of this article is that it gives very concise summary of history of Design Thinking and how this discipline came into being. Design Thinking originated from David Kelley's work in his firm IDEO. David Kelley later on founded Stanford University's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design as well. You need not to go through a number of sources to understand clearly about origin of design thinking.

Second best part of this article is that it summarizes Design Thinking process very well. As per the article, Design Thinking is a system of overlapping 3 spaces - Inspiration, Ideation and Implementation. Design thinking goal or focus is to create products/services which are human entered and process is also quite human centric.

In Inspiration space, one of the key point is to understand that instead of asking customers what they want, we need to look at how they behave in the real world. What it will mean is that instead of doing workshops in hotels or conference rooms and asking users what they want, designers need to go out and see/understand how their potential users are performing those tasks currently in the real world and what are their met and unmet needs.

In Ideation space, we need to distill inspiration into insights leading to options or choices for solution. Authors here also talked about building interdisciplinary teams built with "T" shaped people. Top of the T indicates empathy for people and broader set of skills. I in T is for in depth skill of the person.What it means is that every person in this team of course will be very good in one discipline but also will have empathy for people and will have broader view and skill set at superficial level.

In Implementation space, prototyping, testing, iterating and refining is the key. Here for prototyping, we can go beyond use of simple words and symbols. Visual prototypes, story telling through multimedia can be some of the options.

I hope that this article from me can help you quickly get essence of design thinking and you can pick up threads from here for further building deeper insights.

Reference

Brown, T., & Wyatt, J. (2010). Design thinking for social innovation. Development Outreach, 12(1), 29-43.