Design Thinking Everyday: Perhaps your friends or colleagues have taken an online course. Or maybe it’s something you hear so often that you don’t really get it. Simply put, Design Thinking is a human-centered approach to creative problem-solving. It has been gaining much attention on the internet in recent years.
While Design Thinking has been gaining popularity in recent years, it has been around for decades. As it is often, the more popular a concept becomes, the more it was thrown out of context and the more confusion it created.
We have created this handy guide for beginners to Design Thinking. Learn more about Design Thinking, its importance, its process, and how to apply it to your daily life.
Table of Contents
What is Design Thinking?
Design thinking, in simple terms, is a way to solve problems creatively.
Design thinking, or human-centric innovation, is more specific. It assists teams to find the delicate balance between what makes sense for end-users, technologically feasible and what is practical for businesses to do.
Implementing Design Thinking is a way of encouraging organizations to “focus on the people they are creating for, which leads, products, services, and internal processes to be better.” It’s about how products are designed and how they’re used. Most importantly, it equates to result-driving, so Design Thinking certification is high in demand today!
Design Thinking: The Key Steps
The entire Design Thinking process has five steps. These steps are:
1 – Empathize: Gain empathy for the problem you are trying to solve and the people/market you will be solving.
2 – Define: Use the information from your briefing, user questions, and any other information you collect in the ‘Empathize’ stage to help define the problem statement.
3 – Ideate – This is where the million-dollar creative part takes place. All current solutions are ignored, and all ideas are welcome.
4 – The prototype – Take the ideas from the previous stage and pick out a few to take it to the next prototyping stage. Create a tangible solution.
5 – Testing – The final step in the Design Thinking process is to test the prototypes.
How can Design Thinking be applied in everyday life?
When we talk about Design Thinking in real life, it’s all about creating harmony and balance. These questions can be answered broadly to help you make positive changes in your life.
- What are the components of your life (career and personal, ambitions, achievements)?
- Which components would you like to replace, add, remove, or keep?
- What’s worth doing to improve your daily life?
- How can you reinvent yourself?
Let’s take a look at a practical solution.
1 – Keep an activity journal
It is important to identify which components make up your life to understand how you can retain, add, or replace the various components of your life. Keep a journal with details about your ongoing activities engagements.
- Stress [1] can make you stressed
- Be content
- We are delighted to have you 100% involved
- Get up!
- Drain your energy
It will allow you to see how your activities affect you to decide what you can keep, replace, or add.
2 – Define the problem
You now know the structure of your life after you have gathered information in stage 1. You now need to identify the problem and factor these dynamics into your life. The problem you are facing could be one of many and maybe one of the following.
- Which health supplement is perfect for me?
- How do I plan a great vacation to America?
- How can I generate new passive streams in my life?
- What musical instrument should I learn?
3 – Idea
Life is not like predetermined outcomes with known variables. It’s impossible to predict the future, so you must be open to new possibilities. While you may know what you like and dislike or drains your energy, it is often not enough.
It is possible to think of the possibilities to reach a greater goal. For example, you can resolve the problem statement. You don’t have to believe that your first idea will help you achieve your bigger goal.
4 – Test and prototype
You can take your ideas one step further and create real-world solutions for solving the problem. The first round might not produce the desired results, and you need to continue fine-tuning, re-engineering, testing, and assessing your results until you are satisfied.
Design thinking can bring benefits to your everyday life
Undoubtedly, the Stanford Design Thinking certificate course describes the benefits of Design Thinking in real life the best way, but we’ve attempted to give a general overview.
The objective is to determine an individual human need
Teams can spot the nagging points in consumers’ lives by using a human-centric approach that is based on observation. The team can identify the areas of pain in the consumer’s life using an observational approach [2]. It could be something the user may not have considered previously, and once they’ve identified them, Design Thinking may help address those issues.
Uncertainty or difficulty to understand.
Many consumers don’t understand the issue they’re facing or don’t know how to explain it. However, a careful look at their behavior can help you identify issues by observing actual customer experience behavior instead of their thoughts. It lets you spot more significant problems and make it easier to develop solutions.
Results in innovative solutions
Humans are unable to imagine anything that isn’t real. Design thinking identifies these points of concern. Innovative approaches to solving these issues often result in innovative solutions.
Conclusion
Design Thinking is a new way to think. Design Thinking is a way to express creativity that isn’t based on expertise, feedback, or empathy. Although different Design Thinking experts may use different terminology to describe the process, the overall approach is the same across all disciplines. Design thinking is a robust tool in the business world, but you can also use it in everyday life to improve your quality of life. If you feel Design Thinking elevates your lifestyle, do share in the comments!