Story

Since 2008 I was learning and practicing Design Thinking methods. In 2013 I spent a year as a designer in residence at IDEO Boston, getting to use design thinking way in its original form, as described by David Kelley, Tim Brown and other thought leaders in the area. One of the outcomes of these learnings was a set of workshops on Design Thinking that I started giving in 2014.

Why Design Thinking?

Among multiple design methods that I had chance to practice, Design Thinking remains the most fruitful when it comes to user-centered design under conditions of uncertainty. Design thinking creates an approach that allows designers to focus on people and their problems, collaborate and co-create, work iteratively and use broad set of skills and methods to find unorthodox solutions.

Process

Design Thinking workshop touches upon seven key areas:

1. Immersion: a mix of looking-in and looking-out methods: learning tools for empathic, user-centered research and insight gathering from real people.
2. Defining Problem: reframing the initial challenge in a way that it reflects real people’s problems and needs.
3. Ideation and Selection: creating multiple possible solutions to the problem and refining them to a few that are most likely to work.
4. Iterative Prototyping: creating reasonable lo-fi tangible experiences that could be tested with people.
5. Testing: going out there and testing prototypes with people to further refine the solution.
6. Presentation: clearly communicating the journey and the outcomes of design thinking work.
7. Reflection: settling with new learnings and envisioning how and where to implement them in the future.

The script was originally based on d.School’s 2-hour Design Thinking Crash Course and over time evolved into a full 2-day workshop.

Cases

Design Thinking workshop video from Hyper Island (Stockholm):