How Design Thinking can help you find an Idea and Its Solutions?

Hello people!!

Every day we come across various problems in our life some we face ourselves and some we hear from others. If you are someone whose brain immediately switches from problem-facing mode to solution-thinking mode, I think design thinking will save you today. How? Read Further…

By definition – “To design is to devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones”-Herbert Simon

This simply means It’s a process of solving human problems where more focus is given to a Human hence called HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN (HCD).

while you are following the design thinking approach you should treat a human as an iPhone14 bought on the first day🥰

Let’s get into the Five phases of design thinking

• Empathize
• Define
• Ideate solution
• Prototype
• Test

Among these Phases, the first two phases are crucial because this will determine how will your final solution look like

To better understand the concept let’s take a scenario

CaseStudy – Improving Life of International Students living in kyoto

Empathize

In this phase you have to identify all possible user and their requirement.

Let’s think about this

The thinking process can be classified into two types-

Imagesrc –https://divergentthinking.design/why-divergent-thinking

Divergent thinking – Generate as many ideas as possible**.remember here Quantity of ideas is important** and no Idea is good or bad

Convergent thinking – Analyze all the ideas generated in divergent thinking and keep only those that are not similar and may contribute to the solution. remember here Quality of the idea is important

after applying Divergent Thinking we make stakeholder mapping. All these stakeholders can be classified into two types

Mainstream – the user who holds the majority stake like a student(in our case)

Extreme-the user who comes in the minority but must be considered. example-a disable student

Tip : It’s only when you look at the problem from the perspective of the person facing it that you can truly think of out-of-the-box solutions.

Our next step is to understand what these stakeholders truly desire

This process can be done using various methods like conducting

Interview & survey-self explanatory

ethnography-This process involves observation from 3rd eye perspective to get an overall idea of the situation

Focus group – This one is my favorite because It helps all stakeholders to share their part of stories, after listening to this you can jot down all the problems and finally converge them into onto meaningful ideas

Now that you have all the ideas ready you have to carefully organize it because these generated idea is now going to become a source for defining one problem in define Phase

Define – Collect all Ideas and finally define one problem statement

example 1- How to find mental peace for students who are alone?

example 2 – How to fight the rental problem for students who just arrived in Kyoto

Ideate – Now we have one specific problem to focus on therefore we can brainstorm Ideas and solutions

Prototype and Testing – we can create some mockups for solutions and test it.

all these processes of design thinking is non-cyclic hence you can jump from one phase to another if you feel you need any requirement change or prototype change.

Hope you got some insight out of this approach. Now before you arrive at a solution. Relax and try this approach instead.

Surprise yourself and others.

“Life has no remote….get up and change it yourself!”

― Mark A. Cooper, Operation Einstein

Stay healthy! Keep Hustling❤️