DESIGN THINKING IS A PROCESS OF CREATIVE AND CRITICAL THINKING THAT ALLOWS INFORMATION AND IDEAS TO BE ORGANIZED, DECISIONS TO BE MADE, SITUATIONS TO BE IMPROVED AND KNOWLEDGE TO BE GAINED.”
– CHARLES BURNETT, FAIA, ARCHITECT AND DESIGN EDUCATOR
What is Design Thinking?- An Overview
For several centuries, architects have been trained to think and develop solutions using the design process steps.
Design thinking is a non-linear iterative process that teams use to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions to prototype and test, involving five phases- Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test.
These stages are not always sequential and teams often run them in parallel, out of order and repeat them in an iterative fashion.
Why is it important
Design thinking started out as a process for creating sleek new technology and products. But this methodology is now widely used across both the private and public sectors, for business and personal projects, all around the world.
Design thinking is a process for solving problems by prioritizing the consumer’s needs above all else. It relies on observing, with empathy, how people interact with their environments and employs an iterative, hands-on approach to creating innovative solutions.
Design thinking is “human-centred,” which means that it uses evidence of how consumers (humans) actually engage with a product or service, rather than how someone else or an organization thinks they will engage with it. To be truly human-centred, designers watch how people use a product or service and continue to refine the product or service in order to improve the consumer’s experience. This is the “iterative” part of design thinking. It favours moving quickly to get prototypes out to test, rather than endless research or rumination.
Design thinking in Architecture
It is Architecture with Architecting because the latter helps us envision an on-going, iterative process. Architecting Interaction, this is the philosophy that guides when designing spaces; to deliver an agile space that keeps evolving as the needs and desires of its users change.
If you have ever tackled a really big problem and designed a solution for it, they’re a good chance that you have utilized some of the five steps in the design process:
- Identify the problem and understand the people you’re designing for
- Collect information on the problem and learn how others may have solved something similar
- Brainstorm and analyze your ideas
- Develop a solution that you could test out and get feedback on
- Improve your original idea
The idea behind design thinking is to apply the problem-solving methods and techniques commonly found in design to problems and questions outside of the regular design scope. That could be a strategic problem, the development of a service, or even a political issue. Put simply, design thinking is thinking like a designer.
Architects and Design Thinking
In recent, and not so recent conversations, we have heard architects throw around these two buzz words that really whether architects own design thinking or should they? How we work, live, move, consume, produce has become subject to digital transformation. However, the capability of the architects for the synthesis of complex requirements bears the potential to develop new and needed systems for cities, industries and societies beyond building design.
Designers bring their methods into the business either by taking part themselves from the earliest stages of product and service development processes or by training others to use design methods and to build innovative thinking capabilities within organisations.
Conclusion
Design thinking utilizes elements from the designer’s toolkit like empathy and experimentation to arrive at innovative solutions. By using design thinking, we make decisions based on what future customers really want instead of relying only on historical data or making risky bets based on instinct instead of evidence.
