E6/E4, FORTH, HCD, 3 Is, Hasso-Plattner, 4D/DoubleDiamond, SDT…these are all methods that have come up during the reading for this class and in class. Whatever the method, the point is to have a process that is collaborative (between team members but also between the team and the intended consumers and also the unintended consumers), with well-placed moments of divergence and convergence, and involves some kind of hacked prototype. Only from these very roughly described actions can a team have the beginnings of a workable idea. Depending on what you are trying to accomplish and who is involved will depend on which of these many models serves you and your team(s). These processes then rely on a handbag full of various “tools” that can be accessed when needed. And you will not need all the tools all the time.

During the first days of classes we were introduced to the “Top Ten” tools in Design thinking (Tschimmel, 2012). Of those ten we used 6 in the class project: minds maps, brainwriting, visual confrontations, storyboarding, rapid prototyping, and storytelling. But we also used interviews and a mood board to get the process started in class. One of my favourite points that was reiterated over the three days and in the readings was the fact that the first ideas are the ones “in the box” and that to really access the great ideas you have to go through many processes to jumble everything up first. This allows the participants to step back and really let their imaginations work on another level.

Photo credit: Jaakko Porokuokka

Who will be the creators?

The 21^st Century is, and will continue to be, a complicated place where there is a huge diversity in experience, access (to wealth, services, freedom, etc), wants and needs. So the services and products that will need to be designed will be created for hugely diverse groups of people. My favourite line from Tim Brown’s Design Thinking article say “Time and again we see successful products that were not necessarily the first to market but were the first to appeal to us emotionally and functionally.” I have often struggled with my ideas as to whether they have been done before and have pushed them aside when I see that they have. But the truth is, there is room for more than one when you really get the design (and the business model) right. As it has been pointed out in many places Apple was not the first mp3 player, Facebook was not the first social media space and Google was not the first search engine…but they have all succeeded. Keeping the customer central to your design is crucial to be successful and know what their experience can and should be keeps a business on the right track.

Storytelling

This concept of keeping the customer central to your business is not new nor is it the sole domain of design thinking but it is vital. Tim Brown’s book Change by Design is stuffed full of examples from his company IDEO and I love this style of expressing processes and reasoning through storytelling. A very good demonstration of this comes on page 50 when he discusses the issue of empathy and the case of the SSM DePaul Health Center. It is tangible to me the process of the team member lying on the gurney being rolled, quite disorientingly, through a hospital. This shows that the hospital was built to suit the workers not, in fact, the “customers” or patients.

This continual repetition of customer-centred processes have really stuck with me and I now not only know it intellectually, I actually feel it to be true. In addition to really knowing that the customer needs to be at the centre, there is also the need to really define who your customer is. And in fact, you must know that before you move further than the early prototyping stage otherwise…who are you prototyping for?

By Pamela Spokes