Design Thinking – the challenge in daring to embrace the mess of non linear thinking.
I am quite new to the field of service design and the tools used in Design Thinking are not yet that familiar to me. Hence I didn’t really know what to expect from the first contact session at SID. I thought it was great that we were assigned to go through the process & use the tools of design thinking straight away.
Here are some of the thoughts I had after 2 intensive days:
- Learning by doing is really the best way to grasp something in a very short amount of time.
- When not familiar with the tools for the design thinking process, having an excellent facilitator is key (Thank you Katja!)
- The always current ‘simplify, kill your darlings!’ mantra. I hope i will get better at it during my time at Laurea 🙂
- A reminder of the thrilling feeling of getting carried away, excited about something and that optimism is crucial to any creative process
- It is marvellous to learn from people who all have different backgrounds and patterns of thought
- How important it is to ‘think with your hands’ and prototype to be able to get accurate feedback
I’ve also been reflecting on how fascinating it is that a creative process that at times felt a bit messy and quite abstract still can lead to one or many concrete solutions. That it is a unique joint effort that a team makes trying to translate a problem into a tangible solution. I’ve learned that the design thinking precess & tools gives precise structures to creating ideas that can lead to innovation. To me my first encounter with design thinking has felt quite empowering. This feeling was further enhanced when listening to the audio book of Tim Browns ‘Change by design’. In the book he writes how design thinking encourages and forces a person to embrace the mess of non linear thinking when searching for solutions. The challenges of this I think is concretely highlighted in Katja Tschimmels article ‘Design Thinking as an Effective Toolkit for Innovation’. There is a passage comparing the characteristics of a design thinking manager vs. that of the traditional thinking manager. It is rather interesting how clearly the differences become when overly underlined.
What becomes clear from Browns book is what huge impact design thinking methods can have on anything and everything. Brown draws attention to the bigger responsibility he sees that future design thinkers could or should have – to find new ways on how to balance desirability, feasibility and viability and the positive impact this will have for businesses, people and the planet.
He concludes his book with a mention that all the great design thinkers of their time have had one thing in common, they have all been optimist and used design thinking in their strive to find solutions for a better future. Here I can conclude that this crash course to design thinking has been very inspiring and a great start on what I hope is the beginning of my path to become a design thinker myself.
Sources:
2nd and 3rd September Design Thinking –session in Laurea, teachers Katja Tschimmel and Mariana Valença. See also: http://mindshake.pt/design_thinking
Brown, Tim 2009. Change by design: how design thinking can transform organizations and inspire innovation. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.
Tschimmel, Katja 2012. Design Thinking as an Effective Toolkit for Innovation in Proceedings of the XXIII ISPIM Conference: Action for Innovation from Experience. (http://www.idmais.org/pubs/KatjaTschimmel/2012/actas_internacionais%20c%F3pia/2012.4.ISPIM.KatjaTschimmel1.pdf)
http://forty.co/value-balancing-desirability-feasibility-viability
Leave a reply to adgro Cancel reply