What makes a great designer? Who is creative enough? What is design thinking? Design itself is not anymore merely about aesthetics or product design, but about creating new kind of processes, services, interactions and collaboration. As new service innovation design students we all might worry that are we in the right programme; are we able to express enough creativity and generate new, bright ideas?

The definition of creativity has changed over time.  The term “creativity” derives from the Latin creare, which means “to generate” or “to produce”. Creativity refers to cognitive capacity to create something new.  (Tshcimmel 2020.) “The lone creative genius” myth is nowadays replaced by interdisciplinary collaborator (Brown, 2018).

Deep understanding of customers, their needs and emotions is crucial in developing more attractive offering. This is where the design thinking has a central role. Design principles can be applied to the way all people work, not just designers, which makes the role of design more central to businesses than before. Design thinking includes e.g. empathy with users, prototyping, tolerance for failure and embracing risk. (Kolko 2015.) Motee (2013) describes design thinking quite poetically as: « the search for a magical balance between business and art, structure and chaos, intuition and logic, concept and execution, playfulness and formality, and control and empowerment ». Design thinking can also refer to cognitive process, a mindset or a method with a toolkit for innovation process (Tshcimmel 2020).

A classroom full of enthusiastic collaborators, great designers-to-be, in the Design Thinking Masterclass were given a task to produce new solutions of the theme: Social distancing in the educational institutions. The 2-day workshop was lead by professor Katja Tschimmel from  Mindshake company. Our team selected to elaborate the theme of safe commuting to the campus, thus we developed an e-bike concept to Laurea. The process of development followed the workshop structure: team member introductions, sketching the ideas into the mindmap, selecting three project ideas, voting the most feasible idea, elaborating the idea, prototyping it with the Lego serious play -toolkit, testing the prototype by introducing it to another team,  modification based on the questions from another team, preparing for pitching; converting the prototype into story with a comic strip picture and finally pitching the concept to the SID -classmates. This was an excellent start of our SID programme;  two days loaded with intensive teamwork and theoretical knowledge of design thinking, key concepts and practical training.

I am particularly interested in visualization, team leadership and creative problem solving within multidiciplinary teams. Therefore I wanted to learn how different visualization techniques were used in the Design Thinking workshop. Power of visualization was used in the team building: through visual introduction; drawing pictures and writing notes about team members, making a prototype; it helped us to see the big picture, and identifying the missing points and failures in our concept and in mind maps; seeing the connections between different elements from which our e-bike concept was constructed and finally converting our prototype into storytelling with a story board. From the team leading learning perspective in mind, I also observed what kind of stance do our team members take on their own creativity during teamwork sessions and how will our team perform in decision making situations. All in all I learned most about the process of concept development and the core elements of design thinking.

It was indeed a pleasure to see the sparking creativity in action – especially of those team members, who themselves claimed not to be creative at all! I can not wait to see what we will develop in collaboration with each creative mind bubbling with new ideas.

Written by Tanja Saloniemi

REFERENCES

Brown, Tim (2008). Design Thinking. Harvard Business Review, June, 84-95. http://www.ideo.com/images/uploads/thoughts/IDEO_HBR_Design_Thinking.pdf   

Kolko, Jon (2015). Design thinking comes of age. The approach, once used primarily in product design, is now infusing corporate culture. (Links to an external site.) Harvard Business Review September 2015, 66-71.

Tshcimmel, Katja (2020). Creativity, Design ja Design Thinking – ménage à trios. In Perspectives on Design: Research, Education ja Practice II. Ed. Springer “Serie in Design and Innovation”. (in process).

Mootee, Idris (2013). Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation : What They Can’t Teach You at Business or Design School, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/laurea/detail.action?docID=1358566