learnings from Stanford d.school

1. 101 OF DESIGN THINKING
Lessons learned from d.school

2. DESIGN THINKING IS...
Design thinking is a human-centered process.
We want to connect with our users, connect with the people to
inspire the design (of a product, of a service, of a business,...)

3. EMPATHY
Design Thinkers don’t start with a solution.
We don't start with a great idea that we're now going to design a
business around. We start with people and users and needs.
The first step is called empathy. This is connecting with our users
and understanding both implicit needs and concrete needs. There
are a variety of methods that we use to gain empathy.

4. EMPATHY: TALK TO THEM
We lean into engaging with people. We really push into the types
of interview techniques and phrases that drive deep insight and
deep emotion. We strive to have long interviews with people to talk
about their lives and what matters to them, not just the design
directive.
We sometimes end up having very personal conversations with our
users.

5. EMPATHY: WATCH THEM
We observe.
This is not just looking at someone for five minutes. This is taking an
extended period of time in their environment and really paying
attention to that person, the people they interact with, the objects
in their life, their environment as time passes, keeping careful log
books of all these observations, whether they're mundane things or
very obvious and exciting things.
Taking pictures, making videos, recording the sounds, really
capturing the environment.

6. EMPATHY: IMMERSE YOURSELF
You can talk to someone. You can watch someone. But we also
want to do as that person does.
Can you actually do the activity they're doing? For a group of
students working with farmers in Burma and watching them carry
water to irrigate their farms, what they then do is ask the farmer if
they can put that pole on their back, fill up the buckets, and walk
through the fields – to do it themselves.
We think about what we see in the field and come back to the
d.school and recreate that experience for our teams. That provides
a foundation. And it's fun and exciting. But it's a lot.

7. DEFINE
After you've collected all this information, you need to define what
is the problem that you're going to solve?
And a lot of really innovative solutions come from framing the
problem in a way that is different from the way other people have
framed it.
Trying to solve a problem that everybody hasn't already been trying
to solve for 50 years.
BUT: Don’t fix it if it aint broken!

8. IDEATE
After you've defined the problem, you've sorted through your
empathy work. You've made some sacrifices, and you really have
something to focus on.
It's now time to generate as many potential solutions as possible.
It's not just brainstorm, because we think generating ideas and
solutions is more than just brainstorming. We encourage people to
get up, to participate, to use their bodies, to use objects to
generate ideas, to build things as they're talking. And that
generates a large soup of potential solutions. And moving them
forward, we don't want to just move forward the idea that we
think's going to work, that's going to be the most feasible. We want
to move forward a crazy idea, a delightful idea, a risky idea to our
next step, which is to prototype. And that brings us here.

9. PROTOTYPE
To prototype means making your idea tangible so that you can
actually learn about it as you build and that you have something to
put out in the world and learn about your idea.
There are three types of prototypes:
Low resolution: Work with any material available. Should not take
longer than 20min. Must not function.
Medium resolution: add functionality and form factor
High resolution: Make it look like a final product and work like a
final product.

10. VALIDATE
Bring it back to the people who inspired your design solution in the
first place and test it with them. Now, testing is not being a used
car salesman and trying to sell your idea. It's trying in as simple a
way as possible to present that idea to your user to have them
experience it, to have them hold it in their hands and give you
honest feedback. What we don't want is people to just smile and
say, "This is great. I like it." We want people to tell us why. We want
people to get frustrated or be confused because it's from that that
we can learn more about our ideas. And because we're prototyping
with these types of materials and these types of tools, we haven't
invested a lot of time or energy in that initial exposing of our idea.
And we can use that feedback to make it better for the next time
we continue to iterate.

11. ITERATE
With this feedback, you go back to the beginning and repeat the
process. Make it fast, be actionable. Done is better than perfect.
To become an exponential organisation, you have to start with
something, where “good enough” is good enough. And when you
feed your “good enough” status with real life feedback, you will
get exponentially better in what once started “good enough”.

12. GO, DO IT.
IACy, November 2017