Design Thinking

Type				Team Size
Collaborative Tools	Software	Personal Skills	Productivity Tools	1	2-10	11-30	30+

Design Thinking is a mindset and includes a set of rules that helps you to find out-of-the-box solutions in one or more small teams.

What

• guidelines for a creative process in product design with a user-centered perspective
  
• iterative process of brainstorming, persona building, prototyping and testing
  
• Disclaimer: Design Thinking does not necessarily help you to compromise and balance different interests on the same resource e.g. clean air.
  

Why & When

• useful if you want to solve a problem
  
• helps to understand your target group's position
  
• prevents you from creating a solution when there is no problem
  
• one team should not be larger than 5, but you can scale up the amount of teams
  
• the length of the process is expandable (up to a week), but you can squeeze it into a 3-hour workshop
  

What do you need?

Workshop Material

First, you have to decide under which conditions you want to host a design thinking session. What is the topic or the problem you want to work on? Which participants, perspectives and skills do you need to go through the process? It is recommendable to not work in larger groups than five, if you are more participants, you can split up in smaller teams and find out with what kind of solutions you come up with.
Define a workshop facilitator if you do not want to do it on your own and create an agenda. Find a room and organize the material and resources that you need (paper, pen, post-its, whiteboard etc.)
Second, you need to communicate what you expect from the participants: Time, energy, attention. Try to make use that every participant is actually committed as one team member less is easier to work with than somebody dropping in and out.

The Process

Design Thinking Process

Empathise

In the first phase of the process, you try to change your perspective to the user that you want to focus on. Define your target/ user group and research about their background. You can make use of persona building to visualize your target group. Demographics help you to understand the framework conditions of your user group and have a look at sinus milieus. Your goal is to be able to think and feel like the person or group of persons you want to empathize with.

Define

In the second step, you want to define your problem from the perspective of the user. What are the needs and problems? What are the pain points? Why is the described challenge a problem to the person?

Ideate

This is the wild phase to develop ideas for solutions. You can use different methods as brainstorming, brainwriting, a written discussion, who-writes-the-most-ideas-on-post-its with the goal to broaden your view. No idea is too big or too far out of the box, the restrictive thinking comes later. Try to challenge general assumptions.

Prototype

Yes, now you are allowed to criticise. The goal of this phase is to identify one solution and design a prototype for it. The prototype can be in any form, a drawing, a mock-up of an application, a framework whatever. Just make sure that you create something visual so that every person can grasp the core idea quickly.

Test

In this phase, you try to get feedback from the user group. The feedback should come from 'real' users so call your colleagues, friends, ask people on the street - whatever it takes to collect reactions on your prototype. After that, depending on the feedback, you iterate and get back to another step in the process. If your users mirror you that your prototype is far from what is needed, you should start at understanding your user group again. If only little tweaks are missing, you can work on your prototype and get out in the open. As soon as their are only minor critical comments from your target group, you are ready to realize the solution.

Rules

• yes, and: The rule of "yes-and" means, that you should try to build up on each others ideas. Even though you have the impression that the suggestion by your team member is not suitable, add something that makes it fitting
  
• quantity first, quality second OR first storm, then criticise: Not everything that is brought up in the process will be the next big thing. Try to not judge ideas and collect everything at first. You can throw out unnecessary stuff later.
  
• keep the target in mind: As it happens fast that you get carried away by the brainstorm-thunder, try to get back to the problem description multiple times and check whether your solution fits to the problem and target group. This helps you to stay on track and adjust if necessary.
  
• work as one group: You might have the impression that your idea is better than the other one. Try to focus on one idea with the whole group and do not start to do your own thing. Use the attention of the whole group to progress.
  
• be visual: Depending on your preference, you can draw an idea, make a mindmap, write everything on post-its or use a written discuss - the most important aspect is: write it down. Therefore, you will have a written documentation later and can get back to ideas that were brought up hours ago.
  

Example for sustainability science

Imagine you want to find solutions for different stakeholders on land use in the city of Lüneburg.

1. At first, you would need to define the different needs of the stakeholder and cluster them into need groups, e.g. all stakeholders that are interested in climate change mitigation aspects.
2. Then, you would assign one team per need group and let them dive into the process. The process steps are still the same for all of the groups.
   
3. After having finished the process, you can compare the different solutions. One group might have come up with a participation format of how to include a group that is not yet involved in a decision process. Another group might have developed a ranking scheme for decision criteria and so on. Now, you can see whether there are similarities between the different solutions and how they can be combined, transferred to another need group.
   

Links & Further reading

• https://hpi.de/en/school-of-design-thinking/design-thinking/background/design-thinking-principles.html
  
• Tips for organizing design thinking sessions: https://newkind.com/12-design-thinking-rules-from-david-burney/
  
• Conference Paper on Design Thinking Methods: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-20886-2_2
• Youtube Video about Design Thinking principles (very entrepreneurial): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHGN6hs2gZY

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The author of this entry is Alexa Böckel.