Why must you start thinking like a designer?

Why is everybody talking about design thinking?

Design thinking as a concept has sky-rocketed in popularity during the last years. As a methodology, it is widely used across all sectors and is coming to a place where its peculiar way of delivering results is captivating more and more professional.

It was popularized by the design firm IDEO, that in 2008 had an article published in Harvard Business Review, where they explained several use cases across industries, from manufacturing to healthcare. But it is not restricted to products or services. Universities like Stanford (one of the leading one teaching this method) started developing courses such as “Designing your life” that brings all those methods to spark joy in your personal development.

So, as you can see, you have multiple possibilities about what you can do, but, what is truly the meaning of thinking like a designer?

Trying to define it.

Design Thinking can be summarized as a process to solve problems where you prioritize the user needs, the ones that you detect observing, and empathize with what you see and analyze how people interact with the ecosystems that surround them. In contraposition to other mindsets of problem-solving, design thinking is a non-linear and iterative process, based on the importance of testing before assumptions and with the ultimate goal of choosing the best possible solution after trying many.

In such a complex world it is very important to find solutions using more than one brain in a room. Using design thinking we succeed in producing creative concepts that are more suitable for our customers.

In words of Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO, “Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.”. And here we can find three important concepts that will be all across all the theoretical frameworks that we will find. People, technology, and business. Just make sure that you remember them.

How can Design Thinking help you?

• Overcoming the fear of the fuzzy front ends: the bias to the action of design thinking usually led design-oriented teams to just take action and start working, which has an impact on the development of solutions for existing problems.
  
  
• Putting innovation into action: an approach that encourages you to start testing solutions as soon as possible and learning from mistakes is, of course, an interesting way to innovate. Fail fast, and cheap, and you will learn a lot of things along the journey.
  
  
• Having an impact in your organizational culture: rather than spending time planning, design thinking encourages you to think about possible scenarios and run experiments that, in the long run, can have a great impact on how your team tackles problems and in your overall score at business agility.
  
  
• Helping you to focus on human needs: using an observational approach and focusing on users, it usually helps to uncover where are the problems in processes focusing on the analytical side of the customer journey.