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Understanding Design Thinking This lesson prepares you to start thinking about the ways in which design and business can be synthesized.  It introduces you to design thinking as an approach to plan and implement change in your future.  Whether you are an employer, employee, or designer tackling these problems, before deciding what your next step should be, you should start by developing a better understanding of the design landscape. So, how can we think of design in the context of business, and how can it be useful in helping you take control of your own work future. There are many activities that happened under the banner of design. Design processes take place within disciplinary specializations, such as graphic design,  industrial design, service design, architecture, or engineering.  In fact, many disciplines rely on design as a core of their practice. In principle, however, the design process can be decoupled from any one specific discipline, and applied to a wide range of problems.  We often think of design as being something based in a visual aesthetic, but it's a process that can also result in the creation of an artifact, a product, service, process, workflow, or experience.  For our purposes, when considering design in relation to business and work practices,  a useful summary could be an iterative problem solving process involving multi-disciplinary methods for researching, interpreting, understanding, and responding to problems across a spectrum of scales. It's a purposeful activity, resulting in outcomes that can be implemented to improve the human experience.  In other words, design is a structured, adaptable thought process you can use to change things for the better, in a manageable, sustainable way. There is no single identifiable design process. Depending upon the context, the process of designing can shift, and be adapted to suit the problem, resources, and other factors.  However, all variants of the design process are adaptive, iterative, and take place over a period of successive development cycles. Distilled down to its most basic form, a general design process could be described as iterations of assessing a situation, gathering information, developing ideas, testing, and gathering feedback, making a change, and continuing the cycle to evolve and improve new ideas.  Design is a process in which a certain amount of experimentation and risk is often required in order to arrive at an appropriate outcome. Each design problem is unique in its requirements and its context. Therefore, a good solution often has to make conceptual leap beyond what's gone before, a leap that improves an existing product, area of knowledge, or process by introducing a disruptive or unique perspective or process that offers new insights into solving a specific problem in hand.  This can be an intimidating prospect to be confronted with, when working with established processes and procedures. However, we'll discuss some design approaches that make this a more manageable task.  Many businesses are attempting to holistically synthesize design into their everyday practices, to profile, evaluate, streamline, and unify organizational structures, marketing strategies, or client services.  Increasingly, we're seeing the implementation of new methodologies into workflows, such as Lean and Agile.  These methods are often used as part of established business practices, and you may already be familiar with them.  Lean and Agile methodologies usually sit within the realm of production management, and a quite common within the tech-industry.  However, there are similarities between Lean and Agile and design processes.  These include adaptive work practices, sustainability, working collaboratively, iterative development, efficiency in production and scalability, and a continuous loop of feedback over time. 

If you're familiar with Lean and Agile approaches, it can help in adopting a design approach to solve challenges or problems relating to existing business practices. To help you understand how to apply design processes to change practices in the workplace, it's important to introduce you to the concept of design thinking. Design thinking is a system used to creatively solve problems through a range of analysis and synthesis techniques. It aims to build a holistic understanding of the end-user and challenge assumptions that are being made in any given scenario.  As the Interaction Design Foundation co-founder, Rikke Dam and visual designer, Teo Siang note, "Design thinking is useful, because it's an accessible toolset of designers' work processes that can help us systematically extract, teach, learn, and apply techniques to solve problems in a creative, non-linear, and innovative way."  The principles of design thinking, as they're understood in their contemporary form, began to gather traction through the 1980s and 90s. They were articulated as a set of key texts that emerge and begin to interrogate the problemsolving strategies of designers.  Examples include: Bryan Lawson's 1980 book, How Designers Think, Nigel Cross's 1982 journal article, Designerly ways of knowing, and Peter Rowe's 1987 book, Design Thinking.  Through the early 1990s, these theories began to move into the mainstream, led by pioneers like Richard Buchanan, who's 1992 article, Wicked Problems in Design Thinking, paved the way for design thinking to be thought about more broadly in relation to bigger global concerns.  This led to the formalization of design thinking as a design framework through the 2000s.  Various forms of this framework emerged at design institutions, such as the d.school at Stanford University, the Hasso Plattner Institute in Germany, and the IIT Institute of Design in Chicago. As well as becoming popularized for business through the emergence of design consultancy firms such as IDEO.  There are many variations of the design thinking process, but a good summary is provided by the Interaction Design Foundation who draw on the design thinking framework developed at the d.school.  They described the process as involving five key stages:  Empathize, understand all views is affected by the design and related issues from a variety of perspectives;   Define, identifying the exact parameters of the problem;   Ideate, brainstorming a range of ideas;   Prototype, put the working ideas into practice;   Test, learning about users through testing, revealing insights that redefine the problem and create new ideas for the project.  One thing you'll notice about this process is that many of these stages inform other aspects. You'll often cycle back to earlier stages, based upon what you learn in prototyping and testing, for example. The key concept to understand about this process is that the perfect design is never completed.  The loop of idea generation, testing, and feedback, continues to iteratively improve the situation.  This results in a more adaptive Agile process, that's more adept in handling change.  However, for these to work, there has to be a commitment to the continuation of a design process.  The full benefit of this approach occurs when design thinking is integrated into regular business practice.  A one-off design workshop is often not enough to facilitate systematic change of an organization.  The beauty of design thinking methods is that, they have the potential to establish adaptable practices, more aligned with the changing marketplace, and create more human or customer focused-perspectives, products or services.  Leading design and consulting firm, IDEO, is an organisation well known for its use of design thinking methodologies. 

The CEO, Tim Brown, believes the core of design thinking lies in generating a holistic and empathetic understanding of the problems that people face. To do this, you need to take into account, tricky to access aspects of the human condition, such as the needs and the emotions of people, as well as the motivations and drivers of people's behaviors.  You really need to understand all of those things that make us human.

The Importance of a Human-Centred Approach Contemporary design is driven by the necessity to understand the context and the needs of the people using the product or service.  Throughout any phase of the design thinking process, designers employ a human-centered design approach through the use of methods such as participatory design or co-design.  The premise of the human-centered approach is that as the ultimate recipients of a desired outcome, stakeholders need to be engaged and consulted throughout the whole process of designing. From gathering initial insights, defining the needs of different stakeholders, to exploration and evaluation of possibilities.  For example, a product designer with a human-centered approach would utilize participatory design by engaging with potential users of the product. They would take steps to understand their context and needs and involve them in the testing and feedback on the design ideas.  If a co-design approach was adopted, these users would also contribute to the design itself.  An example of this might be involving many people via crowd sourcing to find solutions to a complex problem.  A human-centered approach enables designers to understand the wider cultural, social, and use contexts more holistically. This can reveal problems or challenges that may not have been apparent at a surface level, and it helps designers to redefine the problem, and identify alternative strategies and solutions as they go along.  The ethos of human-centered designing is that all people are creative. As experts of their own experiences they can offers acknowledge and insights that are critical to the development of a design that might not otherwise be seen if an idea was being developed by a single person or a single team.  Digital technologies continue to drive a shift from companies delivering one type of product or service to a more personalized approach that enables an adaption of a product around the individual needs of a customer.  Kim Arwan, a research professor in Human Centered Design at UIC School of Design, notes that as technological disruption continues to influence business contexts, human-centered design will play an increasingly critical role in any type of innovation, be it technological or behavioral.  By using this approach to understand multiple perspectives and aspects of a problem, a human-centered view can help employers or employees design strategies to cope with change in the workplace by taking multiple factors into consideration as part of the process. To understand the big picture, we need to understand what design is in its most simplified form.  Design is a way of thinking. As we've outlined, this thinking process involves a range of phases including empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping and testing.  The contemporary design landscape emphasizes a human-centered empathetic, inclusive, collaborative, and holistic approach that can be used throughout each of these phases.  User experience designer, Elena Scherer, says' "Design is not magic, it's logical." Design is not something that can be added on at the end of a process to make something look good. 

Design thinking is important at every single stage of the development of an idea, product, or service.  It enables a better understanding of multiple influencing factors, is inclusive of a range of perspectives from people involved in different aspects of the process, and it influences the outcome in a very positive way.  This makes for a more holistic approach to solving problems or adapting to change.  For this type of thinking to affect real change, it's important to understand that design thinking needs to be an ongoing process that is integrated into all stages of business processes to some degree. What are some practical steps you can take if you're an employer, employee or designer?   You can use design thinking to refresh existing products or practices. Start small.   Think of a service or tasks that you already do that could be improved or might have to change due to technological disruption.   Prototype or build something to test your idea, and then expand it or scale up.  In the next lesson, we'll introduce you to some practical design thinking methods that you can use to make a sustainable change in your workplace practice, and develop a strategy to help you deal with change in the future of work.