Design Thinking

Luis,
I use it very extensively when managing projects. It all boils down to understanding the problem well enough that you can determine the difference between solution approaches to find the best fit.

It doesn't matter whether it is engineering design, training development, office processes, or organizational management. All require tailoring the solution to the problem to find the best fit. Once you have established that architectural level concept of the project, when things don't go as planned, you understand the qualities of the solution necessary to realign the plan to the problem.

One cautionary note is that when you shift from pure engineering to consider people as part of the solution, you must have empathy. People don't respond based purely on the laws of physics. That requires considering not only how the solution addresses the underlying problem, but also how the solution approach impacts individuals contributing to the solution. The ideal technical solution might not be a good fit for the team asked to do the work.

Dear kiron
Thanks for this tip

What makes design thinking, in your opinion, an innovative approach?

From my point if view the key advantage of this creativity approach is the user-centric focus to derive solutions and foster idea finding. I use it especially in the UI and mobility domain.

I don't know that I'd consider it necessarily innovative - it is more about creating a deep empathy-based connection to all the potential users of a product, service or result and then using that knowledge with short feedback loops to build good outputs.

Just as most of what is in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development is "common sense" the same might be said about Design Thinking.

Kiron

As a former product development manager, I do not see this approach fitting well within our organizational construct, as we leave all product design work to industry. I still believe it is very important to be creative in order to solve everyday typical problems, but again the prototyping and customer interface is not what we do.

Dear Steve
Thank you for participating in this reflection and for your opinion.

Do you see any advantages in using this approach (Design Thinking) in product and / or service development?

Yes, as Keith mentioned, this is really systems engineering in a nut shell. Systems/ design engineers are responsible for all facets of product design. Interestingly enough, this includes aspects for safety, maintenance, and repair/ overhaul. I'm sure many of us have come across products in our lives that have left us befuddled with respect to servicing. More often than not in today's hyper-competitive and hyper-cost conscious environment, the bean-counters win, leaving consumers, and those who are responsible for maintenance cursing "who designed this stupid thing". Lol.

Reading the principles of Design Thinking, it's a rebranded form of Systems Thinking/ systems engineering. It's a top down approach of first understanding the problem and developing alternate solutions prior to downselecting the preferred approach, elaborating on the solution, validating the solution, and verifying the results.

Keith,

in my understanding design thinking differs from systems thinking in several ways:

- DT is human centric, ST is more an engineering approach to a system
- DT includes looking at solutions being technical viable and economically realistic, ST does not have this limitation
- DT uses prototyping, ST may be not

Both share that there is a problem space and a solution space, but ST could start after the problem is laid out, DT not.