Design Thinking – Using Subjective Analysis to Create Local Solutions to Global Problems
Design Thinking is best described as both a methodology and a mindset to tackle complex problems, which is mostly used to facilitate product, service or process innovation.
Dr. Caroline Szymanski
Design Thinking is one of today’s management’s favorite buzzwords and has catalyzed an entrepreneurial mindset shift in the corporate and the academic world alike.
Design Thinking is best described as both a methodology and a mindset to tackle complex problems, which is mostly used to facilitate product, service or process innovation. Design Thinking was made popular by David Kelley, professor at Stanford university and founder of the design agency IDEO. It revolutionized corporate innovation management by separating analysis and re-design. This strict separation of analyzing the problem space (context, socioemotional relations etc.) before exploring the solution space (creating new design ideas the and re-designing is what made Design Thinking popular in corporate innovation management. Innovation used to be mainly driven by technological invention and oftentimes solutions were offered before the problem was understood.
What is however especially interesting for the academic context are two other core aspects of Design Thinking: subjective analysis and re-design through prototypes. The academic context is traditionally characterized by a high degree of objective analysis of a given situation and a low degree of re-design of this situation.
Design Thinking places human behavior and not the behavior of a theoretical ‘homo economicus’ at the center of the innovation process. Instead of analyzing a situation from an objective point of view that acknowledges facts only, in Design Thinking a situation is analyzed from a subjective point of view – the user’s point of view. What exactly is her problem with the given situation? What are her emotions, values, desires? Borrowing tools from ethnographic research, users are interviewed and observed to create a prototypical ‘persona’, a crystallized subjective analysis of the situation/problem to tackle.
This subjective analysis is what makes Design Thinking a useful method not only for service and product innovation, but also to tackle major global problems such as migration/education etc. Design Thinking acknowledges that emotions and micro contexts are a major driver of human behavior and pushes hyperlocality to an extreme: a situation is analyzed from an individual’s perspective and this perspective is used as a starting point to the larger problem. Design Thinking aims to find a good solution for a problem that a very small number of people in a very specific context are facing. Only once a solution is found to this specific problem, it is scaled or adopted to a large number of people in less specific contexts. Here, re-design through prototypes comes into play. The Design Thinker re-designs the original situation by introducing artifacts such as new products, services or processes. However, not the final solution is introduced immediately, but ever improving prototypes are introduced in multiple testing rounds and the reactions of the users shape the modifications of the prototypes. Hence, the Design Thinker does not end his analysis after observing the situation, but updates her analysis upon interacting with the situation by introducing artifacts. This way the Design Thinker tests and generates new hypotheses, constantly updates her solution and slowly changes the original situation for the better.
Suggested Readings
- Buchanan, R. (1992). Wicked problems in design thinking. Design issues, 8(2), 5-21.
- Dym, C. L., Agogino, A. M., Eris, O., Frey, D. D., & Leifer, L. J. (2005). Engineering design thinking, teaching, and learning. Journal of engineering education, 94(1), 103-120.
- Kimbell, L. (2011). Rethinking design thinking: Part I. Design and Culture, 3(3), 285-306.
- Dorst, K. (2011). The core of ‘design thinking’ and its application. Design studies, 32(6), 521-532.
- Brown, T., & Wyatt, J. (2010). Design thinking for social innovation. Development Outreach, 12(1), 29-43.
- Brown, T. (2009). Change by design.
- Kelley, T., & Kelley, D. (2012). Reclaim your creative confidence. Harvard business review, 90(12), 115-8.
