There are many ways to Design Think! - Issue #4
There are many Design Thinking frameworks out there. This article focuses on sharing the commonalities of these different frameworks, and tries to summarize the common essence across them.
Original Article published by me here
Please Note: The comparison is subjective in nature and presents my viewpoint. Its no way the single source of truth, and reader’s are welcome to draw their own conclusions.
Let’s use Design Thinking?
Some people reached out to me after my first blog about Design Thinking(abbreviated from hereon as DT), inquiring if I had examples of how DT can be exercised into a real-life use-case. In one of my upcoming blogs we will try to build a product using DT, taking one of the many frameworks out there. Yes you read it right, one of the many frameworks
. DT as a concept, is not new, it’s been there for ages(according to Wikipedia, the origin of the term DT can be traced back to 1950’s). People have been applying DT principles and frameworks over decades, just that over the past few years the term has received assiduity and has been gaining momentum. If we analyse the trend over the past 10 years, we can see the pattern on number of google searches on Design Thinking
and Product Design
, highlighting that not only DT searches are catching up(it’s becoming more of a fad), but also that the trend has gained more momentum after 2016.
Contrary to popular belief, DT is not only applicable when building new products(even though in most cases people resonate DT with customer products), it’s a process which facilitates strategic thinking thereby extending its overarching presence to almost all walks of life. The more you start talking about DT to people, the more you will start seeing its presence around in all industries:
WeWork - A design sprint (actually) saved wework a ton of money
Bluebottle - Blue Bottle sprints with GV
Daimler - Off to new horizons with design thinking
Slack - Threads in slack, a long design journey
INFARM - Developing b2b vertical farm units
UCSF - Design thinking brings innovation to health-care and medical education
…
As you can imagine, with DT being so prevalent, there are multiple models and frameworks promoting and explaining DT, but if we look at them closely they all try to achieve a common purpose - co-creatively devise human-centric solutions to solve business problems. In the section which follows below, I am going to be talking about four such design frameworks. Its going to be a long article, since I will be explaining the different methodologies, so if you are just looking for a summary, here you go
Stanford d. School IDEO Frog Double Diamond
Empathize Discovery Clarify Discover
Define Interpretation Build the group Define
Ideate Ideation Seek new Develop
Understanding
Experimentation Prototype Imagine Deliver
Test Evolution Make Plan
To be honest, any of the DT frameworks focus on below questions, no matter what their structures are.
What are the needs of our user segment?
What is the exact problem we are talking about?
What are the many ways to solve the identified problem?
What do we learn from our prototype? Does it actually solves the problem?
Lets see each one of them in more detail.
Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford
If you remember my previous blog, I have referenced the above picture. Stanford D.School, or Hasso Plattner Institute of Design proposes this 5 stage journey to DT.
Empathize - Know your audience, this step is focussed on observing,interviewing and thereby empathizing with the user, to understand their needs, and unearth the unmet and open problems
Define - Provide user stories describing and articulating the needs, defining the user persona, and providing a concise problem statement we need to solve
Ideate - Lets start brainstorming solutions(the ‘how’) now that we have defined the ‘what’ and ‘why’
Prototype - Instead of us building a full fledged solution, we want to build a minimum viable product(mvp) aimed at addressing customer needs
Test - Create a feedback loop with the customer to get early feedback before iterating further. Fail fast and early is always better while building user-centric products.
IDEO, International Design and Consulting Firm
Similar to D.School’s model IDEO’s methodology follows a collaborative human centric approach dividing and focussing on three key areas - inspiration, ideations, and implementation. IDEO’s stresses on the fact that you need to understand people, you are designing for. IDEO has created the Human Centred Design Toolkit (HCD Toolkit) design kit, which can be accessed here.
Design Council UK, Charity for Strategic Design
The Double Diamond is Design Council’s DT methodology empowering both designers and non-designers develop solutions to problems. As illustrated in the example above the two diamonds signify two different stages - exploring an issue and taking focussed action. At the core of this methodology are four core principles to ensure an effective working space:
Put people first
Communicate visually and inclusively
Collaborate and co-create
Iterate
Next let’s break down the Double Diamond into its individual components:
Discover/Research - Interview, empathize and understand the user-pain points, to figure out the problem or unmet needs of the user(synonymous to
Empathize
stage of D.School)Define/Synthesis - Provide a concise definition to the user problems(synonymous to
Define
stage of D.School)Develop/Ideation - Ideate different solutions to the problem at hand(synonymous to
Ideate
stage of D.School)Deliver/Implementation - Involves forming and testing of solutions at smaller scale, to understand what will work, and what will fail (synonymous to
Prototype
andTest
stage of D.School)
Overall this framework is a non-linear approach to problem solving - develop
and deliver
are collaborative learning processes, to help build, experiment, and hone your products - and always using the solutions/mvp to go back and understand if the solutions actually solve the problem we initially defined them to solve.
Frog
Frog institute has a non-linear methodology when it comes to design thinking(ref: Empowering Communities with Design Thinking). Their DT methodology is more fluid in scope, and consists of an action map spanning six areas:
Clarify - Agree on the common problems the group is trying to solve, and define the end result the group wants to achieve. This step is critical, as the rest of the steps are based on this. This step is synonymous to
Define
stage of Stanford d.SchoolBuild the group - Identify the unique strengths of people involved, and their commitments to the cause defined in the clarify section. This allows alignment, and develops understanding in the group.
Seek new understanding - Empathize and start interviewing people to gain perspective as a group to what problems people face and what are their unmet needs. This step is synonymous to
Empathize
stage of Stanford d.SchoolImagine - Ideate and create solutions for the problems and user stories you have formed. This step is synonymous to
Ideate
stage of Stanford d.SchoolMake - with ideation done, build an mvp to see how your version of your idea really stands. This step is synonymous to
Prototype
stage of Stanford d.SchoolPlan - Create milestones, task forces and lets get to action.
Called as collective action kit(or CAT), their DT methodology tries to empower you and your team to develop critical design thinking, empowering you to create better stories, and inspiring and sustaining collective action. CAT (as per my understanding) undertakes the principle of always learning
- everyone starts with a shared goal, but at regular stages/areas, the group returns to the centre of the action map to reevaluate and assess what has been done, and what still needs to be done( it’s analogous to quarterly OKR’s , where we assess the overall progress, and re-prioritize our goals).
To support the rebuilding of a democratic Myanmar, frog worked with pointB, a locally-based design-thinking center for community engagement. The team developed a 6-month CAT-based curriculum that fosters the development of a new generation of leaders equipped to tackle their communities’ social issues.
So what have we learnt?
Overall all the methodologies have the same essence - creating a human-centric problem solving process, with feedback loops, always looking back to ensure we are able to learn and adapt. However there are subtle differences, some are linear in scope( ex. Stanford d.School) whereas some are non-linear( ex. Frog). Depending on the sector and the scale one can choose one vs the other methodology - for example if you are working in the social sector, IDEO and Frog better suited, whereas if you are working on a mid-sized company project you might find D. School is much more applicable. With so many models out there, choose one which works best for your use-case, after all they all achieve the same end-result.
Hope this post was helpful! Stay tuned for my next post on Design Thinking Success Stories.