Design Thinking Notes

Design Thinking

  • How designers operate: ways of thinking, ways of working.

Looking and Seeing

  • Design and creativity rely on observation and perception that goes beyond the obvious.
  • "Stop Knowing, Start Seeing"
  • Being sensitive and more aware of visual material in our environment.
  • Understanding how design elements and principles can be manipulated to generate interesting visual material.
  • Understanding the principles of Visual Perception and how to build this into your work.
  • Exploration and interpretation of how ideas come from a transformative and combinatorial process.
  • Perception shifts happen when you think you know, then you receive new information and your understanding deepens, changing everything.

Ways of Working

  • Developing ways of working that encourage exploration, embracing error, prototyping, testing, and evaluating ideas.
  • Skills to learn: Look, See, Observe, Visual relationships, Draw, Dissect, Reinterpret, Insights, Question, Challenge, Connections, Combinations, Design, Prototype, Evaluate, Generate New Ideas.

Traditional Learning vs. Design Thinking

  • Traditional Learning:
    • Knowledge acquisition and retention.
    • Delivery of outcomes by traditional means.
    • Teacher-centered methods focusing on rote learning and memorization.
    • Outcomes are predetermined and set.
  • Traditional education values long-established customs.
  • Question: How relevant is traditional learning now?

Conformity Bias

  • We all make assumptions; otherwise, our world would be chaotic.
  • It’s normal to follow certain thinking patterns.
  • To move beyond the normal, we need to break these thought patterns.

Types of Thinking

  • Analytical Thinking:
    • Logic, ability to analyze information.
    • Objectivity, universal decisions.
    • Devise conclusions, detect patterns, numbers, and data.
    • Organizational, qualitative analysis.
  • Judgmental Thinking:
    • Making decisions based on value, personal choice, and preference; subjective.
    • Emotional, unreflective, single-minded, opinionated, imposing one’s own bias.
  • Routine (Formularized) Thinking:
    • Repetition; process is the same every time.
    • Always done the same way without question.
    • Easy to master and learn; patterns of action.
  • Creative Thinking:
    • New ideas, positive about generating more ideas.
    • Combining unrelated structures to new patterns.
    • Originality, uniqueness.

Creative Thinking

  • Fluent Thinking:
    • Quantity of ideas, possibilities, consequences, many options, generative, opens up possibilities, withhold the judgement sense, avoid premature closure., quantity not quality.
    • Exploring possibilities without needing the right answer, keep an open mind.
    • ‘If you want a good idea have lots of ideas’
  • Flexible Thinking:
    • Many different views, mental gymnastics turning ideas over, many alternatives, switching.
    • Hold multiple concepts simultaneously, eg Reversal Thinking.
    • Allow the things you are ‘playing’ with influence your ideas.
  • Original Thinking:
    • Produce fresh, unusual, unique, highly personal ideas.
    • Novelty, inventive, entrepreneurial, unconventional, challenge assumptions and conventions, unorthodox.
    • Attribute most associated with creativity.
    • The use of our unique Imaginative capabilities to cognitively speculate and model change in future scenarios
  • Elaborative Thinking:
    • Ability to expand, develop, grow, extend, embellish ideas.
    • Forces more detailed thought revealing logic behind the thinking.
    • Thinking about the thinking, promotes reflection and communication, adding information to a situation, big picture scenarios, metacognition.
    • Examples are Analogous and Metaphorical thinking.

The Future and Imagination

  • We tend to experience our future by way of our past.
  • Marshal McLuhan: “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”

Anticipating the Future

  • You can't predict the future, but you certainly can anticipate it.
  • Albert Einstein: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

Creativity in the Workforce

  • 2010 IBM survey: CEOs value creativity as the key to successful leadership in an increasingly complex world.
  • An estimated 70% of Australian graduates are starting careers in roles that will change or become obsolete within 10 to 15 years, according to The New World Order report (Foundation for Young Australians, 2015).
  • By 2025, we’ll lose over five million jobs to automation.
  • Future jobs will involve knowledge creation and innovation.
  • Machines will free you up to explore, experiment and find interesting solutions to complex problems, like pollution

Mental Elasticity

  • Mental Elasticity and Complex Problem Solving is needed for the problems of the future.
  • Need mental flexibility to think outside the box and see the big picture.
  • This skill can be developed with practice.

Wicked Problems

  • Wicked problems: the nature of the problem doesn’t emerge until you start looking for the answer.
  • Require a different approach, demanding collaborative, innovative, and flexible methods.

Interdisciplinary Knowledge

  • Future careers require pulling information from many different fields.
  • Designers are well-positioned to facilitate collaborations through Design Thinking.
  • Jobs for the future require an innovative, pro-active mindset.
  • Experiment boldly, think outside the square, and don't be afraid to fail.
  • Playing it safe may be the riskiest attitude.
  • "THE BEST WAY TO PREDICT THE FUTURE IS TO CREATE IT"

Design Thinking as a Process

  • Design is a cyclic process involving questioning and creative thinking.
  • Ideas and concepts may have to be revised at any stage of a project.
  • A process that encourages iterative processes of synthetic “abductive” reasoning involving speculative thinking, creative idea generation skills, rapid prototyping, collaboration & teamwork, and reflection and empathy with others/users.
  • Design thinking refers to the strategies that designers use when creating products or solving problems. The challenge is in making these strategies explicit, so that they can be readily accessible to stakeholders
  • A flexible process that is solution-focused to help solve problems.

Steps in the Design Thinking Process

  • EMPATHIZE
  • DEFINE
  • IDEATE
  • PROTOTYPE
  • TEST

Empathy

  • Instead of putting others in their place, put yourself in their place.

Define

  • Define or reframe the problem.

Ideate

  • Explore ideas (Idea Generation)

Prototype

  • Prototyping

Test

  • Test and evaluate.

Review

Creativity

  • Creativity relies first and foremost on observation and perception that goes beyond the obvious.

Failure and Risk

  • Fear of failure can be a major impediment to creativity.
  • Failure is often seen as a negative to be avoided.
  • As young children, we are less inhibited by failure and more willing to explore.

Ways of Working

  • Looking, Speculating, Documenting, Experimenting, Seeing, Exploring, Prototyping, Reviewing.
  • Exploratory play allows children to comprehend new experiences.
  • This is a skill we need to re-learn in practicing Design Thinking.

Resources

  • Design Thinking Justin Ferrell
    • https://youtu.be/Z4gAugRGpeY
  • Guy Kawasaki. The Art of Innovation
    • https://youtu.be/Mtjatz9r-Vc