DESIGN THINKING - A Human Centered Approach

Design Thinking is one of the innovative pedagogy used in the field of education to solve complex problems. 

Design Thinking is a HUMAN-CENTRED approach to innovation that draws from the designer's toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success. (Tin Brown, CEO of IDEO )

It is HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN, as it is based on a philosophy that empowers an individual or team to design

• PRODUCTS 

• SERVICES 

• SYSTEMS  and

• EXPERIENCES 

that address the core needs of those who experience a problem. 

The process of Design Thinking has 5 key phases. These are detailed below in simple words to apply this process in your own setting. 

1. Empathize 

Empathy is about understanding the problem by immersing yourself in the community that will be affected by your design. Designers spend time talking directly with those who are experiencing the problem and observing how their environment works. This stage and design process as a whole is about asking questions instead of making assumptions about why things are the way they are. 

2. Define 

This step helps set up the rest of the process. In this step, the problem is defined by focusing on the key activities that you want to accomplish. Most often people try to define problems as a mix of problem and solution. The statements defining the problem should always be asking why. For eg. why do we need more qualitative resources in the field of pre-school education?  What are we really trying to accomplish? The answer might be something like, " we need a way to foster the qualitative learnings in the children from childhood ". That's the real problem you want to focus on. The way we define the problem is important and should be phrased in a way that allows creativity in how it could be addressed. 

3. Ideate

This stage is brainstorming time. In this stage, we will come up with as many solutions to the problem you defined as possible. This is best done in a team. Each member writes down the ideas they have one at a time and place them on a board for everyone to see. One key thing to consider at this stage is that we should never judge the ideas are good or bad, practical or outlandish. often an impractical idea scaled back slightly can become exactly the type of novel solution that we are looking for. 

4. Prototype

Typically in this stage, the designers put ideas into action by creating low-cost experiments to test them. The goal in this stage is to create something you can test with those who live with the problem in order to see if it works.  In the case of products, this is often a model of the designs you have in mind while in the case of services, build out a model with actionable steps and a workflow that can be simulated either in the real world or through role play .

5. Test

The person who lives with the problem is asked to test the model or prototype to see if it address all aspects of a problem, this is where the designers identify the flaws, weaknesses, and gaps in the design, improving it along the way.

While this may seem like the end, the design process is meant to be dynamic and cyclical. It is often not linear, but you will only realize what your next step is once you are in the mid of the process. 

Everyone is a DESIGNER,
whether we LIKE it or not,
our CHOICES create the SYSTEMS we live within