Stages Of Design Thinking

February, 04 2016

What are Steps of Design Thinking?

Design thinking is made of 5 stages: Empathize Define Ideate Prototype Test

According to Stanford (n. d.), empathize is the phase where the design thinking starts at. The design thinker has to feel empathy towards the group of people or individuals he/she is trying to solve problems for. After empathizing, the design thinker then has to define the problem. According to Stanford (n. d.), this problem should be phrased in a statement, which is also called a point-of-view. This statement is what guides the design thinker. It contains the insights and needs of the people with the problems to be solved. Ideate is the third stage and as its name suggests it is all about concentrating

Before working on this project, I thought design thinking would be a very complicated thing to learn and apply. However, I found out that it is the complete opposite. I learned that the design thinking steps are set to make things easier and to ensure that the solution succeeds. I am very happy about the fact that I was able to understand the 5 steps of design thinking and how those will help to solve the problem. To start with, these steps were the ones that help me come up with the solution. Especially the first step about empathizing. This step helped me to look back in my community and identify a time where I felt sorry for someone. I realize that same time, I felt sorry for people who had to come to the office over and over again. I was also reminded about the fact that I heard many people complaining about the daily emails sent by people to inform them when they are out and in the office over and over again. Working on this issue, I got new thoughts of talking to people in the office, and students in general. I know that the problem exist, but with the design thinking steps, I learned that you have to let it all come from the end user. It helped me to not just base on my knowledge and this will help me to minimize or reduce assumptions in my solution. My next step after today is to find people that I can talk to about the identified issue, and to also survey a number of people to get accurate data.

It was a little bit hard because it seemed like asking what I already know. It was like trying to avoid what you already know and focus on hearing from the others and how they think of the problem. At first, it was also hard to get to the point of view statement. This is because there are many moving pieces of the problem. However, learning from the project resources, I was able to know how to formulate a POV statement. Now that I learned the issue, and confirmed that there is for sure a communication problem, the next step is to find a solution. My understanding is that it is going to be tricky to find a solution that allows only people who want to know the whereabouts of the tech and finance staff members. This is maybe because the idea of email is stuck in my head, but I have to move past that and think more creatively. Thanks to the design thinking process, I believe that I will get to a more suitable solution of the existing problem. With today’s activity I believe I completed the define phase of the design thinking process, next time I will be moving to the “ideate”