What Is The Process Of Design Thinking?

By Author: Ritwik Kapoor
Total Articles: 107
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Design thinking is method that is used by designers use in ideation and development, this process also has applications elsewhere. It is a process that is required in all fields such as literature, art, music, science engineering and business. Through design thinking, a designer will be able to solve any type of problems with processes such as extracting, teaching, learning and applying different techniques for solving problems in an innovative way. Design thinking is an iterative process, through which an individual will seek to understand the user and redefine the problems to identify different strategies and solutions that might now be instantly visible through an individual’s understanding.

This is a way of thinking and working as well as a collection of hands-on methods.

Design thinking is a process which revolves around the interest for developing an understanding of the people for who the customer is designing the products or services. Design thinking will help an individual understand the perception of a customer which will help the professional handle and take care of the problems that are ill-defined ...
... or not known by re-framing the problem in human-centric ways by creating different ideas through brainstorming sessions.

Design thinking is a solution based approach taken for solving problems. They are extremely useful for handling complex problems which are not defined well. Design thinking informs human centered innovation and human-centered innovation begins with developing an understanding of the customer’s or user’s needs. The process of design thinking will minimize the risk and uncertainty of innovation by engaging the customers or users through a series of prototypes for learning, testing and refining the concepts. A design thinker relies on the insights they obtain from customers real-world experiments and not just the historical data or market research. The whole process of design will start with setting a goal for the project. The process of design thinking follows a series of phases, the phases of design thinking are listed below.

5 phases of design thinking:

There are a lot of variants of design thinking process which are used today, and they have different phases, stages and modes. There are five different phases of design thinking.

1. Empathize:
The first step of the design thinking process is to completely understand the needs and requirements of the users. This involves consulting experts and professionals to find out more about the problems through observation, engaging and understanding the needs of the customer.

2. Define:
This step is done for understanding the needs, problems and insights of the customer. This stage will help the designer put all the information together which they have gathered. A designer can get proper understanding after defining the problem correctly.

3. Ideate:
In this stage, a designer will try to find new creative solutions for the ideas. It is an important part of generating many ideas or solutions. They should also pick some solutions at the beginning of the ideation phase.

4. Prototype:
The design thinking team will create a scaled down version of the product with some of the features within the product so as to provide a solution. These solutions are implemented within the prototypes and will be investigated.

5. Test:
This is the final stage of design thinking process and the results will be generated during the testing phase and it will be used for defining one or more problems.

Author Bio:- Ritwik Kapoor is a lecturer in one of the designing school school in India. Being a lecturer, he is also a passionate blogger who keeps individuals updated on new designing courses. In this write-up Ritwik highlights the process of design thinking.