Design Thinking is a term that we often hear while studying at top business schools. Today its important to learn about this as it would elevate your thinking perspectives while solving realtime problems.
Design Thinking is not only meant to outperform businesses around us, instead it has pivotal role in modernizing our lifestyle in a much smoother way. If we apply the intuitive design thinking approach while solving our real life problems, we would discover that the solutions are logical and sensitive in manner.
Having said these, let us learn about the five important phases of design thinking :
1. Empathy : In this phase we can introspect about our issues and perform the needful analysis, whether our emotions imbibe within these. Let say, one of your family member is hospitalized and needs immediate surgery but you have no money to afford this. You don’t have medical insurance either. So, you have identified the issues.
2. Define : In this phase we have to fixate the problem statement that we have to solve. Let say, in the earlier usecase, you defined the problem is – Find a suitable hospital and arrange money for the surgery.
3. Ideate : In this phase you have to generate some constructive ideas from your creative mindset to solve the problem statement. There can be multiple ways to solve a problem, but you have select the most feasible one that would produce the best results. In earlier usecase the possible solutions could be –
- Get a credit card loan and arrange the money
- Ask some of your acquaintances and borrow money
- Move to some government hospital and see if the surgery can be done with minimal cost
- Ask for some health organization to sponsor the surgery cost
- Find the best hospital, and arrange the money through selling of your personal belongings
After analyzing the risks involved, you have to select the most appropriate one out of these. Let say, you have selected the last idea.
4. Prototype : This is the idea implementation phase. Here you have to work on your selected idea and create some working solution out of this. In our usecase, you have to work on finding the best hospital through some reliable resources where this surgery can be performed with expertise. You have to do some homework and create some executable approach to figure out the personal assets that can bring you the best returns at this moment.
5. Execution : This is the final phase of design thinking. Here, you need to see how your prototype performs with real usecases. In this way you would get the correct estimates about the success and failures of your design approach. In our usecase, you can evaluate if the hospital and money helped you to overcome the defined problem in a positive way. There would be some learnings also, like you could examine and see how it could have been improved further.
Design thinking allows you to learn from your actions instantly. You would have complete idea how you could have brought some different results. Even if you are dealing with some serious emotions in life, break down your issues and think of solving this with design thinking approach. You can just think of how the businesses are generating huge revenues just adapting this simple technique while dealing with business problems. Therefore, just imagine, if you would start applying this in your life, how much impact you would experience.
Design thinking allows you to see the horizons of life that were unseen either.