According to Tim Brown, Executive Chair of IDEO, “Design Thinking is a human-centered 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.”

Design Thinking was started as a process to create new technology and products. Today it is used worldwide, in all business sectors; private, public, business projects or personal. The Design Thinking methodology has been applied, practiced, and popularized by the design consulting firm IDEO.

If you ask any modern Design Thinking practitioner, they will tell you that it’s not about products, technology, or even design… it is a methodology that informs on how to serve the needs of people more effectively.

I equate Design Thinking to the application of emotional intelligence in solving problems that impact people, and the key cornerstone of it is empathy.

Why is Design Thinking Important?

Design Thinking assists organization in creating value for people. It aims to solve concrete problems that impact people and delivers solutions that align with people’s needs. 

As designers unveil or identify issues, they can bring about innovative solutions.

In addition, it enables designers to tackle problems that people find difficult to define or verbalize. Furthermore, Design Thinking assists organizations to lead with innovation. 

For example, a human can’t imagine things that cannot be believed. Therefore, it creates difficulty for the designers to land on a solution that does not exist. Using an iterative approach more often leads to innovative solutions. 

It makes any organization run more efficiently and faster because it focuses on creating prototypes and testing to check their effectiveness, after a lot of listening to people and defining the problems.

Which Industries Can Benefit from Design Thinking?

Even if Design Thinking originated with designers, it is now used by people of all disciplines.

WeWork® has proved that applying this method by technologists delivered value to engineers, and business strategists. It helped them deliver value to the business owners and stakeholders.

Kaiser Permanente uses Design Thinking to bring about necessary changes among nursing staff.

The Singapore government used Design Thinking to secure work passes in simpler and more humane way.

Design Thinking helps tackle issues at companies like IBM, SAP, Toyota, and Intuit.

Design Thinking can be used by any complex systems such as government, business, or social organizations to break down problems and explore questions such as how it can respond to the growth of technology and globalization.

It is used to analyze rapid changes and how to address them and support individuals while understanding and providing solutions to larger organizations.

“Design Thinking helps businesses, government, and society be more creative, innovative and humane in dealing with people’s needs.”

Design Thinking Emerging Trends

Like any methodology, we are seeing Design Thinking evolving with new groundbreaking trends. Here are a few of them for your consideration:

Systems Thinking

Today’s world is interlinked and connected. Information flows instantaneously. This interconnection and quick flow of information can significantly impact the whole system as everything in today’s generation are so tightly connected.

This is where systems thinking comes in. Systems thinking is a discipline that enables the identification of the interests and needs of each stakeholder in the system. It allows them to examine the products or services to design the most influential ones.

In systems thinking, primary stakeholders’ consideration, interaction, and influence are required on the other stakeholders. While Design Thinking is human-centric, system thinking is stakeholder-centric. It also focuses on understanding the elements needed within the business system, services, and products.

Resilience Thinking

Design Thinking seeks to achieve excellence and near perfection, but what is perfection? On the other hand, thinking resilience is a solution designed to withstand changing circumstances that are bound to occur. Therefore, it becomes crucial to think beyond the boundaries of the issues at hand.

While Design Thinking focuses on solving problems for people, resilience thinking focuses on solving relevant problems that may arises, likened to contingency planning. Therefore, it is essential to understand the broader problem while adding resilience to Design Thinking.

Human-Centered Design

The concept of Design Thinking is based on two crucial foundations, human-centered design, and aggressive prototyping. The human-centric approach is the fundamental reason design-focused services and products have become successful. 

However, as we are advancing toward our future, nothing is certain. We know there are more significant problems that require our attention and preparation. The bigger issues are international tension, climate change, political instability, and other issues.

There comes the concept of human-centric design that solely focuses on environmentally friendly approaches by proposing sustainable solutions. 

Moreover, it readily embraces the thought that anything harmful to an individual can also cause drastic results to the community. Therefore, it is crucial to think of a solution that provides a stellar experience while also leading to a sustainable future.

Inclusive Thinking

During the research phases of Design Thinking we need to also emphasize diversity as we strive for innovation. Designers need to ask if they have involved the right people in defining problems, and who should voice the issues. They need to ask themselves if they are neglecting any community, and if they are doing what the solution can fix.

Therefore, since innovation is deeply rooted in creativity, having a broader knowledge of various backgrounds and sources is critically important.

So, inclusive thinking needs to have two sides to it. Being inclusive for the collaborators and the users. As a result, being an inclusive collaborator will leverage different perspectives and backgrounds. 

While being user inclusive would bring a set of users who will reduce every chance of neglecting any community. 

“The practice of inclusive designs truly focuses on all-people-centric innovative solutions.”

Master Framing the Problem

Design Thinking is a process that makes designers focus more on identifying problems and problem-framing rather than shifting full attention towards problem-solving. 

That is why Design Thinking is the most sought-after process because it diverts the focus on the crucial aspect of innovation: listening to people and focusing on the needs of people. This requires emotional intelligence. Specifically empathy.

The concept of Design Thinking emerges as a significant way to innovate and be creative in framing how we look at problems and how we go about framing challenges before we develop solutions. 

The closer we get to understanding what needs attention, what is broken, what is failing us as people, the closer we move towards delivering innovation.

Social innovation is a means to develop and implement innovative and effective solutions to solve environmental or social issues. 

It is a new perspective that provides systematic and practical solutions that can be applied to ongoing social issues. The needs of society are given priority in order to improve things like infrastructures, housing, and healthcare.

Design Thinking has evolved over the years for social innovation focused on bettering society with a more human-centered approach to solving problems. 

Stanford Center for Social Innovation defines Design Thinking as “the ultimate solution that is more effective, efficient, sustainable, or just — than current approaches to resolve current challenges”

The Four Phases of Design Thinking for Social Innovation

There are four phases to Design Thinking for social innovation. They are as follows:

1) Discovery Phase

The discovery of social problems is the primary phase research. It enables researchers to deeply understand problems and identify people, their needs, and the barriers they face. 

This phase builds on the foundation of empathy by helping teams empathize with each other and gain new insights. In addition, questioning gives members a more profound perception of necessary solutions to pursue out of all the research.

2) Defining Phase

Defining the problem is the second phase of the Design Thinking methodology for social innovation. This is where the problem is determined and focused around bringing out a human-centered, valuable, and actionable question that aims to bring focus and clarity to the design space. 

This is where we ask the question that defines the problem and the impact on people. We are not defining solutions in this phase, we are exploding the exploration of the problem in a deeper more meaningful way, with the focus on the impact the problem has on people.

3) Development Phase

Development is the third phase of the Design Thinking methodology for social innovation. In this stage, the participants develop an idea based on the results generated in the earlier steps. 

In this phase we begin to inform the problem within the main idea with all the best views in mind. This can be done with a few tools or using a simple storyboard as the medium. The goal is to begin to explore the how to solve what has been learned.

4) Delivery Phase

Delivery is the final stage in the methodology. It starts with communicating the ideas within the team and to the people involved. Be it a community, a region, or even a country.

The delivery phase requires that we maintain openness in order to revisit where appropriate the prior phases. While the goal is to deliver a solution, you want to stay open to the possibility that something may have been missed, or that reality isn’t matching the design on paper.

A very effective way to apply Design Thinking social innovation is by establishing social innovation labs.

Social Innovation Labs

A social Innovation Lab refers to the place or incubator where members across different fields, sectors, and socio-economic organizations collaborate to bring out solutions based on design thinking and innovation processes.

Social Innovation Laboratory (SIL), as an example began as an idea to fuse innovative, research-driven practices and the non-profit format, with the end goal being to improve social programs that benefit the disempowered, disenfranchised, and at-risk populations.

Innovation Is Important

In our modern world, environments and/or nations are hyperconnected. Therefore, what happens in one country can concern other countries as well. 

Today, nations face political, economic growth, financial stability, poverty, hunger, disease, and many more challenges all happening at the same time.

These ongoing issues require attention that can be solved using Design Thinking social innovation by the private sector. 

Solving societal problems can also generate business opportunities. Applying new knowledge and innovation can generate as much as 80% economic growth.

Yesterday, countries were considered prosperous if they were economically and socially prosperous. It was assessed through its GDP. However, in today’s time, a country must have peace, happiness, freedom, and financial well-being to be considered prosperous.

When we assess prosperity from these lenses, we perceive that a prosperous society needs an innovative approach to resolving complex problems with new and relevant solutions.

How Design Thinking Can Help Society

A well-known example from Wyatt and Brown can be cited to display how Design Thinking can bring social innovation.

A young woman, Shanti, who lives on the outskirts of Hyderabad India, fetches water from the local borehole that is about 300 feet away from her dwelling. She can easily carry 3 gallons of water even though she knows drinking the water has made her family sick multiple times.

She could not use safe water from the Naandi Foundation run community treatment plant. Opting for the local borehole over safe water is due to only one reason. 

The plant requires her to use a 5-gallon rectangular jerrican. This is simply too heavy and bulky to carry, even if it is a walking distance from the plant. In addition, she is forced to buy 5 gallons every day even though she does not need it and for which she needs to pay more. 

In this situation, Design Thinking has not been applied as they failed to understand the issue of the dwellers and fix it according to their needs. It has resulted in Shanti forcing herself to use the dirty water even if they had the facility of using safe drinking water nearby.

The treatment center was able to produce safe and potable water but failed to address the community’s water transport challenges. Thus, the traditional problem-solving method could not find systematic solutions needed by the consumer.

Design Thinking now allows us to investigate people’s insights in-depth. It aims to assume practical and relevant solutions by closely examining the product and services and the infrastructure that enables it to deliver the required product and services.

Businesses are taking in Design Thinking to provide products and services by going into the depth of problems and allowing high-impact solutions to bubble up rather than just imposing them from the top, which does not necessarily help the community in the case of Shanti.

Conclusion

Design Thinking has progressed over the years in such a way that now it can be used in addressing social issues, such as improving infrastructure to provide required services, in a way that meets people needs on their terms.

This methodology has proved effective for profit and non-profit organizations as they could understand social problems, unlock innovative ideas, and create better outcomes for people by leveraging the most important pillar of Design Thinking: empathy.

“Empathy in Design Thinking informs us to better understand issues by asking the question why in a deeper and more meaningful way.”

Five levels deep of asking why, will reveal the truth of what the real challenge and possible solution can be. This approach requires being willing to go deeper, and having the patience to gain the necessary insights, to develop appropriate solutions to the challenges we face in society.