3. Design Thinking

Subject title Design Thinking

Purpose of the activity To provide participants with knowledge about the peculiarities of design-based thinking, about the strengths of the method and its implementation stages. To introduce this method as an effective tool for teamwork and for team empowerment in making various decisions and addressing challenges.

Duration From 2–4 hours to 1 week.

Location and tools Various writing tools, sheets of paper of various sizes, computers, projector, writing board. When implementing the practical task, more diverse measures may be needed, which will become clearer in the course of the task.

Number of participants 10–20 participants.

Acquaintance/ team building methods A large poster is hung on the wall. All participants are given many sticky notes of different colours and are asked to write on them one or more problems (local, national or global). Each participant thinks and writes individually, about 5 minutes are given for this task.

Each participant is then invited to approach the poster, introduce themselves briefly, and stick their stickers on the poster with the problems written on, presenting why they wrote down the particular problem.

Practical tasks The theoretical part specifies seven tasks: Task no. 1 In a group, choose the problem you want to solve using the design thinking method. The solution to the problem may be to create some product. The problem can be both general, e.g. ecological problems in the city, as well as a very local one, such as the ecological environment at school. Task no. 2. Prepare 10 questions for your chosen topic to ask during the interview. Select 5–10 people who face the chosen problem in one way or another and interview them. Task no. 3: Fill in all parts “SAY”, “DO”, “THINK”, “FEEL” of the square with the data you received during the interview. From all the data obtained, depict one character (in as much detail as possible): what does he/she like, what is he/she afraid of, what places does he/she visit, what does he/she read, and so on. Write down what your character’s needs have been discovered. Highlight insights. Task no. 4: Based on the image of the highlighted character, you can specify the task you will be solving. For example: “In the beginning, we highlighted the problem of the ecological environment at our school. And now we realized that our character is interested in a specific issue: sorting garbage at our school.”

Practical tasks Task no. 5: After choosing the method of generating ideas, come up with as many (up to 100) ideas as possible, how to solve a problem raised by your character. Choose one idea, which you will continue to work on, by voting.

Task no. 6: Create a prototype of your idea implementation - product, solution to the problem and so on.

Task no. 7: Assemble the focus group and test your prototype with them.

In order to help participants acquire practical design-based thinking skills, it would be most valuable to give the group or groups of participants a longer period of time (e.g., a week) to implement a real project, i.e. to highlight real problems and to create real prototypes. Without the opportunity to devote more time to the implementation of all tasks, it is possible to implement training and completion of tasks in a one or two day training program. And if you want to conduct a multi-hour session, then you can devote 1–2 hours to a practical task and focus only on the first few tasks.

End of session reflection methods In the event that projects created using the design thinking method are successfully implemented, it is highly recommended to organize a small celebration for the participants to celebrate the actions taken, the solution to the problem or the implemented project. Groups of participants are invited to share their results, photos, footage. Each participant is also invited to share his/her experiences and what he/she has learned.

THEORETICAL INFORMATION

“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.” Tim Brown, executive chair of IDEO

The design thinking method was developed at Stanford and is sometimes referred to as the method for creating innovation. This methodology can be used in a wide variety of situations, from working on a new product to developing a customer relationship strategy.

Task no. 1 In a group, choose the problem you want to solve using the design thinking method. The solution to the problem may be to create some product. The problem can be both general, e.g. ecological problems in the city, as well as a very local one, such as the ecological environment at school.

PRINCIPLES OF DESIGN THINKING:

1. Show, not tell Communicate your vision to other people through illustrations and stories.

2. Focus on values Express empathy for the people you design for. Feedback from your users is the basis of quality design.

3. Strive for accuracy Strive to understand exactly the essence of the problem. Form it so that it is understood by everyone and that you want to address it.

4. Say “YES” to experimenting Prototyping and testing is not just a testing of an idea. Prototypes are created for reflection and learning.

5. Remember the processes Always know what stage of the process design you are at, what methods you use at each stage, and what are you aiming for.

6. Less talk, more action Design thinking is more about real work than the process of reflection. Strive to do as much as possible, not just reflect and discuss.

7. Collaboration Bring together people - innovators from different fields and with different perspectives in order to produce the best solutions in this cooperation.

Design Thinking consists of 5 stages:

EMPATHY DEFINITION IDEATE PROTOTYPE TEST

EMPATHY - DEFINITION - IDEATE - PROTOTYPE - TEST

STAGE 1. UNDERSTANDING AND EMPATHY

Empathy is the basis of a design that is human-centred. In the empathy stage you:

Observe. You explore your users, their behaviour, and their daily lives. You get involved. You meet users live in order to communicate with them. You go deep. You try to understand as best you can all the challenges and experiences of the users.

WHY IS THE EMPATHY STAGE NEEDED?

You need to understand the people you are creating your product for. As problems that you focus on are rarely related to you directly, they are more consumer problems, you need to be empathetic to consumers’ values and needs in order to solve relevant problems.

By observing what people do and how they interact with their environment, you can understand what they think and feel. This understanding can help you understand their needs.

Only by observing users can you see what their lives look like in reality. Interpret their experiences at a deeper level and discover strong insights.

On the other hand, learning to observe and experience insights can be harder than it seems at first glance. Why? Because your brain automatically filters large amounts of information, and we don’t even notice it. Therefore, it is worth learning to look at everything with fresh eyes.

Communication and collaboration with users opens up the possibility of knowing their opinions and values, which previously were not so self-evident, even to themselves. An in-depth study of the issue may surprise both researchers and subjects, as some insights may be very surprising.

If you want to create a good product, communicate and collaborate with consumers in order to: • understand their hidden needs;

• discover promising and innovative directions of activity;

• discover your user;

• discover the exact user’s emotions which lead to one experience or another.

In addition to communicating with and observing consumers, it is no less important to experience their experience. Try to reproduce and immerse yourself in the situation they find themselves in.

One way to experience this is to conduct an interview based on empathy. In order to find a solution that improves the life of the consumer, it is necessary to understand his/her thoughts, moods and motives. By understanding what affects his/her decisions and behaviours, you will be able to understand what a user’s need is and discover ideas for solving that need.

HOW TO LEAD SUCH AN INTERVIEW?

Ask “Why?”. Even if you seem to know the answer, ask the interviewer why he/she has expressed one position or another or acted in one way or another. The answers may surprise you. A conversation that was dedicated to one topic may continue for as long as it takes to thoroughly explore the issue.

Do not use the word “usually” in your questions. Better ask about specific cases or events, such as “How was the last time…”.

Seek to hear the story. Whatever that story is, it will give you a chance to understand how a person views the world. Ask questions with the goal of hearing your interlocutor’s story.

Look for discrepancies. Sometimes a user’s stories and desires and actual lifestyle can significantly disagree. These discrepancies may hide interesting insights.

Don’t forget about non-verbal communication and body language. Observe the gestures of the interlocutor and what emotions he/she expresses with the help of body language. Don’t be afraid of silence. When there is a pause of silence during an interview, one always wants to ask a question. Let there be pauses of silence. It is likely that after a longer pause of silence, the interlocutor will start talking in more detail on the topic under discussion, and that will reveal the situation on an even deeper level.

Do not offer answers to your questions. Even if there is an uncomfortable silence after you’ve asked a question, do not rush to offer an answer. Your interlocutor may subconsciously say or confirm what you want to hear.

Ask open questions. An open question would be the following: “What do you think about buying gifts for Christmas?” Meanwhile, the closed question “Do you agree that giving gifts at Christmas is amazing?” gives less space and creative freedom to respond. Generally, closed questions only allow you to answer “yes” or “no,” but you want the interviewer to tell you a story.

Make sure you are ready to capture the information. Always conduct an interview with a partner. If you do not have a partner, use the recorder. You will not be able to communicate qualitatively with the interlocutor throughout the entire interview and at the same time capture everything he/she says.

Task no. 2. Prepare 10 questions for your chosen topic to ask during the interview. Select 5–10 people who face the chosen problem in one way or another and interview them.

STAGE 2. DEFINITION

In the definition phase, you analyse and synthesize all the findings that emerged in the empathy phase. As a result, you gain insights and an understanding of the needs of the users you will work with.

At this stage, it is important to achieve several goals:

1. Understand your user and his environment as well as possible;

2. On the basis of this formed understanding, formulate the task you will be working on.

In order to achieve this goal, you need to draw a “An empathy map”. “An empathy map” is basically the amalgamation of all the interviewed people into one personality with certain thoughts, insights and problems.

This map is displayed and completed in several steps:

Step 1: Depiction Take a sheet of paper, draw a four-part square on it, and fill each part with the following aspects:

What does the user SAY?

What phrases and words did he/she express? What does the user DO?

What actions in his/her behaviour caught your attention?

What does the user THINK?

What is the user thinking about? What did the interlocutor say about his/ her beliefs and thoughts? What does the user FEEL?

What feelings did he/ she experience while speaking? Unfortunately, thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and emotions cannot be understood and interpreted directly. Discover them by observing the interlocutor. Observe body language, tone of voice, and words.

Step 2: Analyse the needs Analyse the resulting map.

Needs are what a person needs on an emotional and physical level. It is the needs of the users that help to determine the right task for the job. Consumer needs are expressed only in verbs (“feel”, “receive”, “understand”) and not in nouns (“solution”, “product”, “idea”). For example, “feeling full” is a need, and “food” is a solution.

The easiest way to understand needs is to observe user needs and remarks. Some needs can be seen in the discrepancies between what consumers are saying and what they are actually doing. Write down and highlight all the needs.

Step 3: Highlight insights Insight is an important discovery that can push you towards a better solution to tasks. Sometimes insight becomes noticeable from discrepancies between consumer needs or discrepancies in behaviour. In addition, insights can be drawn from the answers to the questions “Why?”, which you will ask to explain some strange behaviour of the user. Write down all the insights that emerge. This way, by completing all three steps, you will get one character who has his/her own needs, thoughts, and problems. Task no. 3: Fill in all parts “SAY”, “DO”, “THINK”, “FEEL” of the square with the data you received during the interview. From all the data obtained, depict one character (in as much detail as possible): what does he/ she like, what is he/she afraid of, what places does he/ she visit, what does he/she read, and so on. Write down what your character’s needs have been discovered. Highlight insights. Task no. 4: Based on the image of the highlighted character, you can specify the task you will be solving. For example: “In the beginning, we highlighted the problem of the ecological environment at our school. And now we realized that our character is interested in a specific issue: sorting garbage at our school.”

STAGE 3. IDEAS

At this stage, it is important to come up with as many different ideas as possible in order to solve the tasks on the basis of which you will eventually create and test the prototypes.

WHY IS THE IDEAS’ STAGE NECESSARY? This stage is necessary to move from a problem to a solution to it. It provides the opportunity to:

• to put obvious decisions out of one’s head and start thinking outside the box;

• to increase the potential of innovative solutions;

• to open up new areas for research;

• to create a flexible and coherent innovation process.

Regardless of the method you use to generate ideas, we recommend applying it in two steps. In the first stage, participants generate as many ideas as possible, in the second stage, all ideas are evaluated and supplemented or grouped. Task no. 5: After choosing the method of generating ideas, come up with as many (up to 100) ideas as possible, how to solve a problem raised by your character. Choose one idea, which you will continue to work on, by voting.

STAGE 4. PROTOTYPE

In the prototyping process, your ideas come true in reality. Anything can become a prototype: a wall with sticky notes, a game scene, a space, an object, an interface, or a pattern of behaviour. The process of refining a prototype is carried out together with the refinement of work processes related to it. There is no need to be afraid of the fact that the first prototype variants will be rough and incomplete, as it is important to test them quickly and get feedback.

A prototype brings more benefits if participants (team members, users, and other people) can interact with it. When participants have the opportunity to test the prototype live, you get quality feedback from them about successful and unsuccessful solutions and new knowledge that can help you get to know the user more deeply and empathetically.

WHO DO WE NEED TO CREATE A PROTOTYPE?

It is generally believed that prototypes are used to test functionality. However, prototyping can also be used to perform other tasks: • Development of empathy. The prototype provides an opportunity to get to know your user better in the empathy stage and when gathering information;

• Ideas. Think with your hands when creating a wide variety of solutions;

• Testing. In order to improve solutions, create prototypes that emerge from a particular context;

• Inspiration. Inspire other people (colleagues,

customers, clients, investors) by showing them your vision through a prototype.

Task no. 6: Create a prototype of your idea implementation - product, solution to the problem and so on.

STAGE 5. TESTING

Testing is a great opportunity to improve the solutions you are developing. Prototypes’ testing is usually implemented several times – interactively and in real conditions. Test as if you are sure you are right. Test as if you are sure you are wrong.

WHY IS THE TESTING STAGE NECESSARY?

Testing is required to:

• improve the prototype and solutions. Testing shows how the existing solution can be improved. Sometimes improving a prototype means starting all over again.

• get to know consumers better. Testing is another way to observe and collaborate with users in order to get to know them even better and gain new insights.

• to check and to improve problem solving. Sometimes testing shows that a mistake was made not only in performing the tasks but also in anticipating the problem. If you realized in the testing stage that the solution was not right, you can always go back to any of the previous stages and start over.

Task no. 7: Assemble the focus group and test your prototype with them.