Before I start to speak my mind, on my experience with Design Thinking,  here is the definition from Tim Brown:

Design thinking is an approach that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods for problem solving to meet people’s needs in a technologically feasible and commercially viable way. In other words, design thinking is human-centered innovation. -Tim Brown

If that is not clear, here is a simplified explanation:

Design Thinking is a method to solve problems with focus on the people needs, not on what technology it uses. The easier you can build a prototype of the solution the better, because will not cost millions of dollars. You can read more about here (in IDEO’s website) and in this article from the fast company.

Recently, I spent a weekend in a workshop at SSES, on Design Thinking and Experience Prototyping. Like most hyped methodologies, theories or frameworks, design thinking is not a “miracle anybody can use it” tool, it needs time for the people involved to understand how to use it effectively. Like every other tool out there, it has a learning curve.

Think of it as learning how to dance salsa. Sure, at first glance  it may look fun or might look really sexy and cool. However it is hard to get to the level when you dance, it looks sexy and cool, to other people. You need to know the moves, follow the rhythm and tempo. Salsa is a duo team dance, where they have to focus on the the couple as a whole, not in the individual needs, because it will never work. Finally and most important, salsa needs practice, practice and more practice.

[Cool salsa stuff, which needs experience to get to that level. Image source]

Same happens in design thinking, you need to know about the process, can’t make cool and fun sequences without knowing the moves. Can’t come up with great solutions, without knowing the methodology. Can’t make sense of all without seeing the results, failing, trying again and continue to fail and learn.

It takes time for people to understand what how to build in each others ideas. We [humans] are selfish beings, which leads us to be more concerned on making our voice heard. We need a balance of noise and signal, it can’t be like twitter where everybody is just screaming or re-screaming what others say.

People sometimes don’t realize why (in Design Thinking) we need to create as much ideas as possible, even if they are nonsense. Ideas is the fuel of Design Thinking, without them the tool will no operate. And the more variety there is, the more powerful “the fuel” becomes.

It may be argued that a bunch of ideas may create just noise, or the more ideas we have the less quality we will have. It doesn’t matter if they are good or bad, they will be consume by the process, which will lead to find the better ones in the pile of noise. Think of it as finding a radio signal, to get to the signal we want, first we have to go through the noise.

One of the key elements in design thinking is to learn from failures. What better way to learn from out failures than doing things and gaining experience. or prototyping. Prototyping helps us achieve two goals:

• Try, fail and learn
• Communicate ideas better, because instead of telling or describing a idea we show it, even if its a made of foam or drawn.

We can take the mantra, of learning from our failures further. We can view at every idea that we have as failure. Only a couple will end up being developed and prototyped, the others are dropped. Then why not learn from our ideas that were dropped.

Finally, this is a “team sport”, is not about the superstar or individual. Everybody is good at one thing and bad at another. By working together and complementing each other, the whole group becomes bigger than the addition of individual talents. Which enables the team to deal with bigger problems, that any individual will not be able to tackle by herself.

Your team faces a problem and somebody says: “let’s be creative.. and find a solution to this problem” or  “we need to discuss how to do it, lets do something creative”.

Doesn’t matter what you are doing or what needs to be done, if somebody tells you this, mostly like you will end with some sort of “creative atrophy”. Because at some point you will be stressed thinking if your ideas are creative or not, instead of just coming up with many as possible.

In the past month I heard the create phrase a couple of times. I found it amusing, since even if they meant good and wanted to motivate, taking me into the “creative atrophy” path: the only thing I was thinking of  was the word creative and not the problem at hand.

The big issue with using adjectives like creative, awesome, unique, etc. is that they shift the focus in the wrong direction. Rather than focusing on the problem at hand, we try judge or determine: is it a creative idea, a cool solution or it gives you awesome experience. We pressure ourselves, narrowing the possibilities by we starting to throw any idea that we don’t find as creative. Instead of keeping a open mind and giving any idea a chance, without caring how unoriginal  or uncreative that it looks. And that is being creative, not caring or judging and trying to see how to materialize or use every idea.

The best way to approach problem solving or coming up with new solutions, is not to use any adjective that will qualify the idea. Instead just let people speak their mind and acknowledge their ideas. Generally this sessions where people speak their mind or brainstorming follows a normal distribution (see the image bellow).

The session starts very slowly with a couple of ideas. Basically we need sometime to “warm up” and enter in some kind of flow. Once in the flow the number of ideas will increase, almost exponentially. This is due to us getting excited and feeding up from the ideas of others. However the flow, lasts for a limited time and we start to get tired or uninterested and then the number of ideas take a dive. That is why it has a shape of a bell.

Now that we have all these ideas, we weight which are possible with the resource available (we might have unlimited imagination but not resources). Then we decide which we can peruse, we prototype them and test them.

The prototyping and testing becomes “food for thought”, which can lead to complete new ideas or just improvements on current ones. Once in this trail we can be creative, now we are focus on solving a problem, not on judging or limiting the imagination by asking the team to be creative.

Bellow you will is TED talk by Tim Brown, where he “urges designers to think big”, once you watch it you will see where I get influence on the prototyping.