Chapter 5: Design Thinking

Question 1

Define design thinking.

Answer 1

A human-centered, interactive, problem-solving process that places emphasis on identifying people’s needs, creating solutions to meet those needs, and testing solutions to make them better.

Works best when you don’t really know where to start or what to create.

Involves a high level of empathy.

Question 2

What is a need?

Answer 2

A lack of something desirable, useful, or required.

Question 3

What is the main assumption of design thinking?

Answer 3

Innovation and valuable solutions sit at the intersection of desirability (what do people need?), feasibility (can it be done?), and viability (can we make money doing it?)

Question 4

What is empathy and it’s role in design thinking?

Answer 4

Empathy: the combination of social and emotional skills used to better understand the circumstances, intentions, thoughts, feelings, and needs of others.

To create meaningful ideas and innovations, we need to know and care about the people who are using them.

Question 5

What are the 5 phases of design thinking?

Answer 5

1. Empathize: Empathizing helps us discover “latent” needs (needs we have, but don’t know we have) by seeing the world through the eyes of other people.
2. Define: identifies needs and uncovers problems encountered by users or those you are designing for.
3. Ideate: generating and developing new ideas to address needs (or latent needs) based on observations made during the Empathy phase and insights developed in the Define phase (where empathy and creativity interact).
4. Prototype: select ideas generated in the Ideate phase are transformed into artifacts, called prototypes, that require user interaction to get feedback.
5. Test: early, fast, cheap testing to strengthen ideas and ensure that the design team is on the right path toward meeting the needs of the users they are designing for.

Question 6

What is divergent and convergent thinking?

Answer 6

D: allows us to expand our view of the world to generate as many ideas as possible without being trapped by traditional problem-solving methods or predetermined constraints. (E,D,I)

C: allows us to narrow down the number of ideas generated through divergent thinking in an effort to identify which ones have the most potential. (P,T)

Question 7

What is service design thinking?

Answer 7

The process of planning and organizing sustainable solutions to enhance the customer experience.