This week I’m working with students on the Design Thinking Model. The model asks participants to move through five stages of design.
Empathize: learn and really get a handle on your “client” or audiences through interviews, shadowing, and getting to know them on a deeper level.
Define: identify their pain points and really define the needs that you are going to be trying to solve.
Ideate: generate as many potential ideas as possible and get feedback on what you generate in an exercise of divergent and then convergent thinking on the problem.
Prototype: generate mock-ups, minimum viable products, test cases, examples that you can then test. The idea is to identify what doesn’t work and really come up with a plan that can work.
Test: Test those prototypes and get feedback.
The overall idea behind the methodology is to focus on the end user or the audience or the students or whomever will be using or consuming what it is that we produce and to get as much feedback as possible.
The hardest part when practicing this in the “real world” is the sharing of a raw prototype and idea that isn’t quite fully formed a work in progress and getting feedback.
It highlights the main difference that I look at between art and design. Art is about moving emotions and design is about moving you closer to a practical and tangible goal.
Achieving either involves the use of prototypes and receiving feedback, and of course a significant ability to fail and get back up and try again.