Design Thinking

Description:

Design Thinking is quickly becoming one of the most popular and intriguing methodologies in the quality arena. Some of the world's leading brands, such as Apple, Google, Samsung, GE, and others, have quickly adopted the Design Thinking approach, as well as some of the world's leading universities, have included it as part of the curriculum because of its effectiveness and popularity.

Design Thinking is a people-centered methodology that seeks to understand the end-user/customer, the challenges they face, and to design creative and cost-effective solutions to address them efficiently. It revolves around a strong desire to better understand the people for whom we design our products or services. Design Thinking assists us in the process of questioning: questioning the problem, the assumptions, and the implications. It is extremely useful in dealing with unknown or vague issues by re-framing the problem and finding a creative solution that is human-centric.

It is a five-step methodology that consists of the following: Empathy, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test (EDIPT). It enables us to observe and develop empathy with the target users, define their needs, problems, and our insights, devise creative and innovative solutions, take a hands-on approach in building or sketching prototyping, and finally test it to determine whether the solution is truly effective. Design Thinking is an ongoing process of experimentation that does not have to be sequential or in any particular order; any step can occur concurrently and repetitively.