2021 | Thinking Design Thinking

Design Thinking is now central to the way various companies build out new capabilities into their business. There is a wonderful free course on this topic offered by the Stanford d.school. 

If you're interested in learning design thinking, you should probably also consider taking this other course that is equally useful. Introduction to Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Some good videos (more on these below) - the first explains design thinking in some detail, while the second is Bill Burnett from the famous Stanford d.school explaining how one can use design thinking principles to design oneself a better life. The focus is firmly on the user. For designing a life, the user is yourself.

  

Steps in the Design Thinking Process: 

1. Accept: "gravity problems" - just like we have to accept gravity (we cannot really argue with it), if there are no solutions to some problems, we just have to accept the situation or move away from them to change the context
2. Empathize: (life) find the why behind your goals; (projects) find out what the users really want from the product you are developing
3. Define: Sketch the details of what you see would be in the ideal final state of what you are trying to build (projects, or your life).
4. Ideate: (projects) make a list of best and worst ideas - you want to know what you want to include and just as importantly, what you want to exclude from your design. Prioritize these ideas and see how you might be able to incorporate them. (life) Design 3 parallel lives with the base case being your current life trajectory, then define aspects of each of these in detail. 
5. Prototype: (life) Borrow from the parallel lives to improve or enrich your current pathway if you can. (projects) build out the PoCs or MVPs to include the design features from your prioritized list. 
6. Test - (projects) try out how things work in small steps, then iterate. (life) try out things, but commit to changes you've decided to make, close the door to the past so you focus on the future - you can create more options looking forward if you have to. Iterate on an ongoing basis to design yourself a better life.

Bill Burnett from the Stanford d.school gave an excellent TED talk (above) about "How to Design an Excellent Life" - worth the 20 or so minutes. Some good insights there applying the 5 principles of Design Thinking, which he prefaces with an important idea of "Accepting" - some problems have no solutions, you just have to accept the situation. (These are the items listed with the 'life' qualifier for each item in the list above). He also wrote these books that make for interesting reading: 

Also interesting is this talk with Tom Kelley, Partner at IDEO - a firm that made Design Thinking mainstream. A bit long, but the video is definitely worth a watch.

Tok Kelley has also written the below books. These are important and give you a structured sense of what innovation really is, the art and science of how to build innovative solutions that will really move the needle on your business.