Design Thinking


        Many big corporations needed to produce appropriate products to survive. Meanwhile, their survival linked to provide new products that balance the need of individual and society as a whole. In line with this, “Design Thinking” is used as a creative solution-oriented problem solving method that solves the problem based on proposing an innovative solution, new idea, and human-centered framework. L. Bruce Archer was perhaps the first author mentioned to design thinking and both Tim Brown and Roger Martin shifted this procedure in business.
      In other words, it is important to know what is proposed will respond to the customer’s needs and consider environmental values. Therefore, design thinkers improve their interpersonal and teamwork skills. They, also, taught that to propose a multifunctional solution for problems. For example, electrical automotive design can decrease the amount of gas which is used annually (economic benefits) as well as global warming benefits. “Design thinking keeps the big picture (and its opportunities) in mind while focusing on specifics” (Owen, 2006, P. 4).
      A design thinker is not a decision-maker to choose among alternative proposals. However, they search the competing alternatives and resources related to their problems, then reformulate them as their result and solution. In the world of designers, it is the main factor to be an expert in design. But, extensive knowledge about other contents is a side factor for success. According to figure 1, the process of design thinking looks like a loop. More importantly, these phases are not one after another. But, they can happen side by side and in a parallel time.
Fig. 1 Design thinking is commonly visualized as an iterative series of five major stages (Meinel, 2010).
Fig. 1 Design thinking is commonly visualized as an iterative series of five major stages (Meinel, 2010).

      This process begins with understanding and defining problems. For instance, what factors decreased employees’ motivation for producing and presenting productions and services. In the second stage, engaging creativity and innovation with regards to user’s needs play the main role in problem solving. So, asking “what does human really need?” is a significant question in this step.
      In the next step, the designer uses various techniques of design thinking to collect ideas and generate innovative solutions. For example, designers explore many possible solutions in a spontaneous manner by divergent thinking method then organize ideas to access the best solution with convergent thinking method. Assume that you want to go out with your four friends. Divergent thinking means you have four different ideas about the place and convergent thinking is an agreement on a decision. According to Linus Pauling, “to have a good idea, you must first have lots of ideas” (as cited in Brown, 2009. Convergent and divergent thinking. Para. 4). Another method to collect idea is brainstorming – refers to a beneficial technique to list lots of ideas which spontaneously evolve by the group’s members. Besides, designers collect raw data and investigate them deeply to understand the complex problem then extract a meaningful pattern from masses of raw data.
      In the fourth step, a designer visualizes ideas and makes them tangible. In other words, anything tangible that lets us create an idea, evaluate and implement it is a prototype. As a case in point, building a tower with marshmallow, noodles and some ropes is an example of prototyping. As the last phase, testing, getting feedback, and learning is a part of the design thinking loop.
      As a critical view, some companies prefer to save their time and money and receive solutions fast. They believe that some step of design thinking such as prototyping is impossible because of their high cost.
      To sum up, design thinking as an attitude of problem-solving not only is substantial in psychology, IT and medical but also in business and whenever need to creative and human-oriented solutions.  
Reference
Archer, L. B. (1969). Systematic Method for Designers: Technological Innovation: A      
         Methodology. Council of Industrial Design.
Brown, T. (2009). Change by design. Harper Collins.
Meinel, C., Leifer, L., & Plattner, H. (2010). Design Thinking: Understand-Improve-Apply. 
         Springer.
Owen, C. L. (2006). Design thinking: Driving innovation. The Business Process
         Management Institute, 1-5.
Stickdorn, M., Schneider, J., Andrews, K., & Lawrence, A. (2011). This is service design 
        thinking: Basics, tools, cases (Vol. 1). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Tjendra, J. (2014, April). The Origin of Design Thinking [website post]. Retrieved 

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