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# 3 Design Thinking as an innovation process

While it is important to understand various forms of innovation, it is also vital to have clarity on the processes involved in developing innovations. A commonly used approach to innovation is known as Design Thinking.

Over recent years, Design Thinking has emerged as a high-profile approach to innovation in many organisations. Originally developed at Stanford University’s design school, the basic Design Thinking model has five stages each linked to form an integrated model supporting greater human-centred innovation:

Figure 6 The Design Thinking process

Each of these stages is briefly outlined below.

## 1 Empathise

Empathy is the foundation of a human-centered design process. To empathise, you :

- Observe. View users and their behavior in the context of their lives.
- Engage. Interact with and interview users through both scheduled and short ‘intercept’ encounters.
- Immerse. Experience what your user experiences.

## 2 Define

The define mode is when you unpack and synthesize your empathy findings into compelling needs and insights, and scope a specific and meaningful challenge. It is a mode of ‘focus’ rather than ‘flaring’. Two goals of the define mode are to develop a deep understanding of your users and the design space and, based on that understanding, to come up with an actionable problem statement: your point of view. Your point of view should be a guiding statement that focuses on specific users, and insights and needs that you uncovered during the empathise mode.

## 3 Ideate

Ideate is the mode of your design process in which you aim to generate radical design alternatives. Mentally it represents a process of ‘going wide’ in terms of concepts and outcomes – it is a mode of ‘flaring’ rather than ‘focus’. The goal of ideation is to explore a wide solution space – both a large quantity of ideas and a diversity among those ideas. From this vast depository of ideas you can build prototypes to test with users.

## 4 Prototype

Prototyping is getting ideas and explorations out of your head and into the physical world. A prototype can be anything that takes a physical form – be it a wall of post-it notes, a role-playing activity, a space, an object, an interface, or even a storyboard. The resolution of your prototype should be commensurate with your progress in your project. In early explorations keep your prototypes rough and rapid to allow yourself to learn quickly and investigate a lot of different possibilities. Prototypes are most successful when people (the design team, the user, and others) can experience and interact with them. What you learn from those interactions can help drive deeper empathy, as well as shape successful solutions.

## 5 Test

Testing is the chance to get feedback on your solutions, refine solutions to make them better, and continue to learn about your users. The test mode is an iterative mode in which you place your low resolution artefacts in the appropriate context of the user’s life. Prototype as if you know you’re right, but test as if you know you’re wrong.

(Adapted from Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford)

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