The term “Design Thinking” may have been coined in 1969, but today, it’s a critical part of the creative process across multiple industries. Design thinking helps engineers build more useful devices and user experience (UX) specialists create better interfaces for a more diverse range of people.
By introducing design thinking at an early age, educators and parents could provide children and young people with essential problem-solving and collaboration skills.
What is Design Thinking?
Design thinking is more than just brainstorming great ideas for a product or service. It’s a user-centric approach, focused heavily on what problems someone may have and how to provide meaningful solutions.
What is Design Thinking
The ways that people use products are changing all the time. For example, external storage for photos and other digital media used to be very popular as a way to back up precious memories. Today, 71% of people use online storage for their pictures thanks to cloud services becoming more accessible and affordable. Design thinking allows the creators of these services to constantly improve what’s available, such as offering more space in exchange for slightly less high-quality photos, or the functionality of a “quick download” button that works on any internet-connected device.
Design Thinking as a Framework for Problem Solving
By coming at a problem from the angle of how it impacts the user, there’s the potential to create genuinely groundbreaking solutions. This is preferable to churning out devices or appliances aimed solely at making a fast profit for a corporation or satisfying a trend. It’s clear to see, then, that design thinking is closely connected to problem-solving and vice versa.
In fact, many famous companies utilize the design thinking framework for coming up with solutions to user pain points. These include UberEats, Oral B, and Netflix, to name just a few.
Stages of Design Thinking
Stages of Design Thinking
So, how is this framework actually structured? Most design thinking teams break the product development up into the five stages of empathise, define, ideate, prototype, and test.
Empathise
For design thinking to be effective, designers have to put themselves in the end-user’s shoes. This is why it’s critical to teach children empathy, as without that skill, it’s tricky to know if products offer genuine benefits outside the lab or engineering workshop.
This stage involves researching user problems and pain points and may utilise surveys or existing statistics on a target audience.
Define
Once a team has the general gist of what’s troubling users, they can define an exact problem they want to solve. This is about homing in on the heart of the issue and creating a “problem statement”.
Ideate
Understanding how the problem impacts real people helps designers come up with ideas that drive meaningful solutions. At this stage, teams should expect wildly differing ideas and lots of them!
Prototype
A prototype is usually a first attempt at offering a solution to a problem, whether that’s a new fridge door hinge or a smartphone or a banking app. In many industries, something called the minimal viable product (MVP) is used as a way to understand how solutions will work in the real world and with real users. This means a stripped-down, unfinished product that still has all the core features of the intended end product.
Test
Of course, the only way to assess the success of a product is to test it! Rigorous, well-documented testing allows designers and engineers to go back to the drawing board as many times as necessary to tweak and improve products.
Design Thinking is Critical Thinking
Critical Thinking
These steps may be used multiple times throughout the design thinking process, providing a framework for empathetic, critical thinking that’s open to feedback from all avenues. Introducing the concept of design thinking at an early age gives children a head start when it comes to creativity, collaboration, and understanding how things work. Innovation starts with curiosity, and design thinking encourages that curiosity; not just about the inner workings of appliances and applications, but about how people think, their needs, and what drives them to choose one product over another.
Creative educators can implement a number of ways to encourage design thinking in the classroom or during extra-curricular activities, particularly any form of tech education and certainly in all aspects of design and technology (D&T):
Design Thinking Curiousity
- Ensure every voice has an opportunity to speak up and record every idea.
- Get hands-on and test ideas out, whether that’s the best fabric for a cuddly toy or the best way to 3D print a cylinder.
- Get one team to quiz another on what they want out of a product, service, or app.
- Alternatively, encourage children to consider what they like about their favourite toys, games, apps, or other age-appropriate products.
Ultimately, design thinking provides an iterative approach to innovation. Designing doesn’t stop with a product launch. Collaborators gather feedback, adjust the user interface, and continuously improve the existing product. If, within an educational setting, children can be encouraged to look at ways to continuously improve their own ways of working, that’s the first positive step to creating a new generation of design-thinking problem solvers.
Here at Girls Into Coding, we’re constantly exploring the design thinking process and encouraging our attendees to find new ways to innovate. We help inspire the girls in tech of today to become the women in tech of tomorrow! Find out more about our peer-led FREE events here
Sign up here to our Girls Into Coding mailing list to be among the first to receive our articles and to know about future events!
