{"id":33619,"date":"2021-04-04T14:50:25","date_gmt":"2021-04-04T21:50:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=33619"},"modified":"2021-04-04T14:51:54","modified_gmt":"2021-04-04T21:51:54","slug":"how-to-do-design-thinking-better","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=33619","title":{"rendered":"How to Do Design Thinking Better"},"content":{"rendered":"

Source;\u00a0https:\/\/insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu\/article\/better-design-thinking-research?utm_source=subscriber&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pianomailer042021&pnespid=k7I2pKhIGhWNkt0qNuGwxDQHhRjOpoO1qPO9Gyax<\/a><\/p>\n

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xperts from Kellogg and IDEO explain the psychology behind this creative approach to problem solving.<\/h2>\n
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\nBASED ON THE RESEARCH OF<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Leigh Thompson<\/a><\/p>\n

David Schonthal<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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TRANSLATIONS<\/div>\n

English<\/a><\/p>\n

Portugu\u00eas<\/a><\/p>\n

\u4e2d\u6587<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\"group<\/p>\n

Christine R\u00f6sch<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

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Design thinking has, perhaps, reached peak popularity. Businesses in every industry talk about ideating and iterating, a linguistic nod to the creative process made famous by design and consulting firm IDEO.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The design-thinking approach loosely follows a four-step process that involves observing a problem, reframing it, designing solutions, and testing them\u2014all with the end goal of improving how humans experience a product or service.<\/p>\n

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But being familiar with this approach and actually putting it into practice are very different things. \u201cSometimes people think they\u2019re doing design thinking, but it\u2019s really not,\u201d says\u00a0Leigh Thompson<\/a>, a professor of management and organizations at Kellogg. \u201cWhen you get it right, it\u2019s really powerful.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rather than blindly following the approach, she says, it can be helpful to understand the psychology behind it. And critically, social psychology also offers insight into specific ways to get more out of each step in the process.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe science is what explains the magic,\u201d says\u00a0David Schonthal<\/a>, a clinical associate professor of innovation and entrepreneurship at Kellogg, as well as a senior director at IDEO. He and Thompson recently\u00a0published a paper on this topic<\/a>\u00a0and teach a course together on using creativity as a business tool.<\/p>\n

So why does design thinking work? And how can businesses effectively apply these principles themselves? Thompson and Schonthal explain.<\/p>\n

1. Look for the gorilla.<\/h2>\n

The first step in the design-thinking process is to observe a situation and notice what is actually happening. This sounds straightforward. But Thompson points out that we are actually really bad at observing a situation and noticing what is actually happening\u2014despite having a lot of confidence in our own abilities.<\/p>\n

Twenty years ago, researchers Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons conducted a\u00a0now-famous experiment in psychology<\/a>. They showed participants a video of people playing basketball, and instructed them to count how many times the players on a particular team passed the ball.<\/p>\n

About 45 seconds into the video, a woman wearing a full-body gorilla costume walked across the screen. But a large number of participants didn\u2019t notice this oddity at all. They were too focused on counting passes\u2014an illustration of a phenomenon psychologists call inattentional blindness.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cSometimes people think they\u2019re doing design thinking, but it\u2019s really not.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014 Leigh Thompson<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cPeople are very limited in what they\u2019re able to perceive in their visual world when they\u2019re focused on one thing,\u201d Thompson explains. \u201cCoupled with the fact that people believe themselves to be in the 99th percentile with regard to their perceptive abilities, that\u2019s a dangerous combination.\u201d<\/p>\n

So how can we get better at noticing things?<\/p>\n

As Thompson and Schonthal explain it, noticing is a cognitive strategy that can be broken down into three parts. First, observers must identify and abandon their cognitive scripts\u2014the preexisting narratives that guide their understanding of situations. Next, they must learn inductively, making inferences based on limited information. And finally, they must find patterns in complex stimuli.<\/p>\n

This is why design thinkers must get out from behind their desks and observe a problem \u201cin the wild,\u201d as Schonthal puts it. Relying on people to self-report their habits is not enough.<\/p>\n

He points to an example of when a pharmaceutical company tasked IDEO with investigating its hypothesis that the packaging of its arthritis medication was too difficult for patients to open.<\/p>\n

So the IDEO design team interviewed\u2014and crucially\u2014also observed patients who used the medication going about their daily routine. One elderly woman with arthritis said she had no trouble opening the packaging. But when the IDEO team asked her to actually show them how she did it, she took her pill bottle out of a drawer and put it on a meat slicer, then used the meat slicer to cut open the top of the containers\u2014because twisting the cap off herself was too painful.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the biggest takeaways from this example is to never take what people say they do at face value,\u201d Schonthal says. \u201cActually seeing with your own eyes what is going on can immediately spark identification of unmet needs or better ways of solving a problem\u201d<\/p>\n

2. Ask a question no one else is asking.<\/h2>\n

The second step in design thinking is framing and reframing. In this step, design thinkers look at a problem from multiple vantage points, trying on different lenses to determine the best approach to finding a solution.<\/p>\n

To better understand the importance of this process, Thompson and Schonthal highlight the work of economist Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize for his research on cognitive framing. Kahneman showed that people make very different decisions depending on how those decisions are framed: specifically, whether they are focused on the possibility of gaining something\u2014what design thinkers call a \u201cpromotion frame\u201d\u2014or by the possibility of not losing something\u2014a \u201cprevention frame.\u201d<\/p>\n

Understanding a customer\u2019s motivations for using a product or service are important for developing something that works for the customer. Take, for example, a project IDEO conducted on diabetes management for a healthcare company. IDEO\u2019s team found that more traditional goals like losing weight and controlling blood sugar in order to avoid health problems (which activate a prevention frame) weren\u2019t successful in actually motivating patients to make healthy changes. But setting social and emotional goals\u2014like gaining the ability to walk a 5K or dance with your daughter at her wedding\u2014activated a promotion mindset and actually motivated people to change.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cPrototypes are embodied questions. It\u2019s not building something that you hope people will fall in love with as the final product.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014 David Schonthal<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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Armed with this knowledge and new frame, IDEO was able to help the company move beyond creating a new medical device. Rather, IDEO helped them build a customizable app that instead solved for a different challenge: How do we help people with diabetes live their best lives?<\/p>\n

\u201cWith any really well-thought-out product, chances are the designers started by asking a different question or solving a different problem than all of their competitors,\u201d Schonthal says.<\/p>\n

3. Approach brainstorming with rigor.<\/h2>\n

The third step is to imagine and design\u2014what Thompson and Schonthal describe as \u201cthe heart and soul\u201d of the design-thinking process. Which is why, even more than the other steps, it\u2019s crucial to understand the science behind successful ideation.<\/p>\n

At its core,\u00a0brainstorming<\/a>\u00a0is about focusing on quantity over quality, building on one another\u2019s ideas, and encouraging the most outlandish suggestions, all while avoiding criticism. And studies show that these principles, devised in the 1950s, remain effective today.<\/p>\n

Yet people regularly violate those rules, other studies show. They suggest too few ideas or criticize individuals, rather than ideas. And criticizing the person who comes up with an idea can hurt further ideation.<\/p>\n

Thankfully, science also suggests some best practices.<\/p>\n

First, consider a smaller ideation group. As the number of people on a team increases,\u00a0the productivity of ideas per person decreases<\/a>. That\u2019s because when people work in groups\u2014like the traditional brainstorming session\u2014they\u2019re\u00a0often inhibited\u00a0<\/a>by social demands like being polite and waiting their turn.<\/p>\n

Or consider switching from brainstorming to brainwriting. In a brainwriting session, participants spend a set amount of time writing down as many ideas as they can, before a facilitator collects them all. This allows individuals to generate lots of ideas freely and without concern for criticism. One\u00a0widely cited meta-analysis<\/a>\u00a0shows that brainwriting groups generated about two and a half times the volume of ideas generated by brainstorming groups\u2014and a significantly greater percentage of their ideas were judged to be of higher quality.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost people don\u2019t want to believe that group brainstorming is inferior to individual ideation, at least for a finite amount of time, because we feel good in groups. Groups are stimulating. They make us feel all warm and fuzzy,\u201d Thompson explains. \u201cBut it isn\u2019t necessarily the best way to have a creativity and innovation meeting.\u201d<\/p>\n

4. Fail faster. Learn sooner.<\/h2>\n

When it comes to actually building and testing solutions\u2014the final step in design thinking\u2014a successful designer must understand that failure is simply an expected part of the process and will ultimately make the work better.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe idea is to fail faster and learn sooner,\u201d Thompson says.<\/p>\n

One key to this is ensuring that your group has\u00a0a growth mindset<\/a>. The term refers to the belief that ability and skill come through practice, not through innate talent. With this frame, failure becomes a way to learn, not proof of incompetency. For example,\u00a0one study<\/a>\u00a0showed that participants who were prompted to have a growth mindset accomplished a complex task better and more enjoyably than participants who were prompted to have a \u201cfixed\u201d mindset.<\/p>\n

One way to foster a growth mindset, Thompson and Schonthal explain, is to use \u201cHow Might We\u201d (HMW) questions that get design thinkers to push past constraints. \u201cGroups that adopt a HMW focus are more likely to persist and be creative than those who don\u2019t think about possibilities,\u201d they write.<\/p>\n

Another way to reinforce the idea that you are simply experimenting\u2014and thus that you are open to truly honest feedback\u2014is to use low-fidelity materials to create prototypes.<\/p>\n

For example, to test different ways to redesign the long-haul flight experience, IDEO used materials found around the office. For one concept, the designers literally stacked office chairs to test the idea of \u201cbunkbeds\u201d on a plane. Airline executives who tried to lie in the chairs quickly rejected the concept\u2014and IDEO moved on to the next idea.<\/p>\n

\u201cPrototypes are embodied questions,\u201d Schonthal says. \u201cIt\u2019s not building something that you hope people will fall in love with as the final product.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the end of the process, designers ultimately want to create something that people do fall in love with. A successful final product often seems intuitive\u2014as if the idea sprang fully formed from the designer\u2019s brain. But as Schonthal and Thompson\u2019s research shows, a science-backed approach is critical to innovation.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce you see a beautiful design, it seems obvious,\u201d Thompson says. \u201cBut it\u2019s really, really hard to figure out, \u2018Now how does this get created to begin with?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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