Design Thinking & Design Sprinting
Thinking like a designer can transform the way organizations develop products, services, processes and strategy. This approach is known as design thinking.
Whats even more beautiful about this concept is that people like me who isn’t a trained designer can utilize creative tools to adress a vast range of challenges.
The intersection where design thinking lives is between desirability, viability and feasibility.
Our world is filled with dynamic and very human problems that need solutions designed with a sustainable approach. Solutions to problems in education, governance and business that we seek to solve with technology don’t come easily to us. We would need a certain mindset and creative tools to ultimately solve the problems.
Whats out there for us?
Well to start, we have design thinking which is an idea, a strategy or a method we use to view our problems in the world. Through creativity we can solve many problems but like any other good idea, it won’t solve all the problems.
People are still defining the idea of Design thinking as it evolves as the problems of the modern world become more and more complicated.
Design Sprints
In the book Sprint by Jake Knapp he talks about the five-day process of answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers.
Working together in a sprint, you can shortcut the endless-debate cycle and compress months of time into a single week. Instead of waiting to launch a minimal product to understand if an idea is any good, you’ll get clear data from a realistic prototype. The sprint gives you a superpower: You can fast-forward into the future to see your finished product and customer reactions, before making any expensive commitments.
One component in the book talks about the Crazy 8s which is a fascinating brainstorming method teams can use to produce well structured sessions in which designers design 8 different solutions to a problem in 8 minutes, 1 min each solution. This forces us to create something under our subconscious mind.
When you are drawing out these solutions to your problems you aren’t thinking very much about it but instead solving the problem through deliberately creating it again and again.
Why not trying it out with your client and get into his subconscious mind. That way there is little room to overthink which is very often a problem with people.
HMW — How Might We
Another very powerful brainstorming method is called the HMW notetaking technique.
This method helps us to reframe challenges to solveable problems. It is mainly about being an active listener and a very conscious listener.
What you could do is basically ask a question you want to answer or find certain positive and negative aspects of a product you’re developing and divide them up by placing sticky notes on a wall.
Start by working on how you could improve the aspects that are positive and then the negative ones.
That way the team get into a good mood and are prepared to take on the second challenge.
That’s when the juicy stuff starts to sprout out. What we would do when we start focusing on the negative parts or the parts that are not working so well is we convert the question from a negative one into a HMW — How Might We question.
Notice the magic? — We are ultimately shifting the challenge into a solveable problem using the HMW.
Example:
No links to customer service.
Could change into:
HMW: have links to customer service.
This way we are shifting the mindset from it being a statement of a challenge into a solveable problem.
