Design Thinking plays an integral part in learning nowadays

What is design thinking? How important is it for the future?

Before that we are going to discuss design and thinking.

Design & Thinking :

Design: Design is a discipline of study and practice focused on the interaction between a person and the man-made environment.

Thinking: Thinking is an essential process for humans. Thinking helps us in many ways like learning information, solving a problem, understanding a concept and processing our experiences.

Design Thinking:

Now since we have studied about design and thinking, let’s start with design thinking. When we solve problems by prioritizing the consumer’s needs above all, it is called design thinking. It observes how people interact with their environments, and creates innovative solutions. It can be applied at every aspect of learning experience, space, and situation in personal and professional.

Design thinking is important for the future as it focuses on creating for today’s world and the immediate future. Design thinking helps unlock that creativity by asking you to think outside the box, be open to ideas, and be unafraid of failure. It can be used in different fields be it architecture, engineering or business. It can also be used to tackle some of the government’s most thorny issues—from retaining valuable employees and predicting the impact of new policies to creating new valuable products and services.

There are many benefits we get from design thinking. Some of them are :

• From customer service to product development and finance, design thinking can be used everywhere.
• Design thinking is an approach that focuses on the end user. Their main aim is to provide useful products and solutions that will fulfill the needs of the user.
• Studying design thinking helps students to develop a growth mindset and also skills such as problem solving, analytical and thinking skills .

So far we have discussed design thinking, its use and its benefits. Now we are going to study about the design thinking process.

Design Thinking process :

A methodology that designers use to solve problems is the design thinking process.

Five stages in the design thinking process

They are :

• Empathize: The first stage of the design thinking process is empathize. To gain a deeper understanding of real users and their needs, design teams set aside their own biases and work diligently. Empathize creates an emotional bridge between designers and target users, one that facilitates the kind of deep user insights at the heart of human-based design thinking.
• Define: This second stage is about clarity, focus and definition. Here the user problems will be the one that you want to solve. First, after gathering all the findings from the empathize phase, you will start piecing them together. After synthesizing findings, you’ll formulate a problem statement. Rather than framing the problem statement as a business goal you will frame it from the user’s perspective. A problem statement will guide you throughout the design process by the end of the define phase.
• Ideate: Now, you have a clear idea of who your target users are and what they want from your products. You also have a clear problem statement that you have to solve. Now what you have to do is find solutions to it. This stage marks the transition from identifying problems to exploring solutions.The ideas that are identified will be prototyped and tested with people who represent your target audience.
• Prototype: This is the fourth stage of design thinking where you can turn your ideas that are generated from the previous phase into something tangible which can be tested on real users. The design team will have a better idea of the limitations of the products and the problems it faces by the end of this stage. The design team will also get a view of how users will feel when interacting with the product.
• Test: The testing of the product leads to this stage. Here you will discover whether your ideas solve the user problem that are uncovered during the empathize stage. If the end-user faces usability issues with the solution provided, then the design thinking process will be repeated. On creating a new solution that can empathize with the end-user, testing provides valuable insights that helps the designer to rework the problem.

Integrate design thinking skills help students to solve real-life problems.

Students can understand what they are learning through design thinking skills. It also helps them to go beyond and question the work they are doing. It also enables them to design their own experiences and participation.

Design thinking can develop and nurture a child in several ways:

• Design thinking can help kids to solve their problems.
• Design thinking helps kids to foster their creativity and original thinking.
• Design thinking can also encourage curiosity and questioning.
• Design thinking allows children to express their ideas freely and supports social, emotional, language, and cognitive skills.

Design thinking also helps teachers in framing the problem, developing student-centered ideas, and preparing classes. Applying design thinking in school can also help educators as it helps them to see problems of student learning from different angles. Design thinking helps educators by applying creativity, prototyping, and experimentation to meet students’ needs.

Skills for design thinking :

The skills one needed for design thinking are :

• Emotional intelligence: Emotional intelligence is the ability to identify and regulate your own emotions and to understand the emotions of others. It helps in many ways such as building relationships, reducing team stress, defusing conflicts and improving job satisfaction.
• Consensus Building: Consensus building involves meeting the interests of a group of people and seeking an unanimous agreement. Consensus requires trusting, listening, patience and a desire to find the best solution.
• Brainstorming: People can think more freely, without having a fear of judgment through brainstorming. This technique is an intensive, freewheeling discussion where every member of the group is encouraged to provide ideas based on their diverse knowledge.
• User Research: Some users face barriers or frustrations when they interact with a product. And user research aims to uncover that. User research also helps to understand and build empathy for users in order to make better decisions, build better product experiences, and create solutions people actually want.
• Journey Mapping: This is one of the most important skills needed for design thinking. A journey mapping is a detailed visualization that shows how a user-based persona is feeling throughout the process of using a particular product.

Design Thinking Canvas:

For this, first let’s discuss what is canvas.

Canvas is also known as a web-based learning management system or LMS. To access and manage online course learning materials and communicate about skill development and learning achievement, canva are used by learning institutions, teachers and students.

Now we are going to study about design thinking canvas.

The Design Thinking Canvas is a template which is used to plan a design-led strategy and process. Different elements in a design process are shown in a design thinking canvas. It is also a systemic technique collecting inputs from a project.

The Design Thinking Canvas is the framework to identify the right project brief, support collaboration with stakeholders, and maximize investment in design thinking.The tool contains 8 elements: People, Storytelling, Challenges, Vision, Impact, Management, Problem, and Solution. The template can be downloadable as :
PDF, Mural canvas and Adobe XD whiteboard.

All this proves that design thinking plays an important role in learning. They are beneficial for the students in everyday life.

EDU