Design Thinking: A Process
In class there were five specific steps to the design process: discovery, interpretation, ideation, experimentation, and implementation. While these aren’t hard and fast rules to live by when problem solving or designing, they do cover the bases of how you should start your own process. There are also other things to consider in developing your own design process, like taking a break and stepping away from your projects, using the three H’s, and expanding your process beyond physical design work.
One of the most beneficial things you can do in the early design process sounds like the most counter-productive… stepping away from your work and take a break. Don Draper from the show Mad Men said it best, “Just think about it deeply, then forget it. An idea will jump in your face.” In the book “The Art of Thought” by Graham Wallas, the design process is broken down into four stages, and the second stage is incubation. In the incubation stage, you’ve already gathered as much information about the problem you are trying to solve, and now you’re letting it marinate while you step away for a while. Inspiration can come from doing the most mundane tasks. I personally like to take walks with my dog and get inspired by what’s going on around me. Clearing your mind allows for more creative ideas to flow in!
After you’ve cleared your head, it’s time to come back and use it. In an article for the American Institute of Graphic Arts, designer Richard Grefe writes about the “three H’s” head, heart, and hand and it’s incorporation into modern design work. Using your head is thinking critically and creatively to problem solve. Join creative thinking with empathy and you think of human-centered solutions, then craft that solution with your talent and hand-skills. By engaging all three parts you can maximize your own ideas and skillsets to come up with better solutions to design problems.
In The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design from the designers at IDEO, the design process is enhanced by expanding that process beyond physical design work. Much like Grefe’s recommendation of using your heart in your process, IDEO implements seven mindsets that enhance the process and create a greater human experience through design. These mindsets include empathy, optimism, iteration, creative confidence, making, embracing ambiguity, and learning from failure. Notice how very few of these mindsets involve doing any physical design work. Expanding your process to include real human feeling and emotion makes a greater connection between you, your design, and your client that the design is for, which is an all-around great set up to make a better solution to the original problem.
As you can see, the design process used in class only covers the basics of what we as designers should do to produce design work. Incubating thought, using your head, heart, and hands, and expanding your design process to include emotional responses to the human experience are all great things to include into your own personal design process.
Resources:
Wallas, Graham, The Art of Thought
Grefe, Richard, Head, Heart and Hand: Modern Design Practice https://www.aiga.org/aiga/content/about-aiga/insight/head-heart-and-hand-modern-design-practice/
IDEO, The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design
