 Hi, I'm Dee. I work at AJ & Smart and I am going to talk to you today about what design thinking actually is. It's getting really dark and when we shot this we weren't sure what order things would happen in. So if it's going dark to light it's completely intentional. In this video I'm going to be talking about the history of design thinking, how it came to be, what it is and how it's different from some of the other tools methods frameworks that we use today. So let's dig a little bit into really at a high level what is design thinking. We'll start by actually just having a little Google search. So let's type in design thinking. I might actually type it because it looks nice. Design thinking into our browser and look at images. This is a really great way to kind of get an overview of what design thinking is because you realise you see all these diagrams that look very much the same and at the core of them is the same concept which is that design thinking is a framework, a way of thinking about solving problems that's shifting our view from creating products for business reasons, shifting it to thinking about solving real users needs and understanding what people's real problems actually are and then finding solutions for those. So if we look at one of these diagrams where they all look very similar design thinking, visualisation of the process often has these five steps starting with empathising with people with the user understanding their problems, defining the problem more concretely, ideating coming up with multiple solutions that might work for the problem, creating some quick prototypes or possible solutions and then testing them again with the real people. So we've got this general process that's about doing these five steps or these five phases but the big the core thing to see about this is that within each of these five steps there is a ton of flexibility, a ton of different tools, different methods, different templates, different things you can use to solve problems. So it doesn't give you a real concrete step by step process how to empathise with the user, how to do your ideation, there might be a million different ideation tools that you can use in design thinking. So there's a fundamental framework and a mindset but there's a huge toolbox of things that you can learn and use but you kind of have to figure out how to apply them. When a project comes your way, it's a small big involving mobility software service design, you've got to look into your toolbox of all these huge amounts of things that you've learned and think which tool do I need to apply to this situation, which combination of tools in which order shall I put into this project to do my user research, to do ideation, should I ideate with users, should I ideate with designers, with business people, everything is kind of correct and you have to figure out what's going to work best for your project. Let's look a bit more broadly now at Wikipedia and see what that says about design thinking. So it's got lots of big words here, design thinking refers to the cognitive, strategic and practical processes by which design concepts like proposals for new products, buildings, machines, etc are developed by designers or design teams. So it lays out the thinking and practical processes, so the mindset and the methods and the tools to design products. It's the simple way to say that. And then what's interesting here is if we scroll down, here also it's saying it's associated with prescriptions for the innovation of products and services in businesses and social contexts. That's about how we design products and a new way of thinking that's based on user needs or really strongly related to human centered design. What's interesting is if we scroll down in this Wikipedia article, we see lots of different things. There are methods and frameworks for problem framing, for solving really difficult tricky problems, for solution focused thinking or ideation, abductive reasoning, representations and modeling of problems and solutions, how different ways of getting inspiration about empathizing with users, the whole concept of divergent and convergent thinking which is about really opening up to lots of different options and then narrowing down and focusing, also something you see in the design sprint, how to implement and prototype solutions. There's lots and lots of different parts of design thinking. Everything is just being added to that toolbox. You're learning all these different methods and tools and templates and frameworks and adding all this information into your toolbox. And then you have to know which tool to get out at which time. If we actually look at IDEO, you might know the name IDEO. It's a really big design consultancy and the guy who founded IDEO, David Kelly, also popularized the term design thinking. In 1991 he founded IDEO and at that time it formed kind of the combination of years and years of new ways of thinking that formed the term that was then known as design thinking. Now let's look at IDEOU, which is IDEO's education services. You can actually just use them as a great resource. There's lots of online courses and things to teach you about design thinking and human-centered design. And what is really relevant here in their course called Hello Design Thinking, in the description here, this is one thing I really wanted to show, where they say design thinking is not a cookbook. There's a notion about design thinking that it's a cookbook where the answer falls out at the end, but the truth is it's messier than that. It's basically saying here design thinking is not a linear path. It's a big mass of looping back and forth to different places in this process and they're talking about this five step process. So this is a known thing. They're really acknowledging the people who created design thinking or really gave it some structure are totally acknowledging that design thinking is not a clear, easy step-by-step process that you can follow. It's a big mass of tools and mindsets and methods that you can learn and then adapt and use. Before we go on, let's just look a little bit at the origins and the history of design thinking. I found this great article that is very detailed about this, which we won't go through, but I just wanted to show you the origin story of design thinking. So just looking a little bit at this header image shows us that it's got its foundations in psychology, computer science, anthropology, ethnography, human-computer interaction, interaction design, industrial design, and it was really through researchers and experts in all of these fields that the term was then ended up being formed by David Kelly and then used in IDO. So this is a really great article. You can really read a lot of the deeper history about how and why design thinking got created. But let's move on now to another name or person that I really want to mention is Don Norman. You may have heard of this book. If not, you should get it. It's fantastic. It's called The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. This is one of my favorite books. It's a really, it's an old book as well written, originally published in 1988. So it's really about the fundamentals of design and while the term design thinking isn't used in the book, because it was before the term was popularized, it's got all the fundamentals of the whole framework of design thinking about understanding user needs and designing things to solve those needs rather than thinking we need to build a thing. Let's build it the way that we think. It says let's watch and observe and understand and empathize with how real people solve these problems or go about their day and see how we can design something that fits that need exactly. There's a great example that I want to show of something called The Norman Door and I think this story itself just sums up the whole concept of design thinking. So A Norman Door is something that was described in this book The Design of Everyday Things and it's a really clear example of this whole concept. I'm going to play this video but I'll guess I'll mute it. So this door has a handle that you can grab so you think you need to pull it and when you get up and pull the door you realize that it doesn't work when you pull it, you actually have to push it. So why is there a handle that lets you pull? That's because someone built the door and thought this would look nice with a shiny handle, maybe the both the same on either side of the glass. So it looks symmetrical, fantastic, we install the door, there's a door in the in the office and then people are constantly pulling this door the wrong way because there's something for them to grab. So the simple solution is if something needs to be pulled put a handle, if something needs to be pushed put a push panel. So this is a really clear example of not thinking from the user's needs and the difference between the two creating something that actually works for people and solves their problems. So I think Don Norman deserves this special mention because while he didn't create the term design thinking a lot of his work really is in this same direction and he's written a lot and has a lot of great YouTube videos and other content as well that clearly explains and talks about design thinking. So this is one of the critiques of design thinking that especially from a lot of the companies that AJ and Smart work with when we go in and teach the design sprint is that people ask us well we've just been learning for the last two years about design thinking and all these different methods and now we're also doing agile projects now we're also doing now you're coming here to teach us about the design sprint. What's the difference between all these things? We've just spent so long learning about design thinking and learning all these new methods. How does the sprint change this? Does it replace it all? So this is really one of the questions that we hear all the time. Design thinking is a mindset and that's building up your toolbox full of new methods and ways of thinking about solving problems that you need to then apply them in different ways with each new project that comes along and a design sprint is the cookbook. The way that David Kelly said design thinking is not the cookbook design sprints are the cookbook so it really does outline take the hammer use a three millimeter nail don't know if that exists hit it hit it ten times then go ten centimeters to the left get another nail hit that ten times it's just telling you exactly what to do to solve a particular type of problem so you can't apply it to absolutely anything but for a particular type of problem you just follow that cookbook that recipe and you do get the solution out the other end so this is the big difference between the two both are really valid both are super useful one takes a lot of knowledge building up and expertise and understanding of how to apply a million different tools and the other is a clear process that you can follow to do certain things like kick off a project or find the next iteration of a product this is something that we show to companies when we're training them because this kind of question is so common the difference between design thinking and agile and design sprints so design thinking is a mindset a way of thinking about solving problems with all those tools in your toolbox and you have to decide how to apply them agile is a structured way of working that is ongoing so with software development teams or other teams as well running projects over and over it's a way for them to work and guidelines for them to follow of how to communicate more effectively run meetings implement things decide on priorities there's guidelines for them to work this way and a design sprint is that one off clear process follow this recipe so it doesn't really conflict with the other two works alongside you can be your organization can be using design thinking methods and running agile projects and you can also use design sprints as part of those processes these are things that are covered in the design sprint in this recipe that you can follow but they're also part of design thinking and agile and you can also do them outside of a design sprint so this is just to illustrate that there is an overlap of these things and they don't necessarily conflict with each other at all so if you're interested in hearing more about design thinking and design processes and product development like and subscribe to our channel because you'll get a lot more content just like this if you still have any questions about design thinking post them in the comments below i'd love to know if you want to have anything clarified a bit more or if you just have any specific questions about design thinking is it dark is it light i don't know what's going on questions you still have about design thinking design thinking it's below and we can have a great conversation about design thinking oh my god so i always think it's a wide-eyed thing at the end