 Hey, I'm Jonathan from AJ & Smart and in this video I'm going to give you an overview of design thinking and why it's still relevant in 2020. Almost every innovative company in the world uses some form of design thinking so it's super important for you whether you're a designer, whether you're a product manager or whether you're someone just interested in the topic. It's super important to really understand what the hell it is because no matter where you go, no matter which company you're in, if you're going to work on products, if you're going to work on anything related to the topic of innovation, people are going to start talking about design thinking. It's just going to come up. It's everywhere and it's been everywhere for the last 20 years and it's not going anywhere now. So this video is a quick overview of design thinking. We have new videos every week just like this to help people learn about innovation processes, workshops, design thinking, design sprints. If you like that kind of thing, if you want to see more of that kind of thing in your recommended tab or whatever it is on YouTube just hit the subscribe button. All right, first question. What is design thinking? Really simply design thinking is a philosophy and a set of tools to help you solve problems creatively. That's the first thing you need to understand. When a company is trying to create something new, when a company is trying to solve a problem, when a team is trying to solve a complex problem, you can use design thinking to help you get to that solution. But whereas there are many processes that can be used for problem solving, design thinking specifically focuses on the human-centered side of creative problem solving. So design thinking really looks at all of creative problem solving through the lens of human-centered design. It's a human-centered approach. It's about empathizing and figuring out who you're designing for, what their needs are, and then helping you to solve that problem, helping you to innovate based on those needs. So whereas many other problem solving processes before design thinking, we're always about, well, we have this technology, let's make this thing, design thinking helps you look at this from the customer, the human perspective. There are five main steps to any design thinking process, even though in each of these steps the exercises themselves or the specific process is very, very flexible. And every company and every designer and every design thinker does it differently, but the five steps always remain the same. Step number one is empathize. And this step is basically just about understanding the people you're trying to design the product for, the product or the service for. And in this step, a lot of the time it's about gathering information, interviewing, doing user interviews, creating personas, trying to figure out who am I making this for, what is their problem, and really what do these people do, right? It's about empathizing with the people you're designing for. Step two is to define. Now in the define step, you're taking everything you learned in step one in the empathize step and you're defining and you're really kind of breaking it down and coming to conclusions about what are the user's needs. Based on everything I've learned from interviewing these people, what are their needs? What are their problems? What are their challenges? What are the types of things? What are the insights we can take from these interviews, from empathizing with the users, with the customers? What are we taking from that? What are we actually going to be able to use as information? What are we saying this is a problem. This is a common problem. This is a common challenge. This is an observation we were able to make. How do you take everything you learned in the empathize section and turn that into insights? And this is what define is. Step three is to ideate. Now you're taking everything you learned in the previous two steps and you're coming up with solutions. You're coming up with ideas. You're coming up with potential matches of products or services or whatever it is you're creating. You're trying to match your solution with the insights you figured out in the empathize and define section of the design thinking process. Now what you're doing is coming together and you're coming up with ideas. And often this is the bit that looks sort of like a brainstorming workshop. You've got post-its everywhere. People are coming together. People are sharing ideas and people are trying to come up with ideas. So it's really about coming up with thoughts and ideas that match what you learned in the previous steps. Step four is prototype. Now what you're doing is you're taking all of these ideas. You're breaking it down into a select few that you think might be worth making into something more realistic. And you're turning these ideas into simple, testable prototypes. You know, they're not fully designed. They're not fully coded. They're not fully made into the real thing. But they're essentially a facade, essentially a fake thing, whether that's a digital product or a physical product. You're just trying to quickly make something that you can test with real users. And that's the final step, test. And in the test phase, you're taking your prototypes, the prototypes that are based on what you created in the third step and fourth step. And now you're onto the final step where you're testing with real people. And these real people are, you know, selected based on what you learned in step one in empathize. And essentially these real people are going to use the product and you're going to get feedback from them in real time based on what they're using. So you go back through the cycle, you go from test, once you've got your test results, you go back again into the define phase, right? You're not done once you've tested. There's going to be a lot of new insights. So these insights, you're gathering them together again, back to the defines phase. And then you're back to the ideate phase again, based on your new learnings, you're coming up with new ideas, you're coming up with updated ideas, and then you're back to prototype again, and then you're back to test again. And that is the core design thinking cycle. And these are the five steps you see every time you search for anything design thinking related. And I just want to be super clear about this. You see these, you know, they'll be overlaid on the screen multiple times here. You'll see these five steps. And the important thing to understand here is these five steps are sort of like the zoomed out map of how design thinking, how a design thinking process works. However, the exact exercises within these circles are not defined. Okay. So you need to understand that's an important difference between design thinking and something like design sprints. In design thinking, you have a broad map of what you're going to be doing over the next weeks, months, years, but there's no rule set that says you have to do this exercise. You have to do this persona. You have to do this. Whereas in something like design sprints, it's more like a recipe. You have to do it. I'm going slightly off topic, but I wanted to get you there because I feel like a lot of people misunderstand that about design thinking. Design thinking is not a recipe. It's not do this, this, this, this. It's a philosophy and a mindset combined with multiple different exercises you can choose from depending on how you want to make the dish, right? So design thinking is essentially pretty free form. It's pretty flexible. It's pretty much up to the person who's running the process, which can make it actually quite tricky. And that's often why we recommend taking the philosophy of design thinking, learning the philosophy of design thinking and using something like the design sprint as a recipe to run a design thinking process. So hopefully that quick overview demystified some of design thinking for you. The first thing to understand is just the broad philosophy around what design thinking is. And that's the point of this video. For more videos on design thinking and for more articles and for more posts, we're going to be doing a full week of design thinking content on our LinkedIn profile this week. So definitely say, Hey, over there as well. I know LinkedIn can be a bit boring, but we've got a very exciting LinkedIn page. So AJ and Smart on LinkedIn. If you're looking to get deeper into what exercises exist, exactly what the processes can look like, exactly how to run design thinking workshops, workshopper.com is a great resource for figuring out how to start things like this. We've got a great guide called the ultimate beginner's guide to design thinking. And we've got new videos every single week. Of course, they're free. They're all on YouTube. All you got to do is subscribe. And we do try our best to try to give you all the information you can possibly want. And where do we get the ideas for making these videos? The comments down below. So let me know what you want us to make. What do you want to see? Do you want to see workshops? Do you want to see more about design thinking, more about design sprints? Just let us know in the comments. And thanks so much for watching. We really do appreciate it. And thanks to everyone who subscribes. We're trying to get up to 100,000 subscribers at the moment. Maybe when you see this video, we'll already be there. But still, we're on our way. We're on our journey right now. Thanks so much. What are the types of things? What are the types of things? What are the insights in the empathize and define section of in the empathize, in the empathize and design, in the empathize and define. And you okay. And empathizing is and this step