Let’s Design Lives
Design Thinking has become a buzz word in the field of engineering and business. Design Thinking is a new concept which aims towards tackling complex issues through a human-centric approach. Because of its solutions-oriented design, many businesses are using it to innovate and develop new products or services. It can not only help in improving the user experience for a particular gadget but also address social problems (ex- water conservation efforts from government agencies, tackling malnutrition problems in children, The Sternin’s work in Vietnam). Many organizations, whether public, profit, not for profit is using design thinking to develop better products and services. But the best aspect of design thinking is that it is not only confined to businesses or social problems but can also be used at a personal level to develop solutions for our day to day problems. Appropriate use of logic, intuition, and reasoning can help us implement design thinking to handle any life situation.
Life is full of challenges, and none of us is exempt. However, life situations of every individual are different, but there are common challenges and conditions which create suffering and end in disappointment. But these are the instances which help us learn and become a better person if we tackle them appropriately. If we see from a development perspective, our life challenges give us an opportunity for personal growth and self-improvement if we embrace them joyfully. We can easily overcome them and become the best version of ourselves by handling them tactfully with patience. We are talking about the application of design thinking in solving our life problems because it helps us identify our problems, brainstorm bold new ideas to make a better impact on our life. This leads to fruitful results making our lives more agile, happy, and contented. Let’s explore how we can align the concept of design thinking with our life’s challenges-
Empathize – This is the first stage where you encounter the situation. It might be any condition or challenge of your life like/ career, love, relationship, business, health, or financial issues. Applying design thinking to the situation, we empathize with ourselves to know why the situation has developed, how and when it is impacting us, and our behavior. In short, we visualize the situation, pattern; identify the relations and implications of the same.
Define – Once we identify the situation we try to identify the incidents which trigger the situation, for example, if I’m not feeling energetic during the day, is it because I slept late, last night, or didn’t exercise today. My fatigue feeling activates my senses to identify any situation that leads to such behavior and can help me avoid such incidents.
Ideate – After identifying the real problem we now can work to find out ways to overcome them in the best possible manner. Here we can brainstorm to generate ideas to address the situation, like working on a morning routine, setting up a bed-time alarm, etc. The intention is to address the problem by generating as many solutions and compare them to select suitable ones. You can ideate on the possible ways that you can take to achieve a bigger objective (i.e. resolving the problem statement)
Prototype – This involves the selection of the most appropriate course of action after evaluating all the ideas or solutions identified in the last stage. In the above example, we will focus to see the alignment of identified ideas with the user, whether they are in sync with user lifestyle, daily routine, personal or professional commitments. Based on this we can apply fresh insights to advance or modify the identified solutions.
Test – This is one of the most important steps of the design thinking process. It helps us identify which solution works best for the user. Considering the above problem, the person decides to work-out in early hours, but is not consistent because of a busy morning routine. It means that the identified morning work-out solution doesn’t work for him. Similarly, some activities are energizing, while others can drain energy in your daily routine. Hence this is the step that tests out things and helps us know what works or whatnot.
We should keep in mind that design thinking can be applied to solve any problem of life which helps us in building our future. Think about the technology world that always strives to develop more unique features and applications for their gadgets to meet consumer needs. It keeps them busy ideating, prototyping, and finding innovative solutions for developing more advanced user-friendly products and applications. Likewise, we can apply design thinking to any of our life challenges by continuously defining, prototyping, testing, and making adjustments until we are happy and contented with the results. So, let’s design our lives and address all of it’s challenge with the gift of design thinking.
We at HRletes apply the same concept to our clients’ need and help them provide customized solutions with quality deliveries.
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