What is “Design Thinking”?
Design thinking is a human-centered process of designing new products or strategies by meeting people’s needs. Design thinking has five major processes: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. It may also be condensed to three stages, inventing a future, test, and adjust.
In my opinion, the process of empathize and define truly differentiated design thinking process from the regular designing process. By immersing to the life of his or her target customers, designers can find out what they might need but don’t actually have right now. Therefore, human was being placed at the center of the process
Constraints of Design Thinking — Pessimism
As we’ve experimented in the class, by combining our empathy and creativity, designers can probably come up with a great amount of ideas. However, in the real-life settings, major restriction comes in when designers need to collect feedbacks from targeted users.
In Anthony Pannozzo’s article “Why Design Thinking Initiatives Fail”, optimism is the fuel that keeps empathy and creativity running in the design thinking process. Despite how design thinking was pictured in articles, in real design thinking processes within organizations, it is usually consist of frustration and fake “excitements”. As the process repeats, pessimism will grow and eventually kill creativity and empathy.
How 3D will revolutionize design thinking?
Democratization
As Dr. Weightman mentioned in the interview, 3D printing will very likely democratize the designing process by lowering the requirements for designing. People no longer have to possess multiple special skills to realize their design.
Optimism
As described previously, organizations need to assure the designers with optimism to make design thinking continuable. 3D printing helps with this process by realize more of designers ideas. Under the same budget line, 3D printing can reduce the amount of work required for prototyping and make more ideas realized. Because the marginal cost for 3D printing is extremely low comparing to traditional modeling, it might even be possible in the future when designers don’t have to get their ideas authorized by organization directors before prototyping.
Early Fail
Meanwhile, 3D printing can shorten the recursive process. One of the key tenets for design thinking is: Fail early, fail often. After each fail, designers need to go back to previous processes and figure out what may be adjusted. By allowing more prototypes being produced, 3D printing allow designers to find out what is going to work and what is not in an earlier time.
What are the concerns?
3D printing might democratize the design thinking process and offer optimism for designers, but there are still other concerns ahead. Will 3D printing process encourage team work? As A functional team for design thinking should be consisted of people from different backgrounds. However, if the design process can be done by one, it may discourage people from forming teams. Therefore, as an organization adopt design thinking process and 3D printing, it must lead the designers work together and share strengths.
Here is a list of other pitfalls that people may run into during design thinking process.
Hey Xinlu,
Your post does a great job of summarizing week 3’s design thinking ideology. You also bring up a very interesting/great point about the first two steps in design thinking. I completely agree with you that those two steps, empathize and define, are how design thinking and just regular designing differentiate themselves. In addition, putting yourself in someone else’s shoes goes a very long way to solving the problem now, and preparing for the future.
Hi Xinlu,
I really liked the points that you made in your post. The one particular one that I liked is that the process of design thinking includes empathizing with the target user. Taking surveys and actually going to the target users and asking about the problems that they are facing and then taking feedback on the product that is designed for them. Another point that I thought was very important in design thinking is always being optimistic. A pessimist designer will get frustrated and the product will not turn out the way it is supposed to.
I think you did a great job in putting different points out there about the design process that people tend to forget.
Interesting post Xinlu! I think one of the inherent constraints of 3D printing is that at face value it can be challenging to create a need for team work when working with the machines. However when you frame this idea from a need to create solutions to solve problems I think (as you mentioned) collaboration as a team is vital to the success of consistent creation of an effective product