What is Design Thinking?
‘Design thinking? Is there a specific method of thinking for designing? Is it about not liming yourself so that you can think of something creative? What exactly is design thinking?‘
These were some questions on my mind when I heard the term “design thinking” for the first time. As someone who does not believe in my own creativity, I thought the term must be about a specific process that the designers follow when designing something new that helps them foster creativity. I thought this must be the secret formula for being creative and coming up with innovative ideas.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t quite what design thinking was. However, it is a critical mindset to have for successful designing. In fact, this may not be THE secret formula for fostering creativity, but it is certainly a mindset that will help with the process. Design thinking is basically another term for human-centered design, which means that when designing a product, every decision made has to be based around the intended user of the product. This is a critical mindset to have because when you design for the intended users, it may lead to an idea that you would not have thought of otherwise. While you might be working on a design believing that you are providing what the users want, if you do not take an effort to reach out to those users and understand their motivations and desires, you may be going in a completely wrong direction.
An example of such situations was shared by our TA, Mehment Aydin. He shared a story of how for children, going through a MRI machine is a scary experience. It is challenging for them to stay calm without any movement while being stuck in a dark, narrow space with lots of noise surrounding them. Upon hearing this problem, we might jump straight into how we can adjust the machine to provide more comfortable experience. Perhaps we can find a way to decrease the noise level. Perhaps we can make the bed more comfortable. But what solved the problem was much simpler than those ideas.
What was the solution? Turn the whole MRI experience into a fun role-playing game. Instead of having the children go through the MRI process in all seriousness, the solution was to have the doctors and nurses be pirates and have the children to stay hidden from them in the MRI machine, which is decorated as a ship, until the whole procedure was finished. Now, instead of being afraid of the darkness and the noise, the children were having fun and filled with excitement as they stayed in the machine, “hiding” from the bad guys. In fact, Mehmet shared that they had so much fun that they were asking when would be the next time that they come back.
How could someone reach such a solution without truly understanding the problem from the perspectives of the users? That is what a design thinking is all about.
Going Forward
This mindset of design thinking is very important for my team as we try to design something that will allow the youth wheelchair users to easily customize their wheelchairs and improve their experiences. We really need to understand why the users may want to customize their wheelchairs and in which way they would like to. To find out all these different factors, we are in the process of reaching out to not only youth wheelchair users but also adult wheelchair users who have experiences of being youth wheelchair users themselves. We want to help them step into their childhood and have them share their “dream wheelchairs.” What is this wheelchair capable of? What does it look like? We want to bring out the child-side of the users to really dive into the limitless creativity we had when we were kids. By being in this mindset of children, we believe that we will be able to find a solution to help the youth wheelchair users enjoy their experience more.
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