Empathy. That is often the secret to making a successful sale. It goes well beyond merely googling for your potential customer and reading some of the top results that show up, or trawling through their LinkedIn and Facebook pages. It also includes putting yourself in your customer’s shoes and seeing the world through their eyes.
Go to any major auto show, and you are likely to be wowed by the futuristic ideas and cutting-edge technologies embedded in various vehicles. Some of the concept vehicles and transpiration systems on display may even look like something straight out of a science fiction flick. These solutions may look slick, but an important question soon pops up — can everyone use them? How inclusive are they?
Local problems often need local solutions. And for that, you invariably need local expertise. In a paper titled Design Thinking for Social Innovation, authors Tim Brown and Jocelyn Wyatt argue that design thinking is best delivered by spending time with users or citizens in their own environments, rather than working on a project abstractly in another space.
A systematic review of design thinking on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website asserts that by increasing the focus on patient and provider needs, design thinking enhances innovation, efficiency and effectiveness in healthcare. Healthcare systems require continuous innovation
Can design thinking really increase workplace productivity?
Let’s go on a thought experiment journey and test out design thinking’s potential for increasing productivity and find out!
The communication process, like any other operation within an organization, stands to benefit immensely from leveraging design thinking. Since content is created by humans for humans and communication is the exchange of ideas between humans, the human-centered design thinking approach is well suited for both content and communication.
Parkinson’s Law famously states that work expands to fill up available time. And, in a sufficiently large organization, various departments and officials end up creating work for each other and filling up all available time.
The word “culture” invariably means different things to different organizations. Successful companies are usually those that strive to build a culture that genuinely places customers above everything else. They have a culture reinforcing design mindset.
Turn to Industry 4.0 proponents and they are likely to talk about a future made of cobots – collaborative robots — that coexist with human workers. In this world, they work together to achieve not just efficient production in smart factories, but also to ensure that the humans working alongside robots have a creative and fulfilling work life.
The concept of ethical design allows designers and design teams to create products, services, and systems that don’t harm and improve human situations. Ethical Design Thinking is a methodology that encourages designers to focus on human-oriented values throughout their design process.
