Design Thinking is an innovative method of solving complex problems, the so-called "wicked problems" that cannot be solved effectively using traditional methods.
The challenges of development cooperation and EU development aid to Africa are examples of "wicked problems" that are global in nature. They combine a wide variety of issues – political, economic and social. The Design Thinking method can effectively support solving development cooperation problems, because as a social process, it entails the necessity of cooperating with the external environment, taking into account many points of view and drawing on practical experience.
Design Thinking is a human-oriented and user-oriented method throughout the entire design process. It assumes that the key idea of the design process is human – recipient, user to whom the result of design work is dedicated. It also involves the inclusion in the design process of users to whom the result of the work is directed. Therefore, an important element of the method is listening to the needs of potential recipients and their active involvement in designing, and the method's philosophy can be summarized in four rules:
| Rule | Description |
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The Human Rule: |
There are studies that substantiate the assertion that successful innovation through design thinking activities will always bring us back to the “human-centric point of view.” This is the imperative to solve technical problems in ways that satisfy human needs and acknowledge the human element in all technologists and managers. |
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The Ambiguity Rule: |
There is no chance for “chance discovery” if the box is closed tightly, the constraints enumerated excessively, and the fear of failure is always at hand. Innovation demands experimentation at the limits of our knowledge, at the limits of our ability to control events, and with freedom to see things differently |
| The Re-design Rule: All Design Is Re-design |
The human needs that we seek to satisfy have been with us for millennia. Through time and evolution there have been many successful solutions to these problems. Because technology and social circumstances change constantly, it is imperative to understand how these needs have been addressed in the past. Then we can apply “foresight tools and methods” to better estimate social and technical conditions we will encounter 5, 10, or even 20 years in the future. |
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The Tangibility Rule: |
Curiously, this is one of our most recent findings. While conceptual prototyping has been a central activity in design thinking during the entire period of our research, it is only in the past few years that we have come to realize that “prototypes are communicationmedia.” Seen as media, we now have insights regarding their bandwidth, granularity, time constants, and context dependencies. The “make it tangible” rule is one of the first major findings of the design thinking research program documented in this book |
The Design Thinking process consists of five stages: empathizing, defining, generating ideas, prototyping and testing:
- empathy – it consists in in-depth recognition of users' real needs and understanding their functioning in various situations;
- defining – consists in precisely defining a design challenge on the basis of collected information and data;
- generating ideas – involves generating a large number of diverse ideas that are potential solutions to a previously defined problem;
- prototype construction – involves creating fast and cheap prototypes, which are a visual version of the solutions, in order to pass them on for testing to recipients;
- testing – involves the use of prototypes by recipients in a real environment and collecting comments from them. Positive tests indicate that the solution is ready for final implementation.
The main goal of Design Thinking is to unleash creativity and provide all participants in the design process with the opportunity to learn and improve initial ideas. It is currently included in the curricula of universities and international institutions (UNDP, UNHCR etc.).
It also works as a team training, presentation and discussing skills.