[Design thinking] Introduction and Step 1: Empathize
“Design Thinking” is a famous problem-solving approach in business and even taught in the MBA program or online courses, such as MIT with program fee US$3,300. Hence, there must be some values for design thinking. In this series of posts, I am going to introduce design thinking.
Introduction
Design thinking is well recognized as an innovative problem-solving method developed by Stanford University. This method is human-centred and consists of five steps:
- “Empathize” is the process to fully observe understand your stakeholders, such as their backgrounds, behaviours and feeling etc. This process usually needs some interviews, focus groups and surveys.
- “Define” is the step that takes the insights and findings from step 1 and now focuses on a few key problems which are crucial to the users.
- “Ideate”, the fascinating step, is to brainstorm as many solutions to the selected problems as possible and requires us to think out-of-the-box.
- “Prototype”: When ideate is done, we should have chosen the best solution to form our prototype. Then we need to test our solution as a “prototype”. At the same time, we should record each point in the process for…