[Design thinking] Introduction and Step 1: Empathize

An efficient way to solve problems

“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

The five steps of the design thinking

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:

1. “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.
2. “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.
3. “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.
4. “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…