Designing is a serious business, one that demands full commitment and some serious thought put in it. Designing is not random doodling – there is a world of difference, and it comes from the fact that designing is a systemic procedure that follows a specific method. Many young designers make a recurring mistake – they do not familiarize themselves with the process of design thinking. It is a must for every designer to understand the theory behind design thinking and then apply it during designing projects to get much better results. How to improve design thinking? This piece will try to familiarize the readers with the process of design thinking and its steps so they may improve their Design Collaboration fundamentally, is a process between the designer and the audience. It is not only the designer who is a stakeholder in delivering a good project, the audience must play a role too. So the first step – empathizing – refers to the procedure through which you familiarize yourself with the designing procedure. This means, put yourself in the shoes of your audience and try to understand what they expect and what they want from our project. An easy and efficient way to do this would be to survey the target demographic and see what their problems are.
Once there is some clarity over what the audience wants and what problems they face, it is time to move on to the second step – defining the project. Defining the project means setting some parameters for your project. All the information you gathered in the empathizing step, now is the time to put it to use. What are the problems that your audience is facing and how does your project offer any change in the status quo, or any solution to them? Does your design project help solve the problems that exist? How to translate your idea of solving a problem through your design into a reality? These are some questions that define the defining stage.
At this stage, the basic framework of the project should be defined. Now is time for the third step – ideation – which is essentially just a fancier name for brainstorming. In this stage, the designer must come up with all the different ideas for the design and just note it down somewhere. At this stage. Never think about the practicality or relevance of the ideas. The idea behind ideation is to just let whatever is your mind on paper. Once this step is done and you are flowing with ideas, you would have to select the better ones among them.
The fourth stage – prototyping – is where the actual designing work takes place. From the ideation stage, you would have a lot of ideas on how to make things work. In prototyping, you choose the better of all those ideas and start working on it. Which ideas are better? The better ideas would be judged on three criteria – feasibility, viability, and desirability.
Once you are done with the prototype and have a functioning design project, it is time to fine-tune it. for this, you turn to the audience once again and let them beta test in the last step of the design thinking project – testing. Anything that needs to be fixed or improved would be evident in this step, and the audience feedback would help you determine that.
This was a brief design thinking guide, and we hope it helped improve your design thinking process by making you realize which stage of design thinking you need to work on. Platforms related to designing, such as the Savah App, make design thinking easier by offering a streamlined and organized flow of work during the designing process.