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Published:
July 28, 2020

Design Thinking For Dummies

Overview

Innovate your business by incorporating design thinking Organizations that can innovate have an advantage over competitors who stick to old processes, models, and products. Design Thinking For Dummies walks would-be intrapreneurs through the steps of incorporating design thinking principles into their organizations. Written by a recognized expert in the field of design thinking, the book guides readers through the steps of adapting to a design thinking culture, identifying customer problems, creating and testing solutions, and making innovation an ongoing process. The book covers the crucial and central topics in design thinking, including:

  • Adopting a design thinking mindset
  • Building creative environments
  • Facilitating design thinking workshops
  • Working through the design thinking cycle
  • Implementing your solutions
  • And many more

Design Thinking For Dummies is a great starting place for people joining design-oriented teams and organizations, as well as small businesses and start-ups seeking to take advantage of the same methods and techniques that large firms have used to grow and succeed.

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About The Author

Prof. Dr. Christian Müller- Roterberg is a professor and lecturer in technology, management, and entrepreneurship at Ruhr West University. He heads the university's graduate program in business management. Prof. Dr. Müller-Roterberg has also been involved in a number of startups and IPOs. He is author of Handbook of Design Thinking

Sample Chapters

design thinking for dummies

CHEAT SHEET

Design thinking is an innovative approach to generating creative ideas that center on the needs of people. You analyze your target users and their problems, develop ideas, visualize solutions, and develop prototypes. You can change the concept after receiving feedback from your customers. ©Cienpies Design/Shutterstock.

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Articles from
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In design thinking projects, a team has between five and nine members, gathered together in one place. A smaller group will lack the required amount of experience and the work capacity to master the tasks in a design thinking project. A team that has more than nine team members results in coordination problems that prevent fast and efficient action.
Design thinking is an innovative approach to generating creative ideas that center on the needs of people. You analyze your target users and their problems, develop ideas, visualize solutions, and develop prototypes. You can change the concept after receiving feedback from your customers. ©Cienpies Design/Shutterstock.
An essential element in the design thinking approach is that you develop a thorough understanding of the task and situation before you look for creative ideas for products, services, procedures, or business models. Don’t rush into things and immediately search for solutions for something that you haven’t really worked through yet.
The Personal method is one of the ways in which you can systematically collect information about the people and situations you’re interested in (your targets) and methodically evaluate that information. In design thinking, with the Persona method, you fictitiously assume the role of a customer or user who represents members of a real customer or user group.
Sequence planning involves the scheduling of the work packages during design thinking. With sequence planning, you determine the logical succession of the work packages. A rough framework to follow here would mirror the phases of the design thinking process — such as understanding the task, searching for solutions, creating a prototype, and testing the proposed solution with the customer.
Creativity techniques used in design thinking can be divided into methods that are intuitive-creative or systematic-analytical. By applying the intuitive-creative techniques, usually in a group, you can stimulate spontaneous ideas, associations, and analogous conclusions in order to overcome mental blocks in the form of a much freer configuration.
Part of the design thinking process is making your ideas very clear and tangible. You can easily and quickly create a prototype of your idea on paper, on a whiteboard, or on an electronic device (laptop, smartphone, tablet) with drawings and photo collages. You can outline the product design; drawings of the functions and characteristics of your idea are also possible.
When targeting potential customers during the design thinking process, it's important to figure out the customer journey. For the customer journey, imagine which steps a potential customer (preferably, in the form of a concrete persona) experiences before, during, and after using a product or service. Create a description of the target person using the Persona method, and supplement it with an empathy map.
When targeting your customers in the design thinking process, you can use empathy to understand who your customer is and what they want. With an empathy map, you can holistically put yourself into the role of a person or a group faced by certain situations. Imagine a specific person in their natural environment.
When it comes to work packages, you can illustrate your progress with the help of a task board; it’s a useful tool for communicating to everyone involved the extent of the project's progress. You can use this task board to differentiate on a timeline the various development stages of the design thinking project.
Before you try some of the methods of design thinking in a workshop, you should become familiar with the basics. The principles and methods of this approach to innovation are probably unfamiliar to many in your organization. New ideas are always met with skepticism, reservations, or resistance. Overcome your reservations and foster your curiosity.
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