5 Important Stages of Design Thinking

Design thinking is a process for creative problem solving that focuses on human as its core (human-centered). Design thinking encourages organization to focus on their people, which leads to better products, services, and internal processes. Design thinking is typically broken down into five stages: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test.

Empathize

The aim of this empathize stage is to gain an empathic understanding of the problem you are trying to solve. Empathy is important to Design Thinking because it allows design thinkers to set aside their own assumptions about the world; thus, they could gain insight into users and their needs.

Define

The objective of this stage is to brainstorm ideas about how to solve the problems that have been identified. This is where you will analyze your observations and synthesise them in order to define the core problems.

Ideate

On the previous stages, you have started to understand your users and their needs, and you also have analyzed and synthesized your observations. Furthermore, at the third stage, you will ended up with ideate where you will form a human-centered problem statement.

Prototype

Prototype is an experimental phase aims to identify the best possible solution for each problem found. Your team should produce some inexpensive and scaled-down versions of the product to investigate the ideas that have been generated where it could involve a simple paper prototyping.

Test

Test is the final stage of the five stages of design thinking model. It is an iterative process in which the results generated during the testing phase are often used to redefine one or more problems and inform the understanding of the users, the conditions of use, how people think, behave, feel, as well as to empathize.

Conclusion

Overall, you should understand that these stages are different modes which contribute to the entire design project, rather than sequential steps. Your goal is to gain the deepest understanding of the users and what their ideal solution or product would be.

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References:

Dam, R., & Siang, T. (n.d.). 5 Stages in the Design Thinking Process. Retrieved December 16, 2020, from https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/5-stages-in-the-design-thinking-process

Thoring, Katja & Mueller, Roland. (2011). Understanding design thinking: A process model based on method engineering. DS 69: Proceedings of E and PDE 2011, the 13th International Conference on Engineering and Product Design Education.

Tuttle, G., & Director of growth innovation at WeWork. (2020, September 03). What is design thinking and why is it important? Retrieved December 16, 2020, from https://www.wework.com/ideas/growth-innovation/what-is-design-thinking