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How will I benefit

2 Year PGDM | Admissions Closing Soon | Apply Now

Design Thinking is a new way of thinking of helping students in solving problems. The major focus of a design thinking mindset is the focus on a human-centred approach to innovation. It is about understanding the humans facing the problem more than the solution itself. It is about coming out of the traditional boxes with visual thinking, creativity, and innovation to find new solutions.

Design Thinking can be applied not just to technology or design, it can also be used successfully in any industry, government projects and policies and non-profits.

How will I benefit?

Unlearn patterned thinking

Understand Human Needs

Create Sustainable Businesses

Generate ideas for Innovation

Developing a fail fast approach

Unlearn Patterned Thinking

As humans, Are we innovative by nature? Are we human Centric by nature? The answer is Yes. But does everyone believe that? The majority would say No.

Humans naturally develop patterns of thinking modelled on repetitive activities and commonly accessed knowledge. They train our brains to get solutions to day to day problems faster, but they have the potential to stop us from exploring newer ways of thinking due to the thinking pattern we develop in our lives. The following example gives us an understanding of the problems with patterned thinking.

Unlearn Patterned Thinking

The truck is stuck under an over bridge, causing huge traffic jams. How can this be resolved?

*Think for a minute before reading the solution

Wystan, Flickr. Copyright terms and license: CC BY 2.0

A similar issue happened once and engineers, firefighters, construction experts were called in to fix the problem. As a trained mind with a patterned thinking process (like many of us), the team of experts were thinking about dismantling the truck and clearing the traffic. This resulted in hours of traffic jam and caused misery to people.

A similar problem was given to school kids and because of their un-patterned thinking process, the answer that the students decided was to remove the air in the tyres so that the height of the truck comes down naturally.

Un Patterned Thinkers

(Kids, Design Thinkers, Innovators)

Don’t have assumptions or challenge assumptions

Patterned Thinkers

(Many of us)

Don’t challenge assumptions and limit our thinking process

Understand Human Needs

The very foundation of Design Thinking is to empathize with the customer. It is an approach that takes the end users at the center of the process to solve the problems. The process is inherently human-centered, getting closer to the user to see where their frustrations lie and how we can make their lives and experiences better and more fulfilling.

Creating Sustainable Businesses

Design Thinking focuses on finding solutions by understanding the human needs. The following diagram shows how design thinking combines business viability, technological viability and serving to people’s needs.

Many a time, the tech giants and the big manufacturers of the world focus too much on finding a solution to a fancy problem rather than focussing on improving the value given to a customer. With a DT approach, the human-centred approach becomes helpful in finding meaningful solutions to problems.

Generate Ideas for Innovation

Generate Ideas for Innovation

Students identify ideas when a great idea is found. Great ideas are not new ideas. They are usually a combination of existing ideas. And that’s where brainstorming is powerful because it brings together people with diversity so they can combine their ideas together.

Design thinking becomes effective using a collaborative approach to problem-solving. It brings students from different parts of the world together for their different knowledge, expertise, and input on how to solve a problem.

Develop a fail fast approach – Be Iterative

Develop a fail fast approach - Be Iterative

In “Design Thinking”, every activity leads us to prototype and testing. The whole process is biased towards action. The ultimate goal is to prototype fast, prototype often, and test it on real users.

Rapid prototyping makes practitioners embrace failure as a means of learning, Students learn about the shortcomings of the mock product and making changes. A fast fail approach helps students in not getting discouraged and try alternate solutions constantly.

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