Karen Peterson: ESL4Everyone

Design thinking is a process to help you address the right problem and come up with innovative solutions to even the world's most difficult problems.  

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The steps do not have to be done in order and you can and will often go back to steps.  Let's look at the steps.  

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To determine the real problem:  

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Discover:  Look at what is already being done out there.  You can google it, for example.

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Empathy:  There are many ways to gain empathy.  Here are a few:

 

1.Interview the customer or person facing the problem.

2.Observe the customer or person facing the problem.

3.Live the experience.  Put yourself in that situation and experience the problem yourself.

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Reframe the problem:  After you gain empathy, you might find out that the problem that you thought was the problem was not the problem at all.  Make sure you are working on the right problem, the real pain that your customer is experiencing. According to George Kembrel, the Director of Stanford's DSchool, 50% of companies don't fail because they can't fix the problem but because they are working on the wrong problem.