Design Thinking

With technical advancements and business transformations around the globe, factories have grown from merely producing stuff to meet the demand to innovating and molding the products to customer needs. And in today’s world of competition to achieve this, the businesses have moved forward to have more cordial relations with the consumers to understand their needs, so as to assist them better, and therefore the term DESIGN THINKING was invented in the 20th century.

To give more insight on Design Thinking, Babita Baruah with her impeccable service record of 25 years in marketing and advertising delivered a seminar on the BRATS platform. She started off with an assertion “Design Thinking starts with empathy”. Design Thinking as a process can only be achieved when we can feel the customer and empathize with them to have a better understanding. It is both an ideology and a process, concerned with solving complex problems in a human-centric way.

“ MAKE IT MATTER”

Babita Baruah said, over the years, I have reframed myself from a professional to a more socially responsible person who always tries to ideate new methods to bring the change in the society and if I can change even one life through this then my mission is accomplished. Make every move count and go the distance to achieve the goal.

BENEFITS OF DESIGN THINKING :

• Helps in tracking creative challenges, design thinking allows you to take a look at the problem from a completely different perspective.
• Assists in effectively meeting client requirements as design thinking involves prototyping all the various products at the MVP stage go through multiple rounds of testing and customer feedback for assured quality.
• The design process goes through various evaluations and corrections. The process doesn’t stop even after the deliverable is complete.
• Design thinking helps businesses better identity, understanding of concern problems. It values solutions over processes and creativity and innovations over traditions.
• Gives opportunity for multiple perspectives ensures that the outcome meets the objectives and client requirements.

5 PHASES OF DESIGN THINKING PROCESS :

Empathy – The first stage of the process is spent getting to know the user and understanding their wants, needs, and objectives. This means observing and engaging with people in order to understand them on a psychological and emotional level. 

Reframe – The second stage in the Design Thinking process is dedicated to defining the problem. You’ll gather all of your findings from the empathize phase and start to make sense of them: what difficulties and barriers are your users coming up against? What patterns do you observe? What is the big user problem that your team needs to solve? By the end of the define phase, you will have a clear problem statement.

Reach to enthusiasts – In this phase, we keep in mind the audience base and target the specific ones that are truly passionate. They may be few but if they are impassioned they are ones for which we have to do it.

Play (Ideation) – The third phase in the DT process is where creativity happens, and it’s crucial to point out that the ideation stage is a judgment-free zone! There are many different types of ideation techniques that designers might use, from brainstorming and mind-mapping to roleplay scenarios and provocation — an extreme lateral-thinking technique that gets the designer to challenge established beliefs and explore new options and alternatives.  

Act (Prototype) – This stage is where the convergence of ideas from the ideation phase takes place. It is all about experimentation and turning ideas into tangible products. Throughout the prototype stage, the proposed solutions may be accepted, improved, redesigned, or rejected depending on how they fare in prototype form.

CONCLUSION :

The biggest asset of design thinking is its human-centric feelings and playful thinking. The courage to try something new and creative, the curiosity for other people’s lives, the cooperation with others is all that it takes to understand. Design thinking is all about product development and can bring various benefits. It is not just a trend that will fade away in a month. It is gaining some serious traction, not only in product companies but also in other fields such as education and science.

MORE ABOUT BABITA BARUAH:

Worked for Wunderman Thompson for 20 years with clients like Sunsilk and lux. Her portfolio extends across categories like FMCG, Finance, and Technology. Beside being part of a noble agency team on Nestle, J&J, and radiant. She led the team in Nokia India before moving on to setting up a dedicated solution team for Pepsico India in 2016.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/babitabaruah/

WATCH FULL DESIGN THINKING WEBINAR HERE :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQoat6qzlE8&feature=emb_title

To attend more webinars please visit https://courses.brats.co.in/. 

The webinars are completely free for students. To get connected with the BRATS platform, join this WhatsApp group https://chat.whatsapp.com/JZiHanU6OzB3CXvYbStXfE