-: All right, last but not least for this week
I wanna talk about design thinking.
So, design thinking is the name of a process,
essentially, a way of thinking about
doing any sort of design.
It comes from Stanford,
and the basic idea is it's a process
for creative problem-solving, as it says here,
and it has three primary components.
The first part of it is all about empathy.
It's empathy for your audience, for your stakeholders.
It's essentially really thinking about them,
and what they need, so quienthe, right,
very much aligned with that.
Once you have empathy for your audience
and you really have a human-centered approach
to whatever it is that you're creating,
then that makes it much more likely you're gonna
create a solution for them that is actually helpful, right?
The old way of doing design without this approach,
and maybe I shouldn't call it the old way,
but you know, the thoughtless way, let's call it,
of doing design is looking more like
at the stuff you have, right?
Like, I have a pile of steel, what can I make with it?
But, you know, design thinking, user-focused approach
and empathetic approach is, what does my audience need?
They need a place where they can sit and do work.
Ah, maybe with this steel I could build a structure
to which I could then attach, you know, a sheltering glass,
and we can put chairs inside and that's where people
can do that work that they so wanna do, right?
So, you know, I think you get the point.
The second part, after you've have your design empathy,
you've really thought through what you're doing
in a very human way, is you can brainstorm, you can ideate.
And the basic idea in a design thinking approach
is that you work at this for a little while, right?
You go past the initial thought.
The initial thought is probably gonna be
the most obvious solution, and listen,
sometimes the obvious solution is gonna work.
That's great.
But oftentimes you want to go broader, right?
You want to try to think of more ideas
because sometimes, you know, the thing
you're trying to solve, the solution
you're trying to come up with is more nuanced.
It's more complex, it's a little bit nichier
than the initial obvious thought,
and a little bit more of a nuanced approach will bear fruit.
So, that brainstorming ideation process,
which can only happen after empathy, can take some time.
And then, finally, you can do the last part,
which is really broken into multiple parts,
but, you know, just for structural purposes
you can think of these three parts,
the last bit being, prototyping, experimenting,
and incrementing.
So, you know, you came up with an idea
based on your empathetic approach
to your thoughts about your audience.
You think this thing is gonna work.
You do a quick prototype of it, as quick
and simple as you possibly can, and then you test it.
You try to see if it works for your audience,
and if it does, fantastic.
If it doesn't, then you incrementally improve it
until it delivers what they need.
And the incrementing also can happen,
not just to solve the problem,
but to continue to iterate and make the solution
better and better and better over time.
So, that's the basic idea of design thinking,
those three parts, but it's really important to acknowledge
that design thinking requires curiosity.
It requires that you approach problem-solving
with a curious mind, and that you're there to ask questions.
You don't come in with the idea to answer questions.
You don't come in with the idea to solve problems
from the get-go.
Your first task is to ask a lot of questions.
It's only through questions that you can get
to the actual solutions that are gonna make sense.
And so, it's really about critical thinking, right?
So, you're gonna solve a problem.
You gotta understand that problem deeply.
You gotta understand your audience.
You gotta understand what they really need
and not just the surface level things
that they think that they need,
and critically, essentially break all that down,
piece by piece by piece, nuance by nuance,
and eventually you get to the real underlying problem.
Like I mentioned before, it's sort of like therapy,
at which point you can actually start
to come up with solutions.
So, we talked about this during data analytics,
the five why's from Toyota,
one of the ways you can get to that underlying
real need in a design process.
And, by the way, the word design, you know,
it's not about making things pretty.
It's about problem-solving.
That's literally what design is.
So, the entire goal is to really just shift your mindset,
come at problem-solving
and that's what data storytelling is.
It's problem solving, right?
We've looked at data for a reason.
We're trying to understand why something is happening.
We're trying to change things.
We're trying to find a solution.
We're trying to, you know, solve some sort of a problem,
and the only way to do that is to shift your mindset
into this user human oriented approach.
Design, you know, solutions, think broadly about them
and then test and iterate, test and iterate,
test and iterate.
Don't assume that, oh, you know, someone asked me
for some data, I'm gonna throw it together in dashboard.
Boom, I'm done.
Just doesn't work that way.
Think differently about it.
And one of the best pieces of advice I can give you
is to embrace the creative process.
So, this little illustration here is a visualization
of the creative process.
You start on the left and you start going around
and it goes around and around and around
and it gets kind of crazy,
and, like, you get a little bit overwhelmed.
You're trying to do too many things at once.
Eventually, you start to hone in, and eventually you end up
at the other end with a nice straight line,
a nice solution to the problem, but it can get messy.
It can be ugly and confusing during the process,
but embrace it.
Be okay with that expanding out into the craziness
and then narrowing in to the final solution.
It's gonna be overwhelming during that process.
Allow that to happen.
And you're gonna experience this during this class
as you explore your data.
That's gonna get crazy and overwhelming at times,
as you think about what charts to use
and all the other things we're gonna do during this process.
So, don't be overwhelmed.
Don't freak out.
Embrace it.
Just live through it and I promise you'll come out
the other side with a final product
that you'll be happy with.