Design thinking is all about exploring the processes and creative thinking that go into developing a new idea. It grew out of industries such as architecture and planning but has since been used across many business and innovation sectors to help solve a wide range of problems.
“The notion of design as a “way of thinking” in the sciences can be traced to Herbert A. Simon’s 1969 book The Sciences of the Artificial, and in design engineering to Robert McKim’s 1973 book Experiences in Visual Thinking.” see – Wikipedia
At its heart, design thinking requires you to be flexible and up for experimentation. The idea that you have in your head at this moment in time may or may not be the right solution for solving a particular problem. The process is all about working towards that a-ha moment when the path ahead and the solution suddenly become clear.
Many inventors do this intuitively, working through their own basic knowledge in combination with the goal they are trying to achieve. Design thinking needs to be human-centric in nature, it has to be social and it has to provide a viable solution. It must be used, to a certain extent, without constraints – how can you come up with exactly the right approach if you don’t allow yourself to be open to different solutions?
One principle of design thinking is that every new design is really a re-design. If you want to find solutions to a particular problem, looking to the past can help. Another part of the design thinking process is how you finally communicate abstract notions and make them more tangible, easy to understand for those you pitching to.
Our design thinking process involves 3 clear and distinct stages:
- Inspiration
The inspiration initially comes from the inventor, of course. It’s that lightbulb moment when you suddenly realise you have a great idea ready to explode. While the next stage is obviously to find a way to realise your brilliant conception but the initial idea is all important. Will it work? Is it even original? This is where we help by providing relevant background services such as undertaking worldwide patent searches to make sure you have a solid legal platform on which to build.
- Ideation
This is the process of generating, developing and testing your idea. There may be a number of different plausible concept designs and options to choose from, the strongest of which will combine to eventually deliver your prototype.
Once this is settled on, we can bring our visualisation services so that you can put your idea before relevant parties to push the project. Visualisation is one of the best tools that you can have on your side when you need to explain concepts or ideas – our brains process this kind of information so much faster than written or verbal content.
- Testing
It’s difficult to know if an innovation is going to float. We always recommend once you have patent protection in place that you to start getting feedback from relevant industries before pursuing the development process or commercialising your new product idea. Most new innovations don’t survive unless you have this kind of support in place and you can get a good deal of advice from interested parties along the way.
The design thinking process is a brilliant way to get your initial big idea to the prototype stage and can help you to see things in a new and enlightening way. At Innovate, we can help you through this process, allowing your dreams to move from excited speculation to concrete solution. In short, it’s the spine that can define your innovation and it’s future potential to succeed.
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