Innovation often arises from taking risks, thinking outside the box, and pushing the boundaries of what was once believed to be possible. Everybody has ideas, but the entire point is to work on something that has never been done before. In today’s fast-paced world, Future Factory needs to constantly adapt and stay on its toes to keep ahead of its competition. And the only way to do that is to hasten the pace of innovation, moving ideas from the concept to the execution stage as quickly as possible.
While it may be easier to stimulate ideas and come up with different concepts, innovation teams often struggle to apply them because of different mindsets and biases embedded in people’s behaviours.
This is where Design Thinking comes into play.
Who drives design thinking?
When you are presented with a problem; Design Thinking is the process that makes you broaden your perspective and helps you create better solutions no matter how big or small the problem is. It is essentially encouraging people to explore alternatives, creating options that had not existed before. Using direct observation and qualitative data, the process produces stories that people can empathize with. So once the research is conducted, the problem solver is more apt to define what the real problem is. Designers use design thinking with the intention of improving their products. You analyze how users are interacting with your product and study the situation in which they use the said product in order to gain more insights and perfect your product through multiple prototyping models.
The process of ideating, prototyping and testing is repeated early on so that mistakes are quick, cheap and easy to fix which can ultimately lead to success
Why Design Thinking becomes critical?
Design Thinking works because it focuses on the needs of the user, and understanding the context and culture of the stakeholders involved. The process provides a method and a unifying language for multidisciplinary collaboration leading to greater creativity and better solutions.
The main objective of design thinking is to empathize with your users. When product design consultancies conduct design research, the idea is to get a personal understanding of a consumer’s needs through studying user experience and apply user backwards approach, setting aside every possible assumption. This way, the team receives insights into the user’s world, comprehending their problems, experiences and motivation and then applying that to their designs to the best result possible. This entire process goes through the different stages of design research, product designing or new product development, rapid prototyping, product engineering, technology application and centering it to the design thinking process.
When an Industrial Design Consultancy uses Design Thinking as a core problem-solving process, you get customer-inspired innovation & technology that create meaning and push the boundaries. The goal is to find the most meaningful ideas and work with the customers to solve the right challenges.
Future of innovation depends on design thinking
Ultimately the future of design depends on industrial design consultancies like Future Factory, and how they tackle each problem served to them. Design thinking is just one aspect of problem-solving and just one process designers use, but with new technologies, technology applicationz and advanced software, designers get greater opportunities to continue pushing the bounds of conventional design.
