Design thinking is not really about a lot of ideas, its about really good strategy, alignment with business, diagnostics and deep customer understanding.

That's why gmdesign offers strategic design management – a business process that incorporates design and its management into the strategy formation process and its implemention at every level of the business.

 Vision without action is merely
a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world.
– Joel Arthur Barker

Design thinking: Introduction

Design Thinking is in essence an approach to solving problems. It embodies an ethos that values questioning, collaboration, creativity and learning through trial and error. It’s about putting people at the centre of the process and using a range of methods and supporting processes that deliver the most appropriate solutions for a given context.

Design thinking promotes holistic, integrated system view of the organisation as a collection of business processes, organisational structures, performance measures, skills, IT applications, and culture alignment to strategic objectives.

At gmdesign, we've chosen a 4 D step process to serve as a simplified design thinking approach. To put Design thinking into practice start with four questions:
What is?[DEFINE];
What if? [DREAM];
What wows? [DESIGN]; and
What works? [DELIVER].

It is a process that endeavors to solve problems and create new possibilities, generally by relying on empathic research (studying people to try to figure out what they need) combined with creative experimentation and extensive prototyping and refinement — all aimed at the goal of producing better, more useful objects, experiences, services, and systems.

It basically incorporates three key elements:
First is observational research or ethnography. Ethnography is a research method based on observing people in their natural environment. Ethnography informs design by revealing a deep understanding of people and how they make sense of their world.
The second one is visual sense-making. It is the strategic activity of making sense of ambiquous complex situations by using visual thinking, methods and tools – words, images, drawings, diagrams and charts – resulting in new insights.
The third one is rapid prototyping. In rapid prototyping interactive prototypes are developed allowing users/clients to visualise a system which can be quickly replaced or changed in line with design feedback. The benefits include: quickly determine how a product/service is supposed to work; determine what customers really want and to predict their behaviour; determine whether customer value and business value are aligned (business sense) and if not what's the gap.