Design Thinking positively impacts creativity. Design Thinking workshops empower business owners and staff in different ways to find new and creative solutions to problems. Let’s start by explaining what Design Thinking is.

What is Design Thinking

According to IDEO’s definition, Design Thinking is a human-centered, iterative approach for creative problem solving and innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate what’s desirable from a human point of view, technologically feasible, and economically viable.

According to Wikipedia, Design Thinking is a term used to represent a set of cognitive, strategic, and practical processes by which design concepts such as proposals for products, buildings, machines, and communications are developed.

Design Thinking includes context analysis, problem-solving and framing, creativity and solution generating, creative thinking, sketching and drawing, modeling and prototyping, testing and evaluating. Basic features of Design Thinking include the abilities to:

  • Manage and resolve ill-defined or ‘wicked’ problems
  • Find and implement solution-focused strategies
  • Utilise abductive and productive reasoning
  • Use non-verbal, graphic or spatial modelling media like sketching and prototyping.

How can you impact creativity with Design Thinking?

First of all, Design Thinking will help you discover that all people are creative. Design Thinking will help you acknowledge the inside voice that says “you’re not creative”.

It is often said, almost 90% of people genuinely believe they don’t have a creative bone in their body. They also think that matters related to creativity or innovation are someone else’s job.

Therefore, Design Thinking will help you discover your abundant resources of creativity. With Design Thinking, you will design, create, test, experiment, connect with real people, and most importantly, stretch yourself to do things differently and embrace your very human traits of imagination, creativity, and curiosity. That leads to creative solutions to real-world problems.

One way to awaken the creativity within your team is through collaboration. Each team member can develop creative confidence and be comfortable in bringing their ideas to life. One of the ways is to understand the importance of and rebuild the human skills of creativity, curiosity, and imagination.

Design Thinking focuses highly on interaction and collaboration. It quickly builds skills like empathy, rapid prototyping, and iteration—igniting curiosity about the problems you need to solve and taking your creativity and imagination to the next level.

Over time as you build your creative confidence, you can nurture others and help them develop their creativity and enthusiasm to explore, develop and express their Design Thinking skill set.

Design Thinking Positively Impacts Creativity

Key benefits of Design Thinking

Design Thinking gives you a process to solve problems creatively. It’s a way of solving problems with a mix of rational, data and research, emotions, feelings, and intuition that data can’t measure. Design Thinking considers the user front and center, driving a completely different way of thinking rather than looking at everything through your perception and judgment.

Why are people fearful of being creative?  Simon’s creativity workshops address the number one problem teams face that obstructs their own Creative Ogre.  The inner voice promotes doubt and tells you how uncreative you are.

Creativity should flow in all aspects of someone’s life, not just at work. When you live a more creative and open personal life, you will apply that same approach to work. To truly fulfill your creative potential, learn how to use your creativity at all times in your personal life or career as constant use will positively shift your thinking.

The world’s leading brands such as Google, Samsung, Apple, and GE all use the Design Thinking process and are adopted by top universities such as Stanford, Harvard, MIT, and d.school.

The phases of Design Thinking

According to d.school, the five phases of Design Thinking are:

•          Empathise with users

•          Define the end-user needs, problems, and find insights

•          Challenge assumptions and creating ideas for innovative solutions

•          Prototype–transform your ideas into solutions

•          Test solutions

Conclusion

The core of Design Thinking is its ability to improve products or systems by analyzing and understanding how users interact with them through research, reiteration, and fine-tuning to meet the needs of your client or target audience.

Who is Simon Banks?

Simon Banks is not your ordinary keynote speaker. Simon is an international keynote speaker that has delivered over 1300 events across the globe. Simon speaks at and emcees conferences and events and facilitates many innovations and design programs, including innovation hackathons, visual storytelling programs, design sprints, and creativity and Design Thinking workshops.

Positive Words Research – How Design Thinking Positively Impacts Creativity