Design thinking is a planning approach focused on creativity, innovation, teamwork, and prototyping, all elements I have worked with and am truly passionate about. It all starts by teaming up with a group of people who are very different from you. Having people with diverse backgrounds, their own life experiences, and rich contributions from what they have lived is what feeds inventive ideas that come from unexpected places. Define the problem you want to solve and start thinking outside the box. Identify the needs and the people involved in that problem. All of this can be done with just pen and paper to map out the flows. Looking at the problem, the people involved, and the possible activities around it, start generating ideas without thinking about technical, financial, or scientific limits. Most of us believe that focus means looking at a fixed point through a magnifying glass, but the truth is that the best focus often means looking at everything around that point.
Everything around it is a possibility. Image from the video “The Creative Zone” by SoSonia on the SoulPancake channel. The more ideas and the more people involved in this brainstorming, the better! Once you have the ideas, vote together to pick the 3 best. Think about how feasible each one is and whether it will truly solve the problem. Once you have chosen the best one, move on to the prototype, validation with the audience, and refinement. Creating these representative models makes it possible to show how a product or service should work in practice and to validate hypotheses with users. By building this demonstration, the team clarifies and narrows down its ideas, in a continuous exchange of the creative ideas brought from the previous stages. When we are looking in the right places, a leap in the dark can be the first step toward the light. And that light, more often than not, is innovation.
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