source: https://youtu.be/a7sEoEvT8l8

What is Design Thinking?

Design thinking is a process for creative problem solving.¹ It is very practical in tackling complex problems by understanding the human needs. The problem is reframed in human-centric ways by creating ideas in brainstorming and adopting hands-on approach in prototyping and testing.²

1. Kelley, David. “Design Thinking.” IDEO U, IDEO,https://www.ideou.com/pages/design-thinking#ldt.

2. Dam, Rikke and Siang Teo. “5 Stages in the Design Thinking Process.” The Interaction Design Foundation, IDF, September 2018, https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/5-stages-in-the-design-thinking-process.

Create music with mobile
app

The app had been developed by the university students for local competition. When they became one of the finalists, they were sent to Europe for a contest. Now the app is on app stores for sales. It has introduced a new way to create music and you don’t have to be a professional composer.
Watch it now!

Invisible
wallet

“Mosi Mosi” wallet is created and made for the people with visually impaired or partially impaired. It facilitates to differentiate the Hong Kong currency notes other than the embossed braille and tactile lines. The project was first funded through crowdfunding and succeeded. It is great to see the possibilities to improve the quality of life for some people.
Watch it now!

Automatic homework collection

The primary students are making a prototype with the knowledge of Minecraft to show the efficient way of collecting and delivering the homework. It is amazing that they are able to spot out the issue and provide the solution. With the prototype, they show us how it processes. It is the invention to improve our quality of school life.
Enjoy the reading in Chinese!

Crowd-sourcing platform

Collaction is the crowd-sourcing platform for community projects. Other than looking for funding support, you could seek for materials, volunteers and venues. Everyone in the community has a chance to make contributions.
Go and read their sharing in Chinese.

Watch it now!

Whack-A-Can
Recycle Machine

Come and see how to make the recycle more fun! Watch it now!

Sanitation in Cambodia

We might think a toilet is the basic sanitation facility in our daily life. Do you ever think it is a great luxury to the rural habitants? Jeff shows us what’s his initiative and how he prepares himself to face the culture and economic differences with his empathy. Watch it now!

Design Thinking and Journalism

Using the tools of design thinking, the journalists could redesign the story cycle and bring the involvement of public from the start of story to the end of it.
Enjoy the reading!

Dementia
Dog

Now we are familiar with what the service dog is in Hong Kong when more guide dogs are trained for the visually impaired or partially impaired people. Shall we explore more what the service dog could contribute to our community?
To know more!

Solar Demi,
A Liter Of Light

Innovation and design do not always require big bucks to show. Come and see how to use the plastic bottle, water and bleach to brighten up the residents living in the slums. Watch it now!

Doodle
Jump Stairs

We are always encouraged to walk up one floor and down two floors for our health benefit. It could be also playful to walk up and down the staris. Come and see how the students make it! Watch it now!

Empathize Mode

WHAT is the empathize mode?

Empathy is the foundation of a human-centered design process. To empathize, you:
- Observe.  View users and their behavior in the context of their lives.
- Engage.   Interact with and interview users through both scheduled and short ‘intercept’ encounters.
- Immerse.  Experience what your user experiences.

WHY empathize

As a human-centered designer you need to understand the people for whom you are designing. The problems you are trying to solve are rarely your own—they are those of particular users; in order to design for your users, you must build empathy for who they are and what is important to them.

Method - Assume A Beginner's Mindset

WHY

We all carry our experiences, understanding, and expertise with us. These aspects of yourself are incredibly valuable assets to bring to the design challenge – but at the right time, and with intentionality. Your assumptions may be misconceptions and stereotypes, and can restrict the amount of real empathy you can build. Assume a beginner’s mindset in order to put aside these biases, so that you can approach a design challenge with fresh eyes.

HOW

Don’t judge. Just observe and engage users without the influence of value judgments upon their actions, circumstances, decisions, or “issues.”
Question everything. Question even (and especially) the things you think you already understand. Ask questions to learn about how the user perceives the world. Think about how a 4-year-old asks “Why?” about everything. Follow up an answer to one “why” with a second “why.”
Be truly curious. Strive to assume a posture of wonder and curiosity, especially in circumstances that seem either familiar or uncomfortable.
Find patterns. Look for interesting threads and themes that emerge across interactions with users.
Listen. Really. Lose your agenda and let the scene soak into your psyche. Absorb what users say to you, and how they say it, without thinking about the next thing you’re going to say.

Define Mode

WHAT is the define mode?

The define mode is when you unpack and synthesize your empathy findings into compelling needs and insights, and scope a specific and meaningful challenge. It is a mode of “focus” rather than “flaring.”

Two goals of the define mode are to develop a deep understanding of your users and the design space and, based on that understanding, to come up with an actionable problem statement: your point of view.

Your point of view (POV) should be a guiding statement that focuses on specific users, and insights and needs that you uncovered during the empathize mode. More than simply defining the problem to work on, your point of view is your unique design vision that you crafted based on your discoveries during your empathy work.

Understanding the meaningful challenge to address and the insights that you can leverage in your design work is fundamental to creating a successful solution.

WHY define

The define mode is critical to the design process because it explicitly expresses the problem you are striving to address through your efforts. Often, in order to be truly generative, you must first reframe the challenge based on new insights you have gained through your design work. This reframed problem statement can then be used as a solution-generating springboard.

As a test, a good point of view (POV) is one that:
• Provides focus and frames the problem
• Inspires your team
• Provides a reference for evaluating competing ideas
• Empowers team members to make decisions in response to the high-level goals of the team
• Fuels brainstorms by suggesting “how might we” statements
• Captures the hearts and minds of people you meet
• Saves you from the impossible task of developing solution concepts that are all things to all people
• You revisit and reformulate as you learn by doing
• Guides your innovation efforts

Method - Point-Of-View Madlib

WHY

A point-of-view (POV) is your reframing of a design challenge into an actionable problem statement that will launch you into generative ideation. A POV Madlib provides a scaffolding to develop your POV. A good POV will allow you to ideate in a directed manner, by creating How-Might-We (HMW) questions based on your POV. Most of all, your POV captures your design vision – your responsibility and opportunity as a designer is to discover and articulate the meaningful challenge.

HOW

Use the following madlib to capture and harmonize three elements of a POV: user, need, and insight.

[ USER] needs to [USER’S NEED] because [SURPRISING INSIGHT]

1. Use a whiteboard or scratch paper to try out a number of options, playing with each variable and the combinations of them. The need and insight should flow from your unpacking and synthesis work.
2. Remember, ‘needs’ should be verbs, and the insight typically should not simply be a reason for the need, but rather a synthesized statement that you can leverage in designing a solution.
3. Keep it sexy (it should intrigue people) and hold the tension in your POV.

Ideate Mode

WHAT is the ideate mode?

Ideate is the mode of your design process in which you aim to generate radical design alternatives. Mentally it represents a process of “going wide” in terms of concepts and outcomes—it is a mode of “ﬂaring” rather than “focus.”

The goal of ideation is to explore a wide solution space - both a large quantity of ideas and a diversity among those ideas. From this vast depository of ideas you can build prototypes to test with users.

Regardless of what ideation method you use, the fundamental principle of ideation is to be cognizant of when you and your team are generating ideas and when you are evaluating ideas – typically keeping these two tasks separate, and only mixing the two intentionally.

WHY ideate

You ideate in order to transition from identifying problems into exploring solutions for your users.

Various forms of ideation are leveraged to:
•  Step beyond obvious solutions and thus increase the innovation potential of your solution set
•  Harness the collective perspectives and strengths of your teams •  Uncover unexpected areas of exploration
•  Create ﬂuency (volume) and ﬂexibility (variety) in your innovation options
•  Get obvious solutions out of your heads, and drive your team beyond them

Method - Design Principles

WHY

Design principles are strategies to solve a design challenge independent of a speciﬁc solution. You, as the designer, articulate these principles, translating your ﬁndings – such as needs and insights – into design directives. These principles give you a format to capture abstracted, but actionable, guidelines for solutions, and communicate your design intentions to others.

HOW

Develop a list of statements – using imperative phrasing – that outlines essential guidelines to create successful design solutions. The guidelines should distill your understanding of the design space and user. That is, you deﬁne what would be the meaningful challenge to solve, based on your empathy work, and then create the design principles to outline what’s necessary to achieve that success.

You develop design principles in a number of ways. You can translate your point of view, needs, and insights into design principles by stating your ﬁndings in terms of solutions rather than the user, while maintaining the focus on the user-centered needs and insights you discovered.

For example, a user’s “need to feel instrumental in creating a gift” could become a design directive that the solution should “involve the user in creating the ﬁnal gift outcome.” You can also back out design principles from potential solutions that you and users ﬁnd compelling. Ask yourself what aspects of the solution resonated with users, and those aspects may be abstracted and formed into design principles.

Design principles should be statements independent from the speciﬁc implementation – i.e. useful guidelines regardless of the particular solution. However, it is helpful to identify the broad solution context to help you develop design principles.

For example, you may know that you are designing a physical space – that would help you understand how to phrase your principles. In another case, you might know you are creating a gift – but not know whether it will be physical, digital, or experiential. Still, that context would allow you articulate the principle mentioned above to “involve the gift-giver in creating the ﬁnal outcome.”

How to brainstorm

Write down clearly what you are brainstorming. Using a How-Might-We (HMW) question is a great way to frame a brainstorm (e.g. HMW give each shopper a personal checkout experience?). (See more on the “’How Might We’” Questions”) There are at least two ways to capture the ideas of a brainstorming:
1.  Scribe: the scribe legibly and visually captures on the board ideas that team members call out. It is very important to capture every idea, regardless of your own feelings about each idea.
2.  All-in: Each person will write down each of his or her ideas as they come, and verbally share it with the group. It is great to do this with post-it notes, so you can write your idea and then stick it on the board.

Follow and (nicely) enforce the brainstorming rules – they are intended to increase your creative output.

Prototype Mode

WHAT is the prototype mode?

Prototyping is getting ideas and explorations out of your head and into the physical world. A prototype can be anything that takes a physical form – be it a wall of post-it notes, a role-playing activity, a space, an object, an interface, or even a storyboard. The resolution of your prototype should be commensurate with your progress in your project. In early explorations keep your prototypes rough and rapid to allow yourself to learn quickly and investigate a lot of diﬀerent possibilities.

Prototypes are most successful when people (the design team, the user, and others) can experience and interact with them. What you learn from those interactions can help drive deeper empathy, as well as shape successful solutions.

WHY prototype

WHY do we prototype Traditionally prototyping is thought of as a way to test functionality. But prototyping is used for many reasons, including these (non-mutually-exclusive) categories:

•  Empathy gaining: Prototyping is a tool to deepen your understanding of the design space and your user, even at a pre-solution phase of your project.
•  Exploration: Build to think. Develop multiple solution options.
•  Testing: Create prototypes (and develop the context) to test and reﬁne solutions with users.
•  Inspiration: Inspire others (teammates, clients, customers, investors) by showing your vision.

Goals Of Prototyping

Many of the goals of prototyping are shared across all four of the above categories. We prototype to:
Learn. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousand pictures.
Solve disagreements. Prototyping is a powerful tool that can eliminate ambiguity, assist in ideation, and reduce miscommunication.
Start a conversation. A prototype can be a great way to have a diﬀerent kind of conversation with users.
Fail quickly and cheaply. Creating quick and dirty prototypes allows you to test a number of ideas without investing a lot of time and money up front.
Manage the solution-building process. Identifying a variable to explore encourages you to break a large problem down into smaller, testable chunks.

Method - Prototype To decide

WHY

Often during the design process, it’s unclear how to proceed forward, particularly when team members have mixed opinions. A prototype can frequently resolve team disagreements and help a team decide which design direction to pursue without having to compromise. The best way to resolve team conﬂicts about design elements is to prototype and evaluate them with users. Making and evaluating a prototype informs design decisions. If an idea has been prototyped and passes muster with the group, it’s a good sign that the idea is worth pursuing further.

HOW

Staying as low-resolution as possible, develop models of potential design candidates. Be sure to distill the design problem down to discrete elements so you can isolate and be mindful of the variable you are testing. Then try out the prototypes within your team, outsider peers, or, even better, take your prototypes to users and get their feedback.

Test Mode

WHAT is the test mode?

Testing is the chance to get feedback on your solutions, reﬁne solutions to make them better, and continue to learn about your users. The test mode is an iterative mode in which you place your low-resolution artifacts in the appropriate context of the user’s life. Prototype as if you know you’re right, but test as if you know you’re wrong.

WHY test

To reﬁne your prototypes and solutions. Testing informs the next iterations of prototypes. Sometimes this means going back to the drawing board.
To learn more about your user. Testing is another opportunity to build empathy through observation and engagement—it often yields unexpected insights.
To test and reﬁne your POV. Sometimes testing reveals that not only did you not get the solution right, but also that you have failed to frame the problem correctly.

Method - Feedback Capture Grid

WHY

Use a feedback capture grid to facilitate real-time capture, or post-mortem unpacking, of feedback – times when presenter-critiquer interaction is anticipated. This can be used either to give feedback on progress within the design team or to capture a user’s feedback about a prototype. You use the grid because it helps you be systematic about feedback, and more intentional about capturing thoughts in the four diﬀerent areas.

HOW

1. Section oﬀ a blank page or whiteboard into quadrants.
2. Draw a plus in the upper left quadrant, a delta in the upper right quadrant, a question mark in the lower left quadrant, and a light bulb in the lower right quadrant.

It's pretty simple, really. Fill the four quadrants with your or a user’s feedback. Things one likes or ﬁnds notable, place in the upper left; constructive criticism goes in the upper right; questions that the experience raised go in the lower left; ideas that the experience or presentation spurred go in the lower right. If you are giving feedback yourself, strive to give input in each quadrant (especially the upper two: both “likes” and “wishes”).

Design Thinking