Ideation: Third step of the Design Thinking Process
Design Thinking is a design methodology that provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It’s extremely useful in tackling complex problems that are ill-defined or unknown, by understanding the human needs involved, by re-framing the problem in human-centric ways, by creating many ideas in brainstorming sessions, and by adopting a hands-on approach in prototyping and testing. Understanding these five stages of Design Thinking will empower anyone to apply the Design Thinking methods in order to solve complex problems that occur around us — in our companies, in our countries, and even on the scale of our planet.1
Source: https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/5-stages-in-the-design-thinking-process
Design Thinking tackles complex problems through 5 main steps:
1. Empathizing: Involves consulting experts to find out more about the area of concern through observation, engagement and empathy. This stage involves gaining a deeper understanding of people, their motivations, and experiences.
2. Defining: Re-framing and defining the problem in human-centric ways. The team will gather ideas to establish features, functions, and any other elements that will allow them to solve the problems.
3. Ideating: Producing a number of ideas in ideation sessions.
4. Prototyping: inexpensive, scaled down versions of the product or specific features found within the product, so they can investigate the problem solutions generated during the ideation phase.
5. Testing: Developing a prototype/solution to the problem.
In order to be able to solve problems and innovate new solutions, we usually pass through those five stages. Our focus will be on ideation. “Ideation is the mode of the design process in which you concentrate on idea generation. Mentally it represents a process of “going wide” in terms of concepts and outcomes. Ideation provides both the fuel and also the source material for building prototypes and getting innovative solutions into the hands of your users.” – D.school, an Introduction to Design Thinking PROCESS GUIDE.
During the design phase, the main aim of the Ideation stage is to use creativity and innovation that develop solutions. By expanding the solution space, the design team will be able to look beyond the usual methods of solving problems in order to find better, more elegant, and satisfying solutions to problems that affect a user's experience of a product.2
1https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/5-stages-in-the-design-thinking-process
2https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/stage-3-in-the-design-thinking-process-ideate
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