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Human-centered design (design thinking)is a creative approach to problem-solving with an emphasis on empathy. It begins with finding the unmet needs of the users you are designing for and ends with a solution for that individual. This process includes generating hundreds of ideas, rapid prototyping, testing, and sharing your innovative solutions.
"Empathy is the centerpiece of a human-centered design process. The Empathize mode is the work you do to understand people, within the context of your design challenge. It is your effort to understand the way they do things and why, their physical and emotional needs, how they think about world, and what is meaningful to them."- An Introduction to Design Thinking PROCESS GUIDE
Our team conducted various interviews with various undergraduate and graduate engineering students, professors, and graduate school deans. Below, you can find the discussion guides we followed, striking interview quotes, and emergent themes.
If you would like to read the transcribed interviews, you can read them here.
Extreme User ug1-AA
Extreme User ug1-AA
*For privacy reasons, we changed ug1-aa's name and undergraduate university
Sebby* is an engineer from Mexico* who recently graduated from Cal Poly Slo*. He plans to return to the same company he interned at the summer before and will begin working in August (giving himself a 3-month break since school). He shares with us the racial tensions he experienced in College and his decision process for choosing industry work over academia.
Listen to Part I of our podcast with Sebby.
Listen to Part I of our podcast with Sebby.
- Part I delves into the racial tensions Sebby faced in college
Listen to Part II of our podcast with Sebby.
Listen to Part II of our podcast with Sebby.
- Part II explores why Sebby chooses to pursue industry work over academia at a graduate program.
The goal of the Define mode is to craft a meaningful and actionable problem statement – this is what we call a point-of-view. This should be a guiding statement that focuses on insights and needs of a particular user, or composite character.2
We reframed our insights into How Might We questions, turning these challenges into opportunities for design. This format of question asking is crucial because it suggests that a solution is possible and because they offer you the chance to answer them in a variety of ways.
"A properly framed How Might We doesn’t suggest a particular solution, but gives you the perfect frame for innovative thinking."- An Introduction to Design Thinking PROCESS GUIDE
"A properly framed How Might We doesn’t suggest a particular solution, but gives you the perfect frame for innovative thinking."- An Introduction to Design Thinking PROCESS GUIDE
To uncover the barriers of transformative research at graduate schools, our team generated 51 themes that successfully captured the mindsets of our users. Then, we generated 101 How Might We Questions to prepare for our ideation process.
The Google Sheet below features the details of our foam core board. Make sure to look through the "THEMES" and "HMW" sub-sheets to understand how we approached the Define mode of our research.
Step 3: Ideate
Step 3: Ideate
In the previous step, the Define mode, we determined specific challenge to take on. In this step, the Ideate mode, we are focusing on creating solutions to address that challenge. 1
"You ideate in order to transition from identifying problems to creating solutions for your users. Ideation is your chance to combine the understanding you have of the problem space and people you are designing for with your imagination to generate solution concepts. Particularly early in a design project, ideation is about pushing for a widest possible range of ideas from which you can select, not simply finding a single, best solution. The determination of the best solution will be discovered later, through user testing and feedback." - An Introduction to Design Thinking PROCESS GUIDE
"You ideate in order to transition from identifying problems to creating solutions for your users. Ideation is your chance to combine the understanding you have of the problem space and people you are designing for with your imagination to generate solution concepts. Particularly early in a design project, ideation is about pushing for a widest possible range of ideas from which you can select, not simply finding a single, best solution. The determination of the best solution will be discovered later, through user testing and feedback." - An Introduction to Design Thinking PROCESS GUIDE
A prototype is meant to convey an idea and answer a question. For human-centered designers, Rapid Prototyping is an incredibly effective way to make ideas tangible, to learn through making, and to quickly get key feedback from the people you’re designing for.
Because prototypes are meant only to convey an idea, we quickly moved through a variety of iterations. Rapid Prototyping allows us to build just enough to test our ideas, answer questions, and get the feedback we need.5
Here is a comic that summarizes our findings:
1 d.school (n.d.). An Introduction to Design Thinking PROCESS GUIDE [PDF]. Institute of Design at Stanford. p2
2 Brainstorm Rules. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.designkit.org/methods/28
3 d.school (n.d.). An Introduction to Design Thinking PROCESS GUIDE [PDF]. Institute of Design at Stanford. p2
4 d.school (n.d.). An Introduction to Design Thinking PROCESS GUIDE [PDF]. Institute of Design at Stanford.p3
5 d.school (n.d.). An Introduction to Design Thinking PROCESS GUIDE [PDF]. Institute of Design at Stanford.p4
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