7 Benefits of a Design Thinking Workshop
Design thinking is a methodology from the designer’s tool kit to solve complex problems and find solutions. It revolves around understanding the users by the process of questioning the problem, assumptions, and implications.
At its best, design thinking is an iterative and agile process to design and build with a human-centered approach and experimentation by empathizing, ideating, prototyping, testing. By trying out new concepts and ideas design thinking dramatically improves the outcome.
According to the Design Management Institute, companies that are led by design such as Apple, Nike, Pepsi, Proctor & Gamble, and IBM have exceeded the performance of the S&P 500 by over 200%. This is evidence that “thinking like a designer” is crucial to creating successful products and services.
What is a design thinking workshop?
A Design thinking workshop is an ideation session run in groups and teams. It helps everyone get the best of design methodologies. In a workshop, all practices come together to understand users’ pain points to create rapid ideas.
Workshop culture fosters empathy and genuine discussion of ideas in a human-centric way.
Design thinking workshop is based on the human-centric framework and build around the design thinking process. It involves steps of creative and collaborative exercises that help a group of people to align on certain pain points to come up with testable solutions and can be applied to all phases of designing a product.
This workshop is conducted at the beginning of the project and during the pre-design phase.
How to run a successful design thinking workshop?
Pre-documenting the workshop course and asking interesting questions can help participants discover more possibilities and ideas. The first step here is to set up a document about the steps involved in the workshop, carefully planning the participates their challenges and the structure of the conversation.
The success of a design thinking workshop also depends on how successfully it is conducted. That success can be measured by three basic parameters -
- How interactive was the session?
- Did all participants have an opportunity to contribute?
- What is the quality of ideas generated?
Each participant should understand the process and benefits of the workshop. Communicating how the workshop incorporates ideas is of utmost importance. Each participant should be enabled by communicating the complete agenda and making aware of the tools to be used during the final workshop.
The complete success of the workshop relies on well-defined questions and facilitation that ensures participation from moderators, stakeholders, and every other participant. The succession ensures that everyone including the stakeholders understands users’ on a deeper level.
What are the key benefits of a design thinking workshop?
There are several ways in which a design thinking workshop benefits the process of designing. It is a great way to create an interdisciplinary collaboration. It creates a space for the productive sharing of ideas and the building of innovative solutions.
A design thinking workshop embraces specific attitudes that characterize the design profession and helps people from non-creative backgrounds to use the designer’s tool kit. It is a process that translates the users’ pain points into a single clear problem statement that everyone can understand to solve complex problems and reach desirable solutions.
Participants share ideas and build on them collaboratively. It helps teams develop much-improved respect and understanding of each other’s range of skills and how each of them brings great value by more collaboration and co-creation.
Design thinking workshop creates a natural flow of ideas. It emphasizes overcoming preconception and fixation on solutions. It challenges assumptions, discussions around what will or won’t work reducing the risk of repetition of the process.
Design thinking workshops help to deliver outputs in a reduced amount of time, including — Initial design alignment with the stakeholders and other practices. It helps to create a deeper understanding of the users and effectively reduces the feedback loop, development, and testing time which in the long run saves efforts and costs.
Design thinking workshops are engaging and fun sessions that bring the teams together from different practices and provide an unbiased opportunity for everyone to understand the problem and work together towards common goals.
The questions and ideas documented during the workshop are documented in a detailed shareable report which helps to understand the users and drive the entire product’s design and development journey.
Design thinking workshop helps to create outcomes based on creative thinking and analytical decision-making. This helps to create user experiences that truly resonate with the users and deliver high business impact.
The workshop created on the principles of design thinking help to approach the problem with a designer’s mindset helping everyone unlock everyone’s creative potential.
Wrap up
The design thinking workshop lays out the groundwork for the whole journey of product designing. Its organization-wide adoption and stakeholder involvement help in ideal innovation through a linear and structured process. This results in problem finding preceding problem solving, understanding the human needs, idea generation, and experimentation. Design thinking workshop helps participants collaborate in a continuously iterative process that improves and changes with every project’s needs.
Originally published at https://www.qed42.com.
