Innovation and Design Thinking

Innovation and Design Thinking- (BIDTK158)

Module 2
Tools for Design Thinking
Real-Time design interaction capture and analysis, Enabling efficient collaboration in digital
space, Empathy for design, Collaboration in distributed Design

Tools for Design Thinking

Visualization
Visualization refers to any activity that takes information beyond text and numbers and into
images, maps, and videos.
Visualization is about using images. It’s not about drawing; it’s about visual thinking. It pushes
us beyond using words or language alone.
At its simplest level, visualization is about creating physical images and pictures and stepping
away from our dependence on numbers and text.
Visualization during design refers to the visual mental images used by the designer during the
design process.
Visualization enables the generation, interpretation, and manipulation of information through
spatial representation.
In other words, it is the mental pictures used by a designer when completing a design task.
In Design Thinking, the visualization tool is crucial. After identifying the problem, the second
step is to visualize how to solve the problem.
In this regard, visual thinking helps designers to imagine/create a niche product that is suitable
to the needs of the market it wishes to bring about a change in.
Journey (Experience) mapping
A journey map is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to
accomplish a goal.
In its most basic form, journey mapping starts by compiling a series of user actions into a
timeline.
Next, the timeline is fleshed out with user thoughts and emotions in order to create a narrative.
This narrative is condensed, ultimately leading to visualization.
It is an ethnographic research method that focuses on tracing the customer’s “journey” as he
or she interacts with an organization while in the process of receiving a service, with special
attention to emotional highs and lows.
Experience mapping is used with the objective of identifying needs that customers are often
unable to articulate.
Journey mapping maps are used Before a service, During a service and After a service of
activity to identify needs of a customer.

Elements of Journey Map

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Mind mapping
A mind map is a visual representation of hierarchical information that includes a central idea
surrounded by connected branches of associated topics
Mind Mapping, one of the key tools for designers, helps generate, structure, interlink, and
classify ideas to look for patterns around how the final design will come about.
Mind mapping is used to represent how ideas or other items are linked to a central idea and to
each other.
Mind maps are used to generate, visualize, structure and classify ideas to look for patterns and
insights that provide key design criteria.
Mind mapping steps
1. Begin with the main concept
2. Add branches to the main concept
3. Explore topics by adding more branches
4. Add images and colors
Components of a mind map are Branches, Arrows and \Central Idea

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Prototyping
This is the tool that turns your idea into material reality.
This technique allow us to make abstract new ideas tangible to potential partners and
customers.
Prototypes can also include storyboards, images, role-play, skits, etc.
Prototype encourage deep involvement by important stakeholders to provide feedback.
Storytelling
Storytelling is weaving together a story rather than just making a series of points.
It is a close relative of visualization — another way to make new ideas feel real and
compelling.
Among Textual, Aural, and Visual storytelling, Visual is actually the most compelling type of
story.

All good presentations — whether analytical or design-oriented — tell a persuasive story.

Like images, stories allow us to access emotions and emphasize experiences.
They add the richness of context and allow us to “sell” a problem as well as its solution.
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Value chain analysis
Value chain analysis is a means of evaluating each of the activities in a company’s value chain
to understand where opportunities for improvement lie.
Conducting a value chain analysis prompts to consider how each step adds or subtracts value
from the final product or service.
This, in turn, can help you realize some form of competitive advantage, such as: Cost
reduction and Product differentiation.
Value chain analysis examines how an organization interacts with value chain partners to
produce, market, and distribute new offerings.
Analysis of the value chain offers ways to create better value for customers along the chain
and uncovers important clues about partners’ capabilities and intentions.

Assumption testing
Assumption testing is a tool for bringing to the surface the key assumptions underlying the
attractiveness of a new business concept and using available data to assess the likelihood that
these assumptions are true. This approach acknowledges that any new business concept is
actually a hypothesis—a well-informed guess about what customers desire and what they will
value.

Rapid concept development

Rapid concept development is a tool for using the insights and design criteria we have
generated to develop new business opportunities. When people hear the term “innovation
process,” concept development may be the only thing they think of, and they often equate it
with brainstorming.
Rapid prototyping refers to the process of quickly creating a preliminary version or prototype
of a product, system, or application for the purpose of testing, evaluation, and feedback. The
primary goal of rapid prototyping is to accelerate the development cycle and facilitate iterative
improvements based on user input and testing results.
Order of repetitive and cumulative Rapid prototyping cycle is Build, test, see, refine

Co-creation
Co-creation is based on the belief that the users' presence is essential in the creative process,
as the users provide insight into what is valuable to them. At its core, this means that co-
creation is literally any process that brings together users and designers to work toward a
shared goal.
Case Study is an analysis of persons, groups, events, decisions, periods, policies, institutions
or other systems that are studied holistically by one or more methods.
A case study is a research strategy, an empirical inquiry, a descriptive and exploratory analysis
Real-Time design interaction capture and analysis
Communication plays a central role in collaborative activities such as engineering and design.
The success or failure of complex projects is considerably determined by how design teams
communicate and interact to request information, negotiate, generate ideas, make decisions,
or resolve conflicts.
A strong need exists for design teams and researchers alike to be able to inspect and observe
team communication early and during project runtime.

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Acknowledging communication as an influential factor that determines team performance,
communication behavior should be made measurable in order to establish deeper insight into
what characteristics are beneficial or detrimental for success.
The augmented virtualization and geographic dispersion of team environments raises demand
for an adaptive, computer-supported design research methodology, which takes the increasing
role of online communication into account.
Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) School of Design Thinking, have developed computational data
collection and analysis techniques to improve the efficiency and range of observations in
technology-enabled design spaces.
Using this software, team is able to capture and evaluate complex characteristics of online
interactions in distributed design teams at quasi real-time.
The combination of new techniques along with quantifiable performance metrics provides a
stable foundation for real-time design team diagnostics.
Enabling efficient collaboration in digital space
Design Thinking is an approach for innovative problem solving.
A typical characteristic of this approach involves multidisciplinary teams and the extensive use
of tangible tools such as sticky notes, whiteboards and all kinds of prototyping materials.
When team members try to collaborate from separate locations their traditional way of working
becomes nearly impossible.
A number of computer supported collaborative work systems exist, but there still lacks
acceptable support for teams applying methods like Design Thinking.
Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) School of Design Thinking developed Tele-Board system an
electronic whiteboard software suite which allows users to write digital sticky notes on tablet
PCs, smartphones or directly on a whiteboard.
Users can move the created sticky notes, cluster them and write or draw on the whiteboard.
This digital implementation also includes additional features previously unrealizable by physical
tools, such as resizing sticky notes or changing their color.
All of the mentioned actions are synchronized automatically and propagated to every
connected whiteboard client.
To facilitate a real interactive session it included a video conference among the distributed
team.
The translucent whiteboard can be displayed as an overlay on top of a full screen video of the
other team members.
This setup lets everyone see what the others are doing, where they are pointing along with
their gestures and facial expressions.
This unique setup enables regionally separated team members to simultaneously manipulate
artifacts while seeing each other’s gestures and facial expressions.
Tele-Board system is a good basis to further enable collaborative creativity across distances
while retaining the essential feeling of working together.
Hardware required:
Computer connected to an interactive whiteboard one pair for each location
Additionally, personal devices should be connected wirelessly for writing post-its, e.g. a chat
client, a tablet PC or a Smartphone, XP pen.

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Webcam, microphones and speakers for each location
Empathy for design
Empathic design is a user-centered design approach that pays attention to the user's feelings
toward a product.
Empathic design relies on observation of consumers as opposed to traditional market research
which relies on consumer inquiry with the intention to avoid possible biases in surveys and
questions, and minimizes the chance that consumers will provide false information.
The foundation of empathic design is observation and the goal to identify latent customer
needs in order to create products that the customers don't even know they desire, or, in some
cases, solutions that customers have difficulty envisioning due to lack of familiarity with the
possibilities offered by new technologies or because they are locked in a specific mindset.
In empathic design techniques, users are almost as involved in product design as designers
and engineers.
Collaboration in distributed Design
A distributed design is a design with one or more external components referenced into the
assembly.
Distributed designs enable multiple project members to edit different components in the
assembly at the same time.
As each project member edits components in context, the entire assembly updates to reflect
their changes.
You can see who is editing each component, update component versions as project members
save them, and ensure everyone is always working with the latest version of each component
in the assembly.

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