Change By Design

Change By Design makes you a better problem solver at every aspect of life by outlining the design thinking process that companies can use to innovate and improve.

Most of us consider innovation to simply involve the invention of something new. It’s almost as if these two terms are synonymous. But this view makes it hard to get into the intricacies of the process that make it enjoyable and life-changing for mankind.

For that, we need design thinking, which incorporates all aspects at once. When building a product, you’ll go through different phases multiple times. Instead of seeing them as separate and individual, look at all three together.

We begin with the inspiration phase. This starts with thinking. It’s that moment in the shower when the lightning bolt hits and you begin considering the solution and its opportunities.

Next comes the ideation part of the journey, in which you look more to testing and developing the idea to make it even better.

Implementation is the last step. This is when you take your final product and introduce it to the world.

Although the initial thought is to move smoothly through one phase at a time, in reality, no project does that. Most go through each part multiple times even! This is why design thinking is so powerful because it accounts for this from the beginning.

To make sure to integrate all components, keep feasibility, viability, and desirability in mind at each step. The Nintendo Wii is a good example of this. It was feasible and viable because it worked well, and it’s immersive experience made customers desire it.

I used to love playing with LEGOs. I would spend hours constructing sets and building my own creations. My ideas for new combinations of pieces always went best when just started building and then figured it out as I went. But today we tend to spend too long in the planning phase. It may take years for some projects to get to prototyping. Thinking is important, but when you can do it while building your model, that’s when the real magic happens. It makes getting results for what works and what doesn’t a whole lot faster. When you build first and think as you go, you get more ideas for how to improve the thing as you go. Many limitations and opportunities are hidden until you can actually see a mock-up of the product in real life. That’s why you need to start prototyping from the start! It might look simple and ugly at first, but the benefits are worth it. The initial prototype of Apple’s first mouse, for example, was only a plastic butter dish and the ball from a roll-on…