
Creative Santa Fe strategists John Ravitch and Gray Garmon gave a rousing, hands-on introduction to design thinking and its applications at UNM Rainforest Innovations in Albuquerque last Friday, to a full house. Here are 6 key takeaways from the workshop.
- You don’t need to be a designer to employ human-centered design (HCD). HCD simply means putting real people at the center of the development process for a product or service, enabling you to better serve your customers’ needs and ultimately improve their lives.
- The five mindsets of design thinking are collaboration, empathy, synthesis, testing/prototyping, and storytelling; they can be employed in parallel and across every aspect of business / organizational development.
- The most important action you can take when starting a business or looking to meet a need in your community is to LISTEN; prioritize good questions over “right” answers.
- Successful entrepreneurs focus on experiences, not things; verbs not nouns. For instance, a chair maker is redesigning the way we sit, rest, and convene.
- Launch to learn – once you launch your business or product, that’s when the real learning begins.
- Getting into the design thinking mindset, and harnessing its tactics, can be a gradual process – and it’s not rocket science!
Additional resources around design thinking can be found here:
- “Design Thinking Defined” (Ideo)
- “How Do You Explain Design Thinking to Non-Designers?” (Ideo Blog)
- “Prototyping: You’re Halfway There” (Gray Garmon on Medium)
- “A Virtual Crash Course in Design Thinking” (Stanford d.school)
- Introduction to Human Centered Design (Acumen Academy)
- Video: “What Is Human Centered Design?” (Design Kit by Ideo)
- Human Centered Design Case Studies (Design Kit by Ideo)
- Video: “How to Build Your Creative Confidence” (TED)
- “Why Design Thinking Works” (Harvard Business Review)