About design thinking
Design thinking originated in the 1960s and is in essence a human-centered problem-solving approach. It helps to align stakeholders around an empathy for users’ challenges and recently gained traction in many organizations. By harnessing an iterative process of divergent and convergent steps – the so-called classic ‘Double Diamond’ model – it involves stakeholders and users in the journey of solving the right problem in the right way.
More fundamentally, design thinking helps brands navigate ambiguity and complexity, by deriving patterns from complex data sets to define problems to solve. It also fosters interdepartmental collaboration and ensures consumer centricity of solutions at every step. Like communities, it helps to make your brand VUCA-proof, not by relying on the past to extrapolate to the future, but by ensuring through exploratory research that you are ‘doing the right thing’, before ‘doing it right’ by embedding validation research.
Better Together
Traditional design thinking relied heavily on in-person ethnography and multiple stages of F2F workshops, in-person product or UX tests. As the process often felt long and laborious, it wasn’t unusual for people to start applying the design-thinking badge to any project, while ignoring the rigor of a full ‘Double Diamond’ approach. So, we needed a solution that allows to practice design thinking in a more efficient and scalable way. That is where insight communities come in. We started to explore how to apply design-thinking principles to clients’ insight community activities and research roadmaps.