DESIGN THINKING

Phuoc D, Nguyen

Oster (2008) defined, “Design thinking is generally defined as a process for developing numerous practical alternate solutions to specific problems or issues fully using the individual and group capabilities and ideas of employees, customers, vendors, and the general public.” (p. 109). Creativity requires great method and thought lack of proper thinking, and scientific approaches that ideas and prototypes cannot be complete. Startup companies and organizations need innovation applications that they have often used design thinking. Plattner (2010) noted that to create meaningful innovations, you need to know your users and care about their lives; he describes the design thinking process as including steps of empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping, and testing. The first step is empathy, which means that the innovators must understand and feel customers’ pain points and challenges. After empathy, it is important to define and name the problem explicitly based on the user’s knowledge. Having gone through these two steps, the third step is to create the idea; starting from ideas that are not based on research, understanding, or empathy of the user’s problem resulting in product status that creates or does not solve specific problems or forgetting to identify specific users for research.

According to Oster (2009), through deepened intimacy with customers, employees may continually share prototypes with consumers to gauge their response and seed new product ideas. (p. 222). Once innovators have gone through the three steps above they go to the steps of prototype and test. This process does not stop. If the test fails and the test is not successful, it is up to the team to come back to the beginning to find out and fix issues to create a new idea, make a sample, and test again.