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Design thinking is in existence for a while now and has been sold as a magic pill to the companies faced with disruption to drive cultural and business transformation, and to foster innovation. While out-of-the-box thinking and applying principles of human-centered design are the keys, it’s also equally important to embrace a holistic approach that takes into consideration the technological advancements and changes in the user lifestyle.

What’s the buzz all about?

David Kelly, the founder of IDEO and father of Design Thinking, defines it as
“a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.”

The state of Design Thinking

The design thinking approach has been embraced by pretty much all major brands as they are moving from Design Aware to being Design Mature organization.

The design thinking process emphasizes on the divergent views to the different problem statements identified, this in turn increases the chances of stumbling upon new ideas. It requires stakeholders to face customer’s frustrations by putting themselves in their customer’s shoes. This helps them in developing empathy and to understand their pain points better.

The collective expertise of the multidisciplinary teams working on the research findings brings diversity to the table. Another stepping stone is the practice of “fail early and often” approach by creating prototypes and getting feedback from actual customers, which ultimately result in products that customers want.

What’s next?

Businesses are making great strides by implementing design thinking approach to move beyond analysis and embrace synthesis. However, the conventional approach of design thinking is not an elixir that can transform companies into creative powerhouses.

Design thinking needs a backing of modern technologies such as Big Data, AI, and Machine Learning to craft powerful data backed USE CASES and a thoughtful design that lead to innovation.

Design Thinking + Analytics

While Big Data divulges what’s happening, design thinking research helps you in understanding the context and behavior. Analytics and machine learning algorithms help you uncover the quantitative insights through patterns. Whereas the user research allows you to connect the dots and look for innovation opportunities. The amalgamation of these qualitative and quantitative insights results in richer and meaningful solutions.

Insights powered by algorithms and interpretation by collaborative teams unearth innovation and inspire possibilities for the future. The immense power of data when combined with the human-centered design result in action-oriented processes.

How can design thinking make AI more human?

It’s hard to miss the buzz generated by Artificial Intelligence. AI is emerging as a crucial factor in designing interfaces as it’s difficult to imagine the next generation products without smart assistants or conversational interfaces such as Siri or Google Assistant. Although AI-powered interfaces are quickly replacing the autonomous systems, the lack of human touch is hampering their popularity.

Design thinking boosts the human element and empathy factor in the human-machine and machine-machine interaction. It can make conversational interfaces simplified and smarter by crafting better use cases. Moreover, it improves the contextual awareness and natural language processing (NLP) of conversational interfaces. The human element results in better relationships between AI and humans.

Making things that people want

Design thinking is a journey from making people want your products to creating products that people need. It’s driving the next wave of business transformation that’s fueled by empathy and user-centric research. The rise of emerging technologies will not block this wave, but converge to achieve mass market success.

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