How can we learn Design Thinking (DT)?

A challenging question which I came across with that in design thinking’s workshop was about the appropriate way to learn design thinking. I have learned one of the best methods for learning to be a good design thinker is to reflect upon our personal actions, values, and behaviours and intentionally try to push ourselves outside the business-minded comfort zone. Indeed, DT requires not just learning a skill set and procedure, but also a set of mindset shifts would be needed.

The DT process moves through five different stages:

• Empathizing with those group of users who you are trying to solve their specific problem and designing for them.
• Defining their needs
• Generating ideas
• Prototyping in order to better realize those ideas
• Testing ideas

Therefore, implementing DT process needs a set of skills and mindsets which can be a core value for a design thinker. I considered that as a designer I need to accept the other views of my team members or people and have an open ear to opinions from ‘outside’. In fact, I need to be a visual worker and the ability to have Attention by watching and learning and also observation, understanding, and self-reflecting can be so important for me as a designer.

In my field, it can be so common to face with uncertainty, obscurity, chaos, messiness, complication, unpredictability, and conflicting data, therefore I have to try to be patient, open-minded, and ready to learn and try them out. The Peripheral vision is one of my requirement and as a designer and I have to be able to distance myself from the details of the business and have a broad viewpoint. And finally, in my profession, I need to investigate, experiment, test and repeat some of the DT processes and activities many times in the necessary situations, and keep it in my mind which being wrong and failed is one the inevitable parts of my job, so I have to look into them as an opportunity, not a limitation.