How design thinking has helped the world?

In one of my last posts here, I have briefly described Design Thinking and how the founders of Steemit are Design Thinkers. I am a strong believer of Design Thinking, which consists of empathizing to solve issues and problems. Design Thinking is such a useful methodology, so much so that it is used in a wide range of fields to solve problems. Hence, this post is a collection of stories using Design Thinking as the methodology for problem solving in the world.

Design Thinking for business

Airbnb

Airbnb is currently one of the famously disruptive innovation in the hospitality industry. Do you believe that Airbnb almost went bankrupt in 2009? By adopting "Design Thinking", they tried to know what their users were thinking and why the usage of the site has not increased. They went through 40 posted advertisements and soon found out the problem lies in the pictures. They realized that the pictures posted by the homeowners were badly taken and the users could not really make out what kind of accommodation they are paying for. After helping homeowners enhancing the pictures, Airbnb was able to get twice the turnover. If you are interested, read their story here.

Apple

From the ipod to iphone, there has been few misses with Apple’s products. That is because they have adopted design thinking as the core business thinking. From Mike Markkula to Steve Jobs, ability to empathize is always one of the top marketing priority. In fact, emphathy is one of the principles of "The Apple Marketing Philosophy". Apple was so successful because of an improvement of the user interaction (think Siri) and user experience (think iphone). The 6 pillars of Steve Job’s design philosophy helped solidify Apple's reputation in computers and smart phones, and Steve Jobs is also one of the famous and renowned design thinkers. To Apple, customer is always the first.

If you are interested to read more, there are many more stores of using design thinking in businesses here.

Design Thinking for Social Innovation

Design thinking can also help social entrepreneurs to solve social problems and issues in developing countries. Many times, top-down solutions were not able to solve social issues. The reasons why top-down solutions just do not work are due to corrupt governments, lack of infrastructure and funding, unwillingness to change, etc. Bottom-up solutions become the next option and design thinking process become the methdology to ideate and brainstorm for solutions. Embrace is one of the social entrepreneurs which did it successfully.

Embrace

A big problem in developing countries has threatened the survival rate of premature newborn babies. And that is Hypothermia. A baby incubator would have helped solve this easily in developed countries. But the same incubator is too expensive for people in developing countries. A team of Stanford graduate students was given the challenge to come up with a low-cost solution. They then developed the baby-warming device that helps parents in remote villages giving their dying infants a chance to survive is one of the touching innovations that moved the people in Nepal.

Save the Children

Save the Children, non-profit organization is also a strong believe in design thinking. In 1990, children in Vietnam were starving and suffered from malnutrition. Save the Children sent a team to help. They collected data and realized that there are some children who lived in the same village but were relatively well-fed. They interviewed the parents of these wellfed children and found out that their parents fed shrimps, crabs, and snails which are food usually not fed to children because they are considered unsafe in the eyes of traditional vietnamese back then. But these food add up to a significant calories for the children. So, the team learnt from these parents and then taught other parents on how to prepare and cook them for safe consumption. In the program’s first year, 80 % of the 1,000 children enrolled in the program were adequately nourished.

In fact, UNICEF is one of the believers in applying Design Thinking to solve social issues , click Unicef stories for more stores.

Design Thinking for yourself

Dr Bernard Roth, a Stanford engineering Professor made use of design process thinking process in his own life and has built healthy habits – both social and health. He lost 25 excess pounds and has reconnected with close friends. According to him, looking inwards is important for finding the “right” problems. If the problem you have never gets solved, then it is probably the “wrong” problem that you have been trying to solve. Rather than solving the “wrong” problem that you will never solve, it is better to reframe the views and perspectives you look at the world. After reframing things, you get a sense of renewed empathy for yourself. Like many people say, it is always more difficult to judge yourself than to judge others.

Concluding...

Design Thinking has definitely helped the world in solving many problems and coming up with different innovations. Hope you like the collection of stories about design thinking and convinced to practice in life too!