Design thinking is 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.
Thinking like a designer can transform the way organizations develop products, services, processes, and strategy. It also allows people who aren’t trained as designers to use creative tools to address a vast range of challenges.
– Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, a renown Agency
Design consists of balancing the three Perspectives:
Key Activities in the Design Thinking Process
The order of these activities varies according to the situation
Service Design:
Service Design is the glue that connects various types of Design (Interaction, Experience, Product, Graphic) to the business world (Operations and Process Management, Strategy, Value Proposition Design).
It leads to a more Holistic perspective:
- From products to product-service offerings
- From individual touchpoints to complete user journeys that take longer and cover more mediums (channels)
The 6 Principles of Service Design are:
Human-Centered
Consider the experience of all the people affected by the service
Collaborative
Stakeholders of various backgrounds and functions should be actively engaged in the service design process
Iterative
Service design is an exploratory, adaptive, and experimental approach, iterating toward implementation.
Sequential
The service should be visualized and orchestrated as a sequence of interrelated actions.
Real
Needs should be researched in reality, ideas prototyped in reality, and intangible values evidenced as physical or digital reality.
Holistic
Services should sustainably address the needs of all stakeholders throughout the entire service and across the business.
The book above provides practical tips on everything it takes to be a good service designer. It is co-authored by more than 50 respected practitioners.
This book is special because it doesn’t stop at thinking, it goes until Implementation. I also found the Case Studies for each chapter very useful.
There are some free methods on their website.
Other resources:
Groow by Studio Tast
A physical tool for learning the Design process. It contains the key steps in the process, as well as the tools.
I found it useful for steering the process and aligning with others by:
- making things conscious and slowing down
- being more aware about the process
- making collaboration, alignment and coaching much easier
