Inspiring Innovation through
Design
Thinking – III
The mission of design thinking is to translate
observations into insights and insights into products and services that will
improve lives. So what is needed is
observing people at a fundamental level, by
empathising, standing in the shoes of others. Empathy is the effort to see the world
through the eyes of others, understand the world through their experiences, and
feel the world through their emotions.
ABC Channel's 'Nightline' is a latenight news
program for in-depth reporting on major news stories. In one of the shows they
challenged IDEO to take an old and familiar thing, say a shopping cart and redesign
within five days. The design teamcomprised an engineer, a MBA graduate, a psychologist,
a biologist, a marketing expert, and a linguist.
IDEO’s model of design thinking is,
Understand, Explore,
Prototype and Evaluate. On the first day,after
a brief discussion, the group went to the field to observe actual users, manufacturers,
repairers, handlers,supermarket sales people, supervisors, babies, counter
staff etc. The main issues they focussed are safety, convenience of
handling and flexibility. When they returned
with a flood of data and ideas, they randomly collect all of them and
display them, sieve out non-important ideas
and go on building on others ideas. Simultaneously, they started making the prototype
in their workshop.
The final design ended up as the one – very
safe for babies (22000 babies meet with injuries every year,) No basket (merchandise
come in different shapes and
sizes and cannot be accommodated with the
standard basket,) bags can be hung on hooks, wheels turn 90 degrees, move forward,
backward and sideways (lot of
traffic jam in crowded areas in the supermarkets,)
facility to talk to the staff / supervisor remotely (you don’t have to search
for a staff for queries,) high-tech cart with scanner and self-checkout (don’t
have to wait in long queues in the checkout counters) etc. We can note that all
these features are put in by closely observing the
users of carts and feeling their
difficulties, i.e., empathising with them.
IBM uses ‘Agile Methodology’ - a project management
approach, to lead project management teams, develop and deliver high quality
products and best practices
(human-centered outcomes, for the speed and
scale of the modern enterprise) to the market by observing and answering these questions:
who is the real user? what they think, what they feel, what they see, hear and
do?
In another project IDEO, who were commissioned
by SSM DePaul Health Centre to design a new wing of the
hospital, adopted a new and radical ‘codesign’
process that would join designers and health care professionals in
a common effort. One of the core team members
Kristian Simsarian, with highly specialised expertise in the ethnographic study
set out to capture the patient
experience. (Ethnography is the study of people
in their own environment through the use of methods such as participant observation
and face-to-face interviewing.)
The best way is to check in to the hospital and
go through the emergency room experience, for admission to examination as if he
were a patient.
Pretending as affected by a leg injury, Kristian
placed himself in to the shoes – and in fact onto a wheeled stretcher – of the average
emergency room patient. He saw firsthand how disorienting the check in process
is. He experienced the frustration of being asked to wait, without ever being told
what he was waiting for, why, or how long. He felt the anxiety of being wheeled
by an unidentified staffer down a long corridor through a pair of frightening
huge double doors into the glare of emergency room. We all have had the first
person, such
first time experiences everywhere. With a video
camera, Kristian captured a patient’s experience in a way that no doctor,
nurse, or an ambulance driver could get.
The team reviewed the unedited video and
identified opportunities for improving the patient experience. Moreover they made
a larger discovery – the acoustic
ceilings tiles, look-alike hallways, and featureless
waiting areas – these details, not the efficiency of the staff or the quality of
the facilities, were key to the new design.
The patient’s experience of the lack of transparency
of the hospital process was the thrust of the video. The team members experienced
the anxiety and boredom of
such a situation where one feels lost, uninformed,
and not in control.
The hospital was focusing on the insurance
verification, medical prioritization, and bed allocation etc. which made the
patient experience ofstress as even worse.
From these observations the team concluded
that the hospital needed to balance its requirements with an
empathetic concern for the human side of the
equation.
This insight became the basis of a
farreaching
programme of 'codesign' in which IDEO team
worked with DePaul hospital staff to explore hundreds of
opportunities to improve the patient experience.
Design thinking, in one way, at the macro
level, is leading to incremental innovation only, improving the existing things.
However at the micro level, it brings out several radical or break-through innovations.
March 2018 CS
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