Friday, September 14, 2007

Design thinking and designers

The conversation with Brandon Schauer, design strategist at Adaptive Path, about design thinking is worth reading. Brandon talks about topics such as critical thinking and design thinking, design attitude versus decision attitude, and the importance of business fluency amongst designers.

I agree that for a business problem, you do want to apply design thinking to explore as many alternatives as you can , but you do want to critically think through all the alternatives before you reach a solution and keep your stakeholders informed about your decisions. Not only business fluency is critical to do this but a designer needs to have empathy for the stakeholders as well. Traditional ethnography techniques such as contextual inquiry can be used to understand user's goals and aspirations, but the designers need to go a step further and understand their stakeholders better and for that the designers need to acquire skills in the business and strategy area.

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