Design principles applied to our daily life
According to Tim Brown, “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.” In other words, it is an emphatic way of creating innovation in products, services, processes, public policies, and other segments, as well as solving complex problems, through research, experimentation, co-creation, prototyping, and iteration.
When I first met the design thinking framework, it was love at first sight. That new way of approaching problems, resources, solutions, experimentation, and research, which could be used not only as work tools but also applied to people’s lives, fascinated me so much, I decided to pursue a career change. I started to dig into the subject through online and on-site courses, books, lectures, videos, and talking to professionals about it, and have just enrolled in a design master.
While I was studying more about it, I identified several principles and tools that could be transported into our daily lives, in a way of making us rethink and reprogram the mindsets and attitudes we have toward others and ourselves. They are:
Exploration: Who we are? What do we want? How do we want it?
One of the initial phases of any design project is exploration. This is where we identify the needs, pains, preferences, and behaviors of the person we are going to design for. However, we also know that that person almost never knows consciously what he or she wants and sometimes they can’t even explain the real cause of their problems. Therefore, field research is almost always mandatory. In it, we watch closely what are their habits, how they make decisions, what is their relation with the product or service we are providing. This is many times defined, not by what he or she said, but by what they do.
Making a parallel to our lives, many times we get confused between what we really want for ourselves and what other people think is best for us, how society dictates what we should or should not be, do, have, or behave. How much of what we think we want comes from the outside and not the inside? This is why the process of internal exploration is so important. Self-discovery leads us to better decision-making, according to our truth, our values, and what makes sense to us.
My path to self-discovery was therapy, but there are many other ways to look inside and explore who we are, such as meditation, life coaching, astrological charts, immersions, reading, and studying the matter through different lenses, etc. Whichever path you chose bear in mind that it would be a daily and constant process of self-discovery and experimentation, with no clear end to it.
Prototyping: drafting an action plan
In design, the prototyping solutions phase can be defined as drafting what the final outcome would be. It is a simple version of the final product, rudimentary enough to use as few financial, material, and time resources as possible, which allows us to rapidly test the concept developed after the research and idea generation phases. Normally, the prototype is full of flaws and it is expected that in the close future, some changes will have to be made before it is scaled or definitively implemented.
From a very young age, we have some sort of plan of what we want to be when we grow up, what we want to reach, and how we are going to get there. But quite often, life does not care about our plans and throws unexpected situations, people, and problems at us, which make us rethink and react in ways we never thought you would. Obviously, we have to have goals and create a plan to reach them, but we cannot let those plans imprison us. Planning serves to guide us, not to blind us before changes and opportunities appear in the way. It’s OK to change directions, opinions, and perspectives and recalculate the route.
Iteration: test to see what works
This phase consists of testing the prototype with a small group of people to see how they react to it and identify improvements, flaws, and opportunities. In life, we will only know if something we want is going to work if we test it if we get our hands dirty and start moving toward the direction of what we want. Fear and insecurity can paralyze us because we always judge that the prototype is not ready to be tested. But as in our careers — where we only know if we are good at it or not, when we execute it — many aspects of life can only be learned and improved while we do it and not only through observation or merely theory.
There are no mistakes, only learning opportunities
This concept changed my life. As an incurable perfectionist, I have an innate talent to torment myself with pasts mistakes and obsessively think why did I do it? What if I have done it some other way? How the present would look like if I have taken a different direction? I.e. paralyzing, destructive, and demotivating thoughts.
The design mindset tells us the complete opposite: making mistakes is expected, accepted, and also valued because only through them we can learn how to do it the right way. When we realize something has not gone our way or our plans have not had the desired results, we discover how not to do it and the next attempt will be better than the former one. It will not rely on the same biases and will have more positive results, enabling apprenticeship.
Another important concept regarding failures and lessons is the “fail fast, fail better”. This can be interpreted as follows: as we learn through error, if we fail more often in a short period of time, we will learn faster how to do things right. Therefore, let’s give as many small shots as possible, always trying to learn something from it so that we reach the desired result sooner.
When approaching errors and flaws with this new perspective, we start to think about them as motivators to do something different instead of a reason to stop. And this is liberating!
I sincerely hope that, just like me, you can also look in a different and more optimistic way at this and others' matter from now on, and that this mindset can enable a lighter and more fluid life, with fewer frustrations and more growth.
