Our Founder's Journey with Design Thinking

Today, we have Carol Wong, Founder & CEO of Innothink Advisory shared her journey with and perspective of Design Thinking when she discovered and acted upon it for almost a decade now!

Continue reading below to explore what she has to share with us.

PERSONAL IMPACT BY DESIGN THINKING

Design Thinking has certainly changed the way I work. I often apply the various techniques that I have learned in different situations — even to situations that do not have a project or challenge format.

For example, I tend to use a lot more Post-it notes to capture my thoughts or ideas so that I can arrange my thoughts or ideas in various orders. Furthermore, various brainstorming techniques I learned from Design Thinking have provided me with more options to consider during brainstorming sessions.

The rapid prototyping of ideas is another great way of working. I like this a lot, given that I can try out and quickly discard ideas that do not work so that I can move on to prototype new ones.

From my own experience, I believe that Design Thinking can best be cultivated by self-motivated individuals. Immersion in a two-day (at the minimum) program will develop one’s ability to apply Design Thinking in both one’s personal and work or business life.

Design Thinking is not necessarily used only for creating innovative products or services. Tools and techniques learned can be applied in one’s daily routines. The challenge is the ability to identify the right methods or tools to be applied in which situations.

THE FUTURE OF DESIGN THINKING

From my point of view, Design Thinking is continuously attracting the attention of future generations as the process provides them with the opportunity to create awesome ideas based on their individual passions. Given that these individuals from Gen-Y or beyond are more knowledgeable due to information or knowledge access via the internet, their career aspirations tend to be greater and they expect to be empowered in developing and implementing new ideas for their organisations.

Companies will be expected to have Design Thinking values in order to attract and retain future talent. I therefore foresee that there are significant opportunities for Design Thinking to expand in the future. It will become one of the core competencies/skills within leading innovative companies. Design Thinking will not be seen as only a methodology for creating innovations, it will become a prerequisite skill of future talents. Besides technical or academic qualifications, Design Thinking skills, such as solving complex problems, empathy fieldwork, brainstorming, prototyping and pitching are core skills that will add significant value to an individual’s profile. The methodology itself will be broken down into behaviours and values for talent competency development. This is where I truly see Design Thinking being brought to the next level in the future.

Let us know what your thoughts are on Carol’s perspective! We will be interested to hear how Design Thinking has impacted or will impact your life, and what you envision the future of Design Thinking will be for our generation and beyond.

Join our community of Innothinkers here to stay updated on all things Design Thinking and share your journey of Design Thinking with us :)

Have you checked out these Design Thinking focused online collaboration tools?

Finding ways to collaborate online with your team while applying Design Thinking?

Read on to learn more about the different tools that you can explore using!

Design Thinking activities are typically carried out in a face-to-face setting with plenty of space for team breakouts, and most importantly a whiteboard space for ideation. However, Design Thinking activities can also be done online using digital tools as there may be constraints with space availability, time and more. Especially during this unprecedented period of time, it is ever more important to familiarise ourselves with the online Design Thinking based collaboration tools that we can explore to use with our teams. This will help build a sense of in-person collaboration, whilst ensuring that the team stays on track and focused towards their goals.

1. MURAL - Online collaboration workspace with over 100 templates that can be easily dragged and dropped into a blank canvas. This is great for running team meetings or workshops with your clients. The templates are based on Design Thinking and Agile frameworks, which can be configured to suit your needs. It is integrated with LUMA Institute’s templates, meaning you can use your preferred choice of templates from LUMA in MURAL. From filling out a business model canvas, planning your next project sprint to mapping out your customer’s journey - you will always find the opportunity to use MURAL to enhance your ways of working. MURAL offers a 30 days free trial and tiered paid subscription based on what you need.

2. Miro - Online collaboration whiteboard space with a quirky UI that makes project sprint planning so much more fun! It also offers a bunch of pre-built templates and can be integrated with other apps such as Trello, Jira, Slack, Microsoft Teams and more. It also has a good range of Design Thinking tools like customer journey mapping, 5 Whys, and service blueprint design. You are also able to assign different roles to your users for more enhanced collaboration. There is also an active Miro Community that offers support, community engagement and holds events with its users. Definitely one to check out and try as the free version is available for an unlimited period of time!

3. LUMA Institute - Online resources tool based on Design Thinking methodologies, offering a wide range of templates and guides focusing on human-centered activities - from initial field observation, interviewing, ideation to prototyping. It is used by many companies from consulting to technology firms to encourage employees to use the various Design Thinking methods on projects they are working on. LUMA does not offer its own collaboration tool, but it is integrated with MURAL so you can access LUMA’s templates within MURAL. You can try out the LUMA Workplace (which contains all of the templates, guides, training videos) on a free trial for 30 days to get a feel of what it is like!

4. Smaply - Online collaboration tool with customer experience focused templates. Adopts a service design approach to solving problems for your customers. Offers your typical persona, customer journey, stakeholder mapping templates to help you redefine and enhance your customer’s experiences and interactions with your product or service. You can try Smaply on a 14 days free trial!

Let us know if you try out any of these or if you came across other tools! We would love to hear your experiences using them.

Join our community of Innothinkers here to stay updated on all things Design Thinking and share your journey of Design Thinking with us :)

Life Planning using Design Thinking

Are you trying to think of ways to use Design Thinking right here and now?

Read on to find out how you can use the Concept Poster to help you with charting your life ambitions and goals!

The Concept Poster is generally used in the Prototyping stage of Design Thinking. This takes place after Ideation, where you would like to detail out a specific idea further - what the idea is about, who are the key stakeholders, how would you measure success, why might it fail, etc. An example of a Concept Poster template can be found here. You can use words or even drawings to fill out the Concept Poster - as you may already know, Design Thinking is all about unleashing creativity!

One of our Innothinkers community members, Jane, experimented with using the Concept Poster to detail out how her life might look like 6 years down the road. Today, we will be hearing from her on what she has learned from doing this activity!

Innothink Advisory: Why did you decide to use the Concept Poster for this activity?

Jane: “During this time of quarantine, I have been reflecting a lot on life and where I see myself in 5-6 years time. I am also a huge advocate of Design Thinking and have been trying to find ways of applying some of the tools to my personal life, aside from work. I thought that the Concept Poster is a good template to use for me to structure and organise my immeasurable amount of thoughts of how I imagine my life to be.”

Innothink Advisory: That’s great that you’re using this time to reflect on yourself and explore greater use cases of Design Thinking. Can you share the process of you filling up the Concept Poster?

Jane: “I took a template of the Concept Poster and chose what would be relevant for the areas that I wanted to flesh out more details on. I drew my Concept Poster up on a glass window and used post-its, as this would allow me to easily go back to it and adjust or add anything. it was interesting to brainstorm what my “Key Features” would be. These were things that I wanted to be known for in the future, that ranged from the mindset I wanted to have in the future to the types of work that I wanted to be doing. Filling up the “Value Metrics” was also quite interesting, as I thought of things like “happiness”, or “satisfaction levels” - bringing in the human-centric element of Design Thinking and thinking about the end user i.e. Me, in this case. Populating the “What do I need to do to get there” helped me to think of the different actions in the short and long-term. All in all, using the Concept Poster has definitely helped re-imagine my future with the right directions and goals.”

Innothink Advisory: What will be the next Design Thinking tool that you would use?

Jane: “I am thinking of trying how businesses can apply Design Thinking principles to

pivot and reimagine their businesses during the times of the Covid-19 crisis. I think using Design Thinking will help to inspire and recalibrate how businesses are thinking about their customers, customers’ journeys and touchpoints with products and services during this period.”

We hope this has inspired you to start thinking of how you can use Design Thinking in your life today, be it a small or big activity!

Join our community of Innothinkers here to stay updated and share your stories with us!