1.

In order for development initiatives to effectively meet their goals, design thinking has to be embraced as a core strategy.

The landscape of development is sputtering. As billions of dollars are poured into existing and new initiatives, the impact achieved remains is significantly low. Stasis, confusion, and sluggishness have become the common terms hurled at the field and its committed practitioners. While new and innovative solutions remain abundant, most initiatives fail to achieve their intended goals because of poorly designed programs and strategies.

If development initiatives are to deliver highly effective results, they have to be properly developed, communicated and pursued. Design thinking offers a multidisciplinary approach that can bring clarity to the process of developing and implementing programs. Charles Burnette in his IDeSIGN curriculum calls design thinking “…a process of creative and critical thinking that allows information and ideas to be organized, decisions to be made, situations to be improved, and knowledge to be gained.”

2.

Many of us still think of design in very narrow terms – architecture, industrial products, advertising, and graphics. Whether you’re running a program that delivers life-skills education to underprivileged youth or simply selling toothbrushes, design thinking provides us with a framework to encapsulate initial ideas, build prototypes and finally implement them on the ground. In addition, design thinking can provide valuable input to the decision-making process within the field of development as it is commonly dominated by political and economic perspectives.

3.

Most of us are already involved in design thinking without being aware of it. Equipped with our ideas, we’re prototyping them in the form of proposals, communicating them through inadequate tools such as PowerPoint presentations and spreadsheets, raising the necessary capital and pursuing implementation on the ground. It is only when we begin to take design thinking seriously, we can then improve on traditional design processes.

4.

Unlike businesses, the bottom-lines of development programs are varied. They usually seek a balanced combination of social, economic and environmental returns. Design thinking is suited for this endeavor as it can holistically integrate the process of achieving varied returns as opposed to treating them as separate goals.

As organizations compete for limited resources, there is urgency for them to become more innovative. Design thinking invaluably catalyses innovation – it doesn’t just help organizations continuously improve upon their existing offerings, it also increases the rate at which new ideas are generated and implemented.

5.

In the business world, innovation through design thinking is being spearheaded by the efforts of one firm – IDEO. It began as a products design firm, developing some of the world’s most successful products such as the original Apple mouse, Palm V handheld organizer and portable defibrillators. Today, it is not just applying its “secret formula” to design products and customer experiences, it is also helping companies innovate. IDEO’s formula is in essence design thinking that has been well-developed and continuously refined over time.

6.

Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, asserts that the tools (PowerPoint presentations, spreadsheets, business plans) at our disposal to communicate ideas or strategy (action toward a desired outcome) are simply inadequate. A large part of design thinking involves clear and engaging “storytelling”. Traditional methods of relying on words to present ideas will only expose your plans to different forms of interpretations and ultimately confusion. Tim adds, people need to have a visceral understanding – an image in their minds – of why you’ve chosen a certain strategy and what you’re attempting to create with it.

7.

Design is image-based by nature and therefore does not expose your ideas and strategy to much interpretation. By making films, scenarios or prototypes, designers allow people to emotionally experience what their ideas or strategy aim to describe. Development initiatives have to learn to evolve into more convincing “storytellers” as a large part of their support comes from building and maintaining partnerships with various stakeholders such as donors, governments, private sector and local communities.

8.

Over the past 30 years, IDEO has demonstrated the impact of this rather simple methodology in creating a range of new products and solving a variety of problems. Time and time again, the process has never failed to spawn innovation. It has become apparent that we in development have been involved in design thinking in one way or another when implementing initiatives. The time has come for us to refine the design thinking into a methodology that works for us; one that can be applied indigenously to our environment.

9.

How are we going to prove to the skeptics that design thinking might actually work when addressing development challenges? As an example, ThaiRuralNet’s Grassroots Innovation Network is an initiative that works with farmers in northeast Thailand to develop and implement low-cost agricultural technologies that help increase the average crop yield of farmers in that region. Only by working on the ground and observing the world of these farmers, were they able to identify the key challenges faced. The pattern of challenges was rather simple: The constant drought and dryness of land in the region affects the farmers’ main source of income which comes from selling agricultural produce such as glutinous rice.

Collective brainstorming pointed the team toward applying measures to improve the soil-quality of farm plots and to diversify the farmers sources of income. This led them to introduce and adapt simple prototypes of technologies such as drip irrigation, vermicompost, high-density fish ponds, and low-cost charcoal-burners in test-plots. Through a continuous process of trial and error, the technologies were refined to fit local conditions. As a result, the farmers were not only able to increase their income through increased sales of agricultural produce, they’re also able to diversify their income sources and enjoy access to cheap energy.

10.

According to Charles Owen, professor at the Institute of Design of the Illinois Institute of Technology, creative people tend to work in two ways as either “finders” or “makers”. Finders are usually scientists or scholars that are driven to understand and find explanations for phenomena not well understood. Makers on the other hand, are inventors who are responsible for combining different ideas, concepts and elements in order to create the environments we live, work, and play in. Professionally, we relate to makers as architects, engineers, artists and designers.

11.

As with social entrepreneurship, there’s probably no one definition of design thinking that we can all agree on. The methodology behind the concept can be loosely based around IDEO’s five point model: