Design Thinking And Social Technology: Enhancing Work Processes Through Essay. (70 Characters)

1. Is to focus the student’s ability to extract and clearly express the central message of this article, separating the primary content from the supporting detail.

2. Include a recommendation (in the conclusion area) in your paper.

Challenges of Design Thinking

Social Technology is referred to as the integration of the tools and the vision that is applied on the work processes leading to incredible improvements. One such innovative social technology is design thinking (Liedtka, 2018).

Some of the major challenges of design thinking are explained as follows. The design thinking technology must provide superior solutions, which can be achieved through efficient involvement of the user driven criteria and diverse voices. Another challenge is to lower the risks and costs, which can be achieved by eliminating the bad ideas from the portfolio of options. Lastly, the employees must be involved in the processes and managing the trade-offs by analysing the behavioural hindrances (Liedtka and Ogilvie, 2011).

The structural format of design thinking aids in research with customers, understanding the various perspectives, involvement of stakeholder and overall designing and execution.; the same was accorded by Kaaren Hanson. In addition, the tools of design thinking aid in inculcating security and assurance.

Discovering the customer is an important aspect of design thinking, as accommodated from the ethnography and sociology. Traditional customer identification methods had a problem of biases of innovators while drawing the inferences (Johansson?Sköldberg, Woodilla and Çetinkaya, 2013). Design thinking injects better understanding of customers, new possibilities of solutions, and provided an insight of various assumptions enabling the significant designing. The gallery walk or selection of the core important data from the total collected ones is crucial for making sense of knowledge. This is done by preparing posters, writing down the data bits that are potentially important, sorting the data, and thus database is created; followed by conduct of workshops and discussions. The same procedure was adopted in the case of Monash Health Hospital in Australia, which concluded that patient needs is prime consideration to run the whole process smoothly.

The next step is idea generation, which starts with identification of the potential solutions, participants, challenges, and sharing and building of new ideas (Martin, 2009). The example of an efficient idea creation is that in Children’s Health System of Texas where a large number of stakeholders were identified and the ideas were shared to create a modern wellness ecosystem. After the idea generation, the next step is to articulate or question the implicit assumptions in relation to the gathered ideas, thereby allowing the discussion on the ideas and removing the deadlock of the presumed understandings. The product of the same is well-researched portfolio of ideas.

The next step is testing or prototyping, which in design thinking is done much before the end results, helping achieve the accurate assessments of the overall value generated. The artefacts that are often achieved on the way are further modified and thus allow interaction with the surrounding environment. The last approach in the design thinking process is to conduct the real world experiments, which aids in value addition of the result and reduces the fear of change among the employees and customers.

Thus, it is recommended to the modern managers to implement the design thinking social technology to enhance the development and implementation of the range of work processes encountered in organisations.

References:

Johansson?Sköldberg, U., Woodilla, J. and Çetinkaya, M. (2013) Design thinking: past, present and possible futures. Creativity and innovation management, 22(2), pp. 121-146.

Liedtka, J. (2018) Why Design Thinking Works. Harvard Business Review. September – October 2018. pp. 72-79.

Liedtka, J. and Ogilvie, T. (2011) Designing for growth: A design thinking tool kit for managers. New York: Columbia University Press.

Martin, R. L. (2009) The design of business: Why design thinking is the next competitive advantage. UK: Harvard Business Press.