Design Thinking in Teams.

1
Design Thinking in Teams

• MEC

2
Contents

• Importance of Team Work.
• Conflicts in Team Work.
• Design Process Plan.
• Planning and Changing Activities.
• Gathering and Sharing Information.
• Generating and Adopting Concepts.
• Avoiding and Resolving Conflicts.

3
Design Thinking

• Design thinking is a versatile approach to
  problem solving, involving design techniques like
  user empathy, ideation, rapid prototyping, and
  testing, that helps teams tackle complex business
  and/or organizational problems.

4
Team Work

• Important in a normal professional design
  activity.
• Needed when design becomes a more integrated
  activity involving collaboration among many
  different professions.
• Each member has roles and relationships within
  the team, relative to each other.
• Need to communicate with other members of the
  team.

5
Team Work

• Need to observe what other teams do.
• There may be hierarchies and particular job
  roles.
• There may be a team leader appointed by a higher
  authority.
• Explicit planning of activities not always
  evident in individual or team work.
• Necessary to plan the activities to fit within
  the available time.

6
Team Work

• Exploratory activities a normal feature of design
  activity.
• Both planned and unplanned actions to be handled
  within a team.
• Unplanned, adhoc exploratory activities to be
  pursued when perceived as relevant by the
  designer.
• Need to interpret and re-formulate the problem
  given as the task.

7
Team Work

• Information relevant to the task to be gathered
  from a variety of sources.
• Need to make explicit and observable some aspects
  of the necessary gathering and sharing of
  information that any team would have to
  undertake.
• Information on aspects of the problem may be kept
  in a file and given to the designers when asked
  for.
• User evaluation reports a source of useful
  information in case of redesigns.

8
Team Work

• Analysing and understanding the problem a part of
  the design process.
• Individual designers can form their own, possibly
  idiosyncratic interpretation of the problem.
• Teams to reach some shared/commonly held
  understanding of the problem.
• Team work permits generation of greater number
  and variety of concepts and ideas.
• Need to communicate and share such concepts,
  ideas and activities.

9
Team Work

• A social process, may be multidisciplinary.
• A collaborative process, need sharing of
  representations.
• Social interactions, roles and relationships
  cannot be ignored.
• Team to work productively to reach a relatively
  successful conclusion to the set task, within the
  prescribed time.

10
Conflicts in Team Work

• Conflicts may arise between team members.
• Members may have equal previous design experience
  and similar job roles within the firm.
• Members may be of equal hierarchy in the normal
  work situation.
• There may be informal/no predetermined roles that
  the members brought with them.

11
Conflicts in Team Work.

• Roles and relationships to be established and
  played within the team.
• Different interpretations or understandings of
  the problem may become evident.
• Different members of the team may favour
  different design concepts.
• May find difficulty in getting the team to
  proceed in a way any one member would prefer.

12
Conflicts in Team Work.

• Identifying, avoiding and resolving conflicts
  inevitable part of team work.
• Roles and relationships not always fixed and
  simple.
• Role playing behaviours will emerge in any team
  activity.
• Role play might depend on personality,
  experience, and the task in hand.
• Team members to show more sensitivity to each
  others preferences.

13
Design Process Plan

• May be derived from conventional models of a
  design process.
• Steps may include
• 1. Quantify the problem
• 2. Generate concepts
• 3. Refine concepts
• 4. Select a concept
• 5. Design
• 6. Present

14
Planning and Changing Activities

• Team to be conscious of planning the design
  process.
• Team members to be aware of planning the
  activities and of keeping the activities to a
  schedule.
• Design activity, especially at a conceptual
  stage, is unplanned, intuitive and adhoc.
• Team to prepare a schedule of activities.

15
Planning and Changing Activities

• Tacit and unplanned, drifting and discontinuous
  changes of activity.
• Not always easy to track what is actually
  happening in teamwork.
• Some of the activity naturally becomes more like
  a conversation than a formal debate.
• Topics may drift in or out of conversation.
• Team volunteer to draw attention to the schedule
  and time when needed.

16
Planning and Changing Activities

• Designer to show opportunistic behaviour in case
  of deviation from current or planned activities.
• Opportunistic behaviour allows flexibility to
  deal with design problems opportunities that
  emerge in the design process.
• An opportunistic deviation initiated by one
  member may be seen as irrelevant by another.

17
Gathering and Sharing Information

• Relevant information to be gathered in any design
  task.
• Information to be extracted from its source and
  shared among the team.
• Use of user evaluation report to gather
  information.
• May also rely on personal experience and
  knowledge of members.
• Approach to information gathering can be informal.

18
Gathering and Sharing Information

• Possibility of misunderstandings and errors if no
  formal role assigned for information gathering.
• Team members could misunderstand what were
  apparently shared concepts.
• Errors and misunderstandings might suggest that
  the team does not have a very effective strategy
  for gathering and sharing information.
• Shared understanding cannot always be assumed in
  team work.

19
Generating and Adopting Concepts

• Necessary for the team to generate design
  concepts.
• To build the concepts into a specific design
  proposal.
• To develop initial concepts into more detailed
  and robust versions.
• Must decide to adopt certain concepts from among
  the several proposed.

20
Generating and Adopting Concepts

• Design proposal may begin as a vague concept with
  a lot of development work put into it.
• Concepts need to be built up.
• Additions and variations turn initial idea into
  something more robust.
• Generate some random concept-lists, the team to
  review each list to eliminate unsatisfactory
  concepts and identify the preferred ones.

21
Generating and Adopting Concepts

• Team members to persuade others of the value of
  the most favoured concept (called the tray
  concept).
• Tray idea, the key concept, will be proposed,
  accepted, modified, developed and justified.
• Designers may be emotionally involved with their
  ideas, may defend their own.
• Design concepts not merely abstract ideas, but
  personal insights that emerge from cognitive
  efforts.

22
Avoiding and Resolving Conflicts

• Disagreement may arise between members of a
  design team.
• More serious disagreement might arise if there
  are competing design concepts.
• Team to find ways of resolving, or perhaps
  avoiding conflicts.
• Team members to be aware of when they are close
  to reaching actual agreement.

23
Avoiding and Resolving Conflicts

• Deferred agreement or non-committal apparent
  agreement reflect normal aspects of human
  discussion and verbal interchange.
• Individuals may nurse a contrary viewpoint and
  return to it when opportunity arises, even when
  there is no overt disagreement.

24
Design Thinking Teams

• Design thinking teams are highly collaborative,
  multidisciplinary project teams, comprised of
  people from different backgrounds, including
  design, engineering, research, and business, that
  jointly apply human-centered design strategies to
  solve problems.

25
Design Thinking Teams

• Seek diverse perspectives.
• - multi-disciplinary in composition.
• - seek out diverse perspectives to help
• devise better solutions.
• - leverage internal expertise.
• - seek out a variety of perspectives
• outside of their team.
• - attempt to build a holistic understanding
• of the customer needs and experiences.

26
Design Thinking Teams

• Co-design.
• - should have a participatory approach.
• - participate in the definition, design, and
• creation of value for customers or end-
• users.
• - co-design internally as a team and
• externally with customers or end-users.
• - solicit feedback from customers or end-
• users throughout product development
• cycle.

27
Design Thinking Teams

• Experience radical empathy.
• - dedicate resources to speak directly to
• or observe customers in real world
• contexts.
• - find what is the customer life like today
• and how to make their lives easier?
• - try to know customer goals, needs, and
• pain points.
• - develop customer-centric solutions that
• genuinely resonate with end-users.

28
Design Thinking Teams

• Iteratively re-frame problems.
• - know that the problem is rarely precise
• enough from the get-go.
• - know that the problem requires constant
• reframing as the team learns.
• - understands the problem space more.

29
Design Thinking Teams

• Get paint on the walls.
• - make ideas tangible.
• - understand the value of externalizing
• ideas, be it a sketch or a prototype.
• - facilitate a culture of enlightened trial
• and error that empowers teams to build
• on successful ideas or pivot when
• something isnt working.

30
So What Design Thinking Offers?

• Design thinking offers a shared way of working
  that fosters transparency, human-centered
  thinking, and a bias towards action. Design
  thinking prompts a designer to look at how
  his/her team operates today and considers what
  he/she could be doing differently.

31
References

• Nigel Cross, Design Thinking Understanding How
  Designers Think and Work, Berg, New York, 1st
  Edition, 2011.
• https//smashingideas.com/5-things-design-thinking
  -teams-differently/

32

Ready for Team Work?