Design Thinking Intro

The Krebs Cycle of Creativity (KCC) is a map that describes the perpetuation of creative energy (creative ATP or ‘CreATP’), analogous to the Krebs Cycle proper. In this analogy, the four modalities of human creativity—Science, Engineering, Design and Art—replace the Krebs Cycle’s carbon compounds. Each of the modalities (or ‘compounds‘) produces ‘currency’ by transforming into another:

Design Thinking is described as both a methodology and — by one of its main contemporary proponent David Kelley — a way of thinking (for more info I recommend this podcast by the awesome designbetter.com).

The core idea is to put humans in the centre of the project (thus the human-centric approach), and apply a problem solving “process” with distinct actualization steps.

The steps are:

1. Empathize: Where (duh) one seeks to get into the shoes of the person for whom one is designing;
2. Define: Where one summarizes the user’s need in clear and concise statements;
3. Ideate: Where one comes up with a number of ideas (where the number tends towards infinity);
4. Prototype: Where one creates a rough, tangible prototype of the best emergent idea(s);
5. Test: Where one jumps into the streets of Sydney (or wherever one’s users are) and tests the prototype;
6. Repeat: Where the last two steps are repeated until awesomeness is reached. (occasionally the last 3, 4, all, restart from scratch or, occasionally, everything is thrown away).

ONWARD >

References

1. ⇪ Neri Oxman, The Age of Entanglement, Jods MIT Press, Jan 14–2016
2. ⇪ Paul Bloom, The baby in the well, New Yorker, May 20–2013
3. ⇪ Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational, By-the-Book Pub., 2008
4. ⇪ Robert Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, Bodley Head, 2017