May Monthly Event Recap:  Human-Centered Design

What does it take to come up with radically new solutions? what has to be in place in order to reliably innovate? We got answers to these questions and more at the May Monthly event about the Secrets to Successfully Using Human-Centered Design, featuring speakers Anna Love-Mickelson, Dean Kephart, and Scott Mark.

The event was broken out into half educational presentation and half audience interaction. In the first part, we learned about human-centered design, its key principles, and how using its approach will foster innovation and powerful problem-solving. In the second half, the audience voted on topics via VoiceHive to be discussed amongst the three speakers along with an interactive Q&A to learn even more examples.

Here are the key takeaways from this two-part event.

• Design thinking demystified:  There’s design for aesthetics (art) and there’s design for problem solving (design thinking).

• Design is a team sport. Be intentional about who you put on a team. Sometimes people who go together don’t create new ideas. Get a group of people together who have their own way of thinking.

• There are four tools for design thinking:  empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test.  In design thinking, you start with empathy to find the problem. You must learn from your customers.

• Fall in love with the problem you’re trying to solve, not your solution. If you fall in love with your solution first, you’re just pulling strings to get it done, and oftentimes it’s the wrong solution. When you’re able to fall in love with the problem, you’re able to find a better solution.

• When finding solutions to your problem, the best way to inspire isn’t through words, it’s through prototypes. The person who brings a prototype to a meeting always wins. In prototyping, stay in low resolution until you have something desirable. Then move to medium resolution where you’re tweaking, followed by high resolution where you’re identifying how something fits into the broader system.

• Show your shitty first draft. People can help you build off your first draft to create a better solution.

• When building toward a solution, always be inspired and don’t stop asking the question “why.” Relate to your inner child of curiosity and assume a beginner’s mindset. The states of mind for inspiration are to be truly curious, be a strong listener, rely on the question why, and don’t think, but look.

• Using these approaches of design thinking in business can lead to greater problem solving to find the right solution to the true core problem.