Design Thinking: How Empathy
Shapes Real World Solutions

Where do I even start?

Design Thinking is more than a buzzword, it is a powerful shift in understanding how to solve problems. It embraces the principles of empathy, collaboration, creativity, and human-centred company alignment, it encourages us to truly understand the people we’re designing for, and their needs. The process of Design Thinking is not only for designers, it is dynamic and can be applied to every-day decisions, it can lead to world-defining ideas, or everything in between. It puts real humans at the forefront of the problem-solving process, and is a mentality that can create radical solutions. 

The framework traditionally contains 5 stages: 

  1. Empathize 
  2. Define 
  3. Ideate
  4. Prototype
  5. Test
 
 

The heart of Design Thinking

At the core of Design Thinking is empathy. 

This is the ability to truly understand and share the feelings of others, even if we don’t directly experience that same feeling ourselves. To me, empathy can drive us to look beyond our set of assumptions and dive into the experiences of the people we’re designing a solution for. 

One way to reveal people’s experiences is through a Design Thinking workshop, like the one’s Zu holds (which look just so exciting btw!), where teams collaboratively unravel their experiences and unleash the shackles on creativity, trust and unity. And here I am not talking about only speaking with high-level executives or managers, but really getting to the heart of the organizations: the users, the staff, and the entire team, from the bottom up. 

When you can empathize with all these different humans that are the centre of the operations, you can really begin to understand the underlying problems, and start building a strong idea of the direction your company needs to be heading towards. 

It all starts here, putting egos aside, listening to one another, and keeping an open mind to uncover the key insights driving us to the promise land.

Finding the real problem

Once you have built empathy and understanding, you can take a step towards defining the problem. 

This step is about accumulating, drawing insights from, and synthesizing what you’ve learned, ultimately with the goal of narrowing down your problem statement. From personal experience, I can tell you that this is a lot more difficult than it may seem. It’s easy to identify problems too broadly or too narrowly, but the goal of Design Thinking is really to allow us to take a step back, and ask: “What’s really going on here?”.

Generating creative possibilities

Once you’ve understood the people, and the challenge is clear, now it’s time to ideate, and unleash creativity. 

What Zu does and what I think is key to a effective Design Thinking process, is to now come up with as many ideas as you possibly, collaboratively, and get people to freely express unique ways to solve the problem. The more ideas you can generate, the better, they don’t need to perfect. Once you create a list of ideas, then you can narrow down to what you think might actually be the best ones. And sometimes, this process might take a lot of time, a lot of building on top of previous ideas, but if you stay committed to it, that breakthrough will come. 

In Zu’s workshops, this phase is driven by trust and openness. The best teams are not the ones with the smartest people in one room, but the one’s where every person can speak up, ideas and thoughts can be freely expressed, and everyone can be driven towards a common goal. 

Making ideas tangible

Now that we have generated these exciting ideas, it is critical that we prototype.

This stage is not where you worry about building something polished or perfect. This is where you take your concept, and build anything that represents it, however rough it may be, and you get out and get feedback on it. For once you can make it tangible, then you can start to see how people actually react to it, or whether you need to take a step back, and have another ideation session. 

The objective here is build anything that gets you feedback as early as possible, so you can continue to refine your idea and make sure that it’s actually addressing the problem.

Learning and improving

This stage goes hand-in-hand with protoyping, because once you create your prototype, you can then test it out in the real world. 

Here you really don’t want to have any attachment to your prototype, and certainly not defending it. This is where you learn as much as you can from the protype. Bring your rough product to the real world and see how users react to it, watch how it works) or doesn’t), what parts are resonating with people? What creates more confusion? 

This is an iterative and collaborative and long process; this is not the final exam. You might realize that you just have to return all the way back to step 1, and dig deeper. And that is not a failure, that is progress, because the goal with Design Thinking is to build something that actually solves the real problem for real people, not just satisfies managements egos. 

My final thoughts: What Design Thinking Taught Me

I didn’t quite know what Design Thinking was, but the more I explored it and how it reflects in Zu’s work, and drew parallels to my current decision making processes, the more I realized that this is a powerful and brilliant mindset, and this is a tool I will keep in my shed to really help solve problems. 

Its not about having “all the answers”. It’s about listening intently, asking the right questions, creating trusting and open environments, and collaborating to create human-centred solutions. 

Design Thinking is not just a buzzword, but it encapsulates foundational principles: empathy, trust, creativity, teamwork, and continuous improvement, that I want to continue to build my career around.