*Design here absolutely doesn’t mean whatever you are thinking right now.
If not that, then What is Design Thinking?
Design thinking is a process/approach of thinking about a problem.
Thinking is a very complex thing to do, especially on open ended subjects. You will start at A and will be at Q even before you realize you wasted hours thinking completely off track, and sometimes circling around the same thoughts.
Design thinking solves that by providing a structure to ‘how you think’, a pipeline that only pushes your thinking in one direction.
Who said boundaries were bad!?
Once you have a structured approach, it becomes very easy to move forward and sometimes back to redefine the problem.
Stages of Design Thinking:
It starts with empathizing with people/processes/institutions/elements that are affected by the problem.
Simply put “a filtered water bottle built to maximize utilization of space while transportation” is the problem.
Empathize with the stakeholders, cylindrical bottles leave out a lot of space unoccupied as voids.
Defining the problem: Building a bottle that can help maximizing the space occupied while transportation.
Ideating on the problem: Squares are the easiest shape to build with a mould and helps occupy 100% of the space.
Prototype: Building multiple cardboard box prototypes with 1kg of sand to mimic an actual bottle of 1 liter.
Testing: Testing with stacking of multiple such prototypes, decreases voids by 100%.
Prototype 2: Building Minimum Viable Product to test with users.
Users find the bottles extremely difficult to carry.
Redefining the Problem Statement: Building a bottle that can help in maximizing the space occupied + should be easy to carry.
Ideating:
1) A side handle – Increases the void area – rejected
2) A top handle – better than a bottle with side handle, but difficult to stack, overall not a great improvement over cylindrical bottles.
3) Hexagonal bottles – 100% space occupied, easier to carry compared to square bottles.
Prototyping:
Building cardboard prototypes with sand to test stability and space occupation – high stability, high space occupation check.
User Testing:
Easy to carry, even with slippery hands.
Good product, check.
No idea why they don’t use hexagonal bottles.
