Design Thinking and Imagination

There are many changes in an organization to master design work, the point is how to create a business environment for inspiring imagination, design thinking, creativity, flexibility, and risk intelligence.

Being able to become innovative to achieve the “art of possible” is being able to apply design thinking to create new things based on the business or customers’ needs. Fundamentally, design is a creative process of turning imagination into reality. There are architecture imagination, practical imagination, as well as aesthetic of imagination, which need to be leveraged in design scenario for creating new products or services to delight customers.

Design thinking is fueled with imagination, with the mix of other skills: As Einstein wisely put: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited, imagination encircles the world.” Often, to make a large leap into the future, what is lacking today, and the element you are looking for is imagination. We cannot envision a future different from the present without a developed and disciplined imagination. For decades, the organization has been talking about "exceptional designers," Design thinking is in fact both nature and nurtured. Beside creativity, there are a mix of ingredients such as strong technical skills, great communication skills, and the well-developed imagination. Design thinkers aren't afraid to use their imagination, turn things inside out, look at them from underneath, break them down into bits and pieces, shove bit A into bit B, paint them blue and orange, etc, all with no particular expectation that anything defined will happen, but it’s the good experimentation to design a product, service or business system with both effectiveness and elegance.

Disciplined imagination: Design thinking could be wild, there needs to have the very purpose to frame it. The purpose of design thinking is to use imagination for making “delightful” thing from “functioning to firm to delight.” It’s a creative ability in your toolbox to transform novel ideas into delightful products or services. Designers need to focus more on the future and less on the present. They need to gain an in-depth understanding of the problems and understanding the possible means to problems as well. Both of these require some imagination and a disciplined imagination which brings the potential solutions to bear on the problem in a novel, elegant and improved ways.

People are the center of design thinking: The construct of a design-driven innovation game allows the open-mindedness brainstorming: It’s important to create space for open dialogues and design brainstorming, developing a common understanding of innovation effort, creating the necessity and motivation for it, as well as getting the management buy-in. Whether you design the business process or user interfaces, what's important is for improving the customer experience. Process design and interface design integrate at the user. Imagination can be seen as helping one expand the initial idea and building a set of hypotheses about how the product of the idea will look like and how the customers will react to the product. The structural design shows how well the different parts of the system work and how they fit together cohesively; the innovative designs involve radically different ways of rethinking processes, simplify the user experience and add intuition and flexibility.

There are many changes in an organization to master design work, the point is how to create a business environment for inspiring imagination, design thinking, creativity, flexibility, and risk intelligence. An open mind leads to imagination, and imagination leads to discovery. The higher the level at which we are engaged and stimulated to imagine, the more likely we proactively stimulate creativity and master design thinking.

Posted in: Creativity,Innovation