What is Design Thinking?

(MUSIC PLAYS)

KIRBY CLARK: I think one of the most important skill to have to be a good design thinker is curiosity. I mean, I don’t even know if that’s a skill. It’s just something that’s in you. But it’s very important to be curious about everything, asking questions, researching, empathising with other people. It’s also really important to suspend the need to solve. Often when we’re given a problem, we wanna jump straight into ideation or developing a design. So it’s really important to, practice that skill within yourself on suspending the need to solve a problem straight away and instead love a problem. So becoming really curious about what it is, that this problem, encompasses.

FREDDIE OST: We believe that you need to have that criticism against almost everything, a critical eye, both visual as well as political or any kind of like, you need to criticise everything in this world. And by doing that, you will almost come in full into design process thinking automatically because it has to do with criticising things and finding your way and disrupting and doing things differently.

ERIK KOCKUM: Like have interest in something else than only design. You know it’s like so much all the work we do like connects to everything that’s going on in society and politics etc, you know. And, I think that’s, it’s so many times that we’ve seen people in our industry or like, designers or agencies that do, they put something out as like extremely stupid and you can see how they, they own, only saw it from my like, design perspective or like create the croft perspective or something, but they didn’t think about at all how this would like, actually be seeing from other people or you know, when they put it.

So it’s like, I think it’s important to be able to like step away from your little playground. And like, see it from a different time.

FREDDIE OST: Definitely. That’s super important than, well, the skills we look for, when it comes to design thinkers, it’s definitely people who have other interests than just design people who are aware of what’s going on in their home country or in Sweden or wherever, politics and culture and like, we think that’s super important, enabled to become a good designer.

KIRBY CLARK: So there are a few keys to ensuring that there is an effective application of design thinking. And one of them is really just practice, practice, practice, practice. It’s about going through the motions and not skipping straight to the end. There’s a great analogy out there which actually refers to coming up with ideas, in the way of pouring a beer from a tap. So when you first tap a keg, those hospo workers are probably familiar with this, that when you pour the first beer it’s all froth and it’s not a very good beer. But the second one is good, the next one is even better.

So, the design process is similar to that and coming up with ideas and similar to that. The first idea is always the worst. Keep going… (LAUGHS) Keep going through that process and practice, practice, practice.

FREDDIE OST: What we do at SNASK, is that we ask everyone to think, to criticise, to really challenge ideas and we also challenge them and we wanted to be an open discussion and everyone can criticise anything they want and it’s very, very flat hierarchy within the group and team. And that way we think that we can ensure, like design thinking, that is, for that purpose.