Reflect on this week and looking forward to next week.

Congratulations for completing week 1 of the Design Thinking Toolbox.

This week we have reintroduced ourselves to the Design Thinking process and read two case studies which used some of the design thinking tools. I hope that you see there are commonalities but also differences in approaches due to the contexts the challenges exist in.

We then looked at some tools of the empathy stage. Remember empathy is not only about understanding our challenge and the stakeholders involved but understanding the depth with which these stakeholders interact with our challenge. For example: What language do they use and what do the words mean to them? How do they experience the world? With what perspectives do they view the experience through?

It can be difficult for us to empathise – and this might be because we are in an achievement based society – always striving for quick answers to save on time and resource. But empathy requires time to understand the motivations behind our users, their unconscious beliefs, prejudices and unfulfilled needs. I hope that you have seen that for this process to be successful we need to listen carefully to our users. This means the tools that we use need to be able to draw this out.

Tools we looked at included:

• Context Maps
• Empathy interviews
• Empathy Maps
• Observation and Immersion

There are many other tools, but these as a base are a great starting point and will help you adapt other tools as you learn about them.

The key is to find tools which allow you to remove your own bias and to collect the right data. This will then make the next stage of define easier.

Next week we will continue the design thinking toolbox with common tools used within the Define and Ideate stages.

I am looking forward to seeing you there.

Reflect on the first week by reflecting on the following 3 questions.

• Can you remember the mindsets? Which of the mindsets stick out to you the most now you have read some of the tools?
• What was your favourite tool of the Empathy stage and why?
• What was the biggest learning for you from week 1?

Choose one question to answer in the comments section below.