Aren’t we all CREATIVE?
How many times have you thought of yourself as a non-creative person? or how many times have you held yourself back about your ideas because you thought you did not have the right answers from a creative perspective? The petty division between creatives and non — creatives is something which we humans have brought across communities.
David Kelly, the founder of IDEO design agency, founder of Stanford D.School, mentions in one of his interviews, how as a child we were not encouraged enough or disapproved by others to be a “creative type”. Many designers might relate to this where they have heard some of their clients saying that they were not “creative enough”.
The idea of Stanford d.school is to make the design knowledge open for all, as they believed that the design thinking could help people from marketing, management and engineering perform much better and more creatively at their jobs.
A famous psychologist Bandura believes that human beings can work upon their fear and achieve a newly developed confidence by overcoming that fear, through a series of steps which he defined with a term called “Guided Mastery”. “Self Efficacy” was a term defined by him as the confidence which generates through these steps. The design thinking also follows a similar step-by-step approach to bring about the creative spirit in any field.
According to IDEO, design thinking is defined as a process and mindset for collaboratively finding solutions for wicked problems in a variety of educational settings.
These five phases of Design Thinking are:
- Empathise — with your users
- Define — your users’ needs, their problem, and your insights
- Ideate — by challenging assumptions and creating ideas for innovative solutions
- Prototype — to start creating solutions.
- Test — solutions.
Design thinking is instrumental in solving wicked problems. The wicked problems are the ill-defined or unknown problems which may or may not have the right answers. Thus, it is an iterative process where knowledge is continuously questioned, and an attempt is made to identify the alternate strategies and solution with a holistic approach to empathising with problems that people face.
Doug Dietz, whose MRI design work for GE Healthcare, was nominated for International Design Excellence Award. He was disheartened to see a little girl scared to go inside the MRI Scanner and was lastly sedated for her scanning to be complete. The incident shook the designer, who then decided to collaborate with several other designers and engineers to create an experience that will comfortable for the little children going through MRI Scanning. Delighted by his work, the designer noticed the rise in the percentage of vulnerable patients thoroughly enjoying their MRI experience in their “pirate ship”. This brought a newly developed creative confidence in him, and Dietz was appointed as a thought leader in GE Design.
Design thinking has also been broadly recognised in STEM education, which should be viewed as a model of thinking to nurture students in the twenty-first century. The traditional belief that mathematics and science are not the “right type” of schools subjects in which students can build design thinking has been challenged in the current movement of STEM education.
The aim of this article was concluded by the vision that everyone can formally or non formally design to generate creative confidence inside them.
