The Engineering Journey - Part 3: From Customer Whine to Innovation: How 'Design Thinking' Solves Real-World Problems

The Shift from Specification to Sympathy

In the previous post, we established that successful engineering design is a rigorous, multidisciplinary, and often iterative decision-making process that applies science and art to meet a societal or market need. We also noted that traditional or conventional design, often characterized by the “over-the-wall” approach, frequently leads to costly missteps because technical teams become isolated from the ultimate user.

The modern global market, hungry for new products at an accelerated pace, demanded a methodology that inherently minimized these inefficiencies while maximizing the chance of genuine, breakthrough innovation. The solution that has gained immense traction across industries—from technology giants to financial institutions (like Netflix, Uber Eats, GE, Airbnb, IBM, and Bank of America)—is design thinking.

Design thinking is fundamentally defined as a human-centered innovation process focused on producing creative solutions. Its single key difference from conventional design is the dedicated effort to empathize with the customer, which literally means putting oneself into the customer’s shoes. This methodology mandates that designers and engineers move out of the familiar comfort of their offices and analytical models and step directly into the field, forcing them to experience and become emotionally involved with the design problem.

This emphasis on the human element ensures that the eventual solution is not merely technically viable, but profoundly desired by the market.

The Three Lenses of Human-Centered Design

For a solution to be truly innovative and marketable, the design thinking approach insists that the product must pass through three critical “lenses” of human-centered design, as advocated by IDEO.org. A quality solution must sit precisely at the intersection of all three:

1. Desirability: This is the primary focus of empathy. The question here is: What does the customer want? Specifically, do customers recognize the value in the design, and do they feel this design successfully addresses their problems? A product can be feasible and viable, but if it is not desirable, it will fail in the marketplace.
2. Feasibility: This addresses the technical reality. The core question is: Is it technically possible? This requires a clear-eyed assessment of whether the necessary resources and technological means are known and available for the realization of the design.
3. Viability: This addresses the commercial sustainability. The concern here is: Is it financially possible? Beyond mere short-term profitability, viability ensures that, from a commercial and economic viewpoint, the business model surrounding the product is sustainable.

Only solutions that successfully address all three aspects—desirability, feasibility, and viability—will result in the innovative designs that are genuinely marketable.

The methodology itself is designed to promote a more open-minded approach, actively encouraging designers to collaborate not only with customers but also with people from disciplines that traditionally would not be involved in the design process. Instead of following formal, drawn-out bureaucratic procedures, design thinking aims for accelerated innovation through crude prototyping and the famous mantra of “failing fast to learn faster,” enabling quicker reaction times in development.

The Five Acts of Empathy: The Design Thinking Process

The overall design thinking process shares similarities with the broader design process journey. It operates as a continuous, cyclical effort to define and pursue a solution that meets the customer’s needs, often mirroring scientific thinking but grounding the questions in insights obtained directly from empathetic engagement.

The process is broken down into five distinct, often iterative, steps:

Step 1: Empathy (Learning About the Customer)

This step is the foundation of the human-centered approach. The designer’s responsibility is to delve deeply into understanding the people concerned with the design challenge. This means figuring out why and how people perform actions, what their physical and emotional needs are, and what the design’s potential value and meaning might be to them.

The methods used to achieve this empathy are direct and involve active engagement:

• Observe: Watch users interacting with the problem or existing solutions.
• Engage: Talk to users to understand their perspective and feelings.
• Listen: Pay attention not just to what is said, but to the emotional context.

For instance, in the design thinking activity related to a smart respiratory mask, the first step is to establish empathy through conversation. This involves asking warm-up questions, such as asking team members about the last time they wore a mask, and following up with prompts to explore feelings, comfort, effectiveness, and ease of use, all of which elicit emotions and lead to further questions. The designer must be non-judgmental and communicate that they understand and care about the other person’s feelings.

Step 2: Define (Focusing the Problem)

Once empathy is gained, the Define step shifts to clarifying and focusing the vast design space based on the insights gathered. This step is critical because the goal is to synthesize the information into a specific, meaningful, and implementable problem statement. Without this clear definition, the subsequent ideation phase will lack focus.

Defining the problem requires combining three essential elements into a powerful problem statement:

1. User: The specific person (or type of person) the design is for.
2. Need: The synthesized requirement or requirements that must be addressed by the design solution.
3. Insight: The synthesized information, understanding, and research gained through the empathy step.

The outcome is often captured in a concise design brief. A well-constructed design brief clarifies the scope of the project, including identifying target users, constraints (time, budget, safety), assumptions, and standards, and outlining key exploratory questions.

For the smart respiratory mask example, the Define step involves reviewing notes and reframing the design problem from the client’s point of view, focusing on their goals, wishes, and insights. The definition should be compelling and achievable. The outcome must define a point of view, such as: “The college student needs a way to design a smart mask because [reason related to comfort, cost, and health].” The constraints here would include: easy to use, less expensive, disposable, and comfortable to wear for long periods.

Step 3: Ideate (Generating Creative Solutions)

Ideation is the process of generating a large volume of potential concepts or ideas that address the defined user needs. This step demands that the team engage in divergent thinking—imagining solutions that go beyond the obvious.

The ideas generated must span a wide spectrum: they can be wild, silly, outrageous, emotional, generic, cost-effective, or simple. Techniques used in ideation include:

• Brainstorming: Encouraging all members to share any possible idea without judgment. All ideas are considered equally and recorded (often on post-it notes) for later discussion.
• SCAMPER Technique: A structural approach using trigger questions to generate new ideas from existing solutions. SCAMPER stands for:
  • Substitute (What materials/methods can be used instead?)
  • Combine (What uses or elements can be combined?)
  • Adapt (What other purposes might this serve?)
  • Minimize/Magnify (What features can be changed in scale or strength?)
  • Put to Other Uses (What other markets exist?)
  • Eliminate (What parts can be removed?)
  • Reverse/Rearrange (What parts can be reconfigured?)
• Analogy (or Biomimicry): Drawing design inspiration from similar problems solved in other fields, particularly nature. For instance, adopting the honeycomb pattern for its structural strength or mimicking fish for sonar devices.
• Patent Searches: Reviewing existing literature to find concepts, ideas, class/subclass numbers, and abstracts.

Through these methods, the team builds on existing ideas, draws inspiration from other domains, and uncovers unexpected areas of exploration. Prototypes are often employed during this phase to evaluate the ideas quickly in terms of their ability to generate innovative solutions for the users.

Step 4: Prototype (Building to Learn)

Prototyping is the stage where multiple iterations of synthesized ideas are brought to life quickly. Crucially, a prototype does not have to be a complex, finished device. It can be anything that a user can interact with or react to. This could be a physical gadget, a storyboard, or even just a post-it note.

The fundamental goal is to quickly build something using everyday materials and tools that allows the design team to assess user needs and refine the idea. This immediate, tangible interaction helps the design team narrow down the possibilities until a meaningful solution is obtained for further evaluation. This technique relies on the philosophy of accelerated innovation through “crude prototyping.”

Step 5: Test & Feedback (Iterating to Perfection)

Testing is where the prototype is evaluated with actual users, and feedback is solicited. This process is crucial because it allows the designers to gain empathy again for the people they are designing for.

Depending on the nature of the prototype, users evaluate its features and provide feedback, including positives, negatives, and suggestions for improvement. This feedback loop drives the iterative nature of design thinking: the results may lead the team to refine the idea, engage in further prototyping, or even return to the empathy stage to deepen their understanding of the user’s point of view and engagement. Any truly good design involves multiple iterations in order to create innovative solutions that successfully meet the user’s needs.

The Strategy of Creativity: Divergent and Convergent Thinking

The transition from a vast collection of ideas (Ideate) to a single, chosen solution (Detail Design) is managed through a strategic balance of two thinking processes:

1. Divergent Thinking (Creating Choices): This phase is all about expansion. The goal is to develop as many concepts and ideas as possible, pushing the boundaries of the design space (e.g., through brainstorming all possible uses for a grocery bag, including a mask, a wallet, or storage containers).
2. Convergent Thinking (Making Decisions): This phase is about contraction. The goal is to narrow the vast number of ideas generated by divergent thinking to identify the best candidate designs for further testing and evaluation.

The ideation and evaluation process itself is typically not complex or expensive, but it demands relentless iteration—modeling and testing a physical prototype as many times as needed (test, re-prototype, re-test, re-prototype, for example) to ensure the final prototype achieves perfection and meets consumer needs.

This rigorous evaluation often involves several techniques:

• Feasibility Judgment: An abstract method where the team asks: Is this concept feasible, or does it simply not meet the customer requirements or rely on unavailable technology?
• Go/No-Go Screening: A quick check to see if a concept can satisfy each customer or engineering requirement. If a concept receives only a few “no-go” answers, it is considered for modification; otherwise, it is discarded.
• Decision Matrix Technique (Pugh’s Method): A sophisticated, quantitative method for comparing multiple concepts. This technique is used to rapidly identify the strongest concept, foster new ideas, and deepen the understanding of customer requirements.

The Decision Matrix assigns a quantitative score by comparing every alternate concept against a datum (a baseline concept, often the existing design or the designer’s favorite idea). The comparison is conducted criterion-by-criterion (based on customer requirements):

• A score of + or +1 is given if the concept meets the criterion better than the datum.
• A score of S (same) or 0 is given if the concept performs as well as the datum.
• A score of - or -1 is given if the concept performs worse than the datum.

The satisfaction score is then calculated as the weighted total of these scores. If a concept has a good overall score, its strengths are identified; conversely, clusters of minus scores reveal requirements that are difficult to meet. This comparison process is repeated, potentially using the highest-scoring concept as the new datum, until the best concepts are clearly identified. The method is most effective when each team member performs the evaluation independently before comparing results, forcing continuous iteration until the team reaches consensus.

Design Thinking in Practice: Corporate Case Studies

The widespread adoption of design thinking across major industries confirms its efficiency in driving market success.

Apple: Systemic Quality Through Iteration

Apple’s product design and development process, famously spearheaded by Steve Jobs, is admired globally for its high success rate and reputation for quality. The product development cycle is systematic and detailed, requiring the design team to develop prototypes that are tested and reviewed iteratively. This cycle is rigorously implemented throughout the manufacturing process to ensure that every product launched is cutting-edge and offers a high-quality consumer experience. While rigorous, this process aligns closely with the design thinking principle of rapid prototyping and testing to refine an idea.

Kaiser Permanente: Solving the Human Hand-Off Problem

In a compelling application of empathy, Kaiser Permanente utilized design thinking to solve a problem related to the information flow between nurses during shift changes. The organization realized it lacked an effective system for recording and organizing patient care information that could be easily accessed by nurses across different shifts. Instead of imposing a purely technical IT solution, the design thinking approach helped them truly understand and better address the critical human and informational gap in patient care, leading to innovative solutions for continuity.

Shimano: Balancing Performance and Accessibility

Shimano, a key player in the bicycle parts market, used design thinking to establish a unique niche for itself. Recognizing that traditional design focused primarily on performance for expert riders, Shimano conducted extensive consumer research, including input from novice bikers via social media. This research revealed the necessity of addressing both performance and ease of use in manufacturing bicycle parts. By focusing on desirability for the average user, Shimano ensured the purchasing experience was user-friendly and the parts were accessible, carving out a new, profitable market segment.

The Fault Lines of Conventional Design

To truly appreciate the value of design thinking, it is essential to understand why conventional design often leads to failure or stagnation. The differences between the two methodologies highlight the core strategic shifts required for innovation:

Conventional design is reactive, waiting for a solution to fit predefined specifications. If the original specifications were incomplete, ambiguous, or based on incorrect assumptions—as frequently happens in the “over-the-wall” approach—the resulting product is fundamentally flawed.

Design thinking, conversely, is proactive and regenerative. By beginning with deep, emotional empathy, it ensures that the foundational question—“What do they really need?"—is answered correctly before any resources are committed to detailed design or manufacturing. The willingness to engage in accelerated learning, often through “crude prototyping” and embracing quick failure, significantly reduces the time and cost associated with late-stage design flaws, which can otherwise account for:

In essence, design thinking transforms the engineering journey from a technical pursuit governed by rigid standards into a continuous search for human meaning and value. This structured creativity ensures that when the concept finally progresses from the ideation phase to the rigorous evaluation of detail design, the resulting product is not just a triumph of engineering, but a commercially successful solution that addresses a genuine, deeply understood human need.

Analogy: If conventional design is like a tailor who insists on making a suit based only on a list of measurements (width, length, material type), design thinking is like a tailor who insists on living with the customer for a week first. The conventional tailor may deliver a technically perfect suit, but it may be the wrong style, made of the wrong fabric for the climate, or simply uncomfortable because the measurements didn’t capture the customer’s actual experience of wearing clothes (e.g., how they move, sit, or feel emotionally in the garment). The design thinking tailor uses the measurements (feasibility/viability) but only after deeply understanding the desirability—the desired outcome of confidence, comfort, and expression.