Design Thinking:
It is a human centered problem-solving approach that emphasizes
understanding user needs and iteratively developing solutions.
There are 5 stages:
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
Empathize
Define
Ideate
Prototype
Test
User Centered Design:
It is a framework that places the needs of the end users at the forefront of the
design process.
It involves involving users throughout the design process, conducting user
research, creating personas, and usability testing.
It ensures that the final product meets the requirements and expectations of
the target audience.
Context Analysis -> Defining Requirements -> Design -> Evaluation
Agile Design:
It is an iterative and collaborative approach that integrates design into the
agile development process.
It involves working in short iterations, continuously gathering feedback, and
adapting designs accordingly.
It allows flexibility and quick response to changes, ensuring the final product
aligns with the user needs and business goals.
Design -> Analyze -> Implement -> Develop
Lean UX:
It focuses on reducing waste materials and maximizing value in the design
process.
It emphasizes rapid experimentation, minimal documentation, and early
validation of design ideas.
It encourages cross functional collaboration and a continuous learning mindset
to deliver streamlined and user-centric solutions.
Think -> Make -> Check (In a Loop)
It combines Lean Startup principles with User Experiences (UX) Design.
Information Architecture(IA):
It focuses on organizing and structuring information to enhance usability and
findability.
It involves creating intuitive navigation systems, organizing content
hierarchies, and designing effective search functionalities.
It ensures that users can easily locate and access the information within a
product or website.
It is a structural design of shared information environments.
It typically involves the concept of information that is utilized and applied to
actions that need detailed details of complicated information system.
IA = Users – Context – Content (IA in the center with the other 3 circles like a
Penn Diagram)
Material Design:
It is a visual design framework developed by Google.
It provides guidelines and principles for creating intuitive and consistent user
interfaces across different platforms and devices.
It emphasizes responsive layouts, realistic motion, depth, and meaningful
transitions, creating a visually appealing and seamless user experience.
Types of Design Frameworks:
The various design frameworks used in different fields to guide and structure
the design process.
1) Human Centred Design(HCD):
It focuses on understanding the needs, behaviors, and preferences of users to
create effective and meaningful designs.
It involves an iterative process of observation, ideation, prototyping, and
testing to ensure the end product meets user requirements.
2) Lean UX:
It is an approach to user experience(UX) design that emphasizes collaboration,
iteration, and a focus on creating values for users while minimizing waste.
The key characteristics of Lean UX include:
1) Cross – Functional Collaboration: Lean UX encourages collaboration
among team members from different disciplines. This helps everyone to
have a shared understanding of the user’s needs.
2) Early and Frequent User Feedback: Lean UX advocates for involving
users early in the design process to gather feedback and validate
assumptions.
3) Rapid Prototyping: Lean UX emphasizes creating quick and low-fidelity
prototypes that can be tested and refined based on user feedback.
4) Iterative Design: Lean UX promotes an iterative and incremental
approach to design, where multiple design iterations are made based on
user feedback and insights.
5) Minimizing Waste: Lean UX aims to reduce waste by focusing on creating
only the necessary design deliverables and avoiding unnecessary
documentation or features that do not add value to user.
3) Agile Design:
The design process is divided into smaller increments or iterations, often
referred to as sprints or cycles.
Each iteration lasts for a fixed period and involves a cross-functional team.
The team works together to define, design and deliver a usable and valuable
product increment at the end of each iteration.
4) Atomic Design:
It is a methodology for creating design systems.
It breaks down interfaces into smaller, reusable components called atoms,
which can be combined to form molecules, organisms, templates and pages.
This ensures consistency and scalability across designs.
5) Material Design:
It is a design framework developed by Google.
It provides guidelines and principles for creating visually appealing and
consistent user interfaces across different platforms.
It focuses on realistic motion, depth, and responsive interactions.
6) Design Sprint:
It is a time-constrained framework for solving design challenges.
It typically spans five days and involves a structured process of understanding
the problem, generating ideas, prototyping, and testing solutions.
It is used to quickly validate concepts and make informed design decisions.
7) Information Architecture:
It focuses on organizing and structuring information to enhance usability and
findability.
It involves creating clear navigation systems, labelling schemes, and
categorization methods to ensure users can easily locate and understand
information within a digital product or website.
Engineering Design Problem Solving
Engineering problem solving is the process of using scientific principles,
mathematical techniques, and systematic approaches to identify, analyze, and
resolve challenges encountered in various engineering disciplines.
General Framework for engineering problem solving:
1) Problem definition
2) Research and information gathering
3) Generate alternatives
4) Analysis and Evaluation
5) Decision-making
6) Detailed Design
7) Implementation
8) Testing and Validation
9) Iterative Process
10)
Documentation
11)
Implementation and Maintenance
12)
Continuous Improvement
Design Solution Definition:
The design solution definition process is used to translate the high level
requirements derived from the stakeholder expectations and the outputs of
the logical decomposition process into a design solution.
This involves transforming the defined logical decomposition models and their
associated sets of derived technical requirements into alternative solutions.
This design solution definition is used to generate the end product
specifications that are used to produce the product and to conduct product
verification.
This process may be further defined depending on whether there are
additional subsystems of the end product that need to be defined.
Process Activities:
Recognize Need/ Opportunity -> Identify and quantify goals -> create concepts
-> Do trade studies -> Select Design -> Increase Resolution -> (Repeat the
previous steps 2 times) -> Implement Decisions -> Perform Mission
Developing design solutions is a crucial process in various fields including
graphic design, product design, architecture, software development, and
others.
It involves identifying problems or opportunities, brainstorming ideas, refining
concepts, and ultimately creating a final design that meets the specific needs
and requirements of the project.
Some steps are:
1) Understand the Problem
2) Define Goals and Objectives
3) Ideation and Brainstorming
4) Evaluate and Prioritize Ideas
5) Research and Inspiration
6) Prototyping And Iteration
7) User Testing and Feedback
8) Refinement
9) Finalize and Implement
10)
Review and Evaluation
Making Design Solutions:
Design solutions involve creating effective and innovative solutions to address
specific problems or challenges in various fields, such as product design, user
experience (UX) design, graphic design, architectural design, and more.
The goal of the design solution is to meet the needs of the end-users or clients
while considering functionality, usability, and other relevant factors.
Some Steps in making design solutions:
1) Identify the problem
2) Research and gather information
3) Brainstorming and ideation
4) Prioritize and refine
5) Create prototype
6) User testing and feedback
7) Iterate and Improve
8) Finalize Design
9) Implementation
10)
Evaluate and Learn
Evaluation Design:
Analysis -> Design -> Develop -> Implement -> Evaluate (Keep this in a repeated
cycle drawing pie chart)
Program goals:
1) Evaluation Research Questions
2) Purpose of the evaluation
3) Available resources
To evaluate the effect that a program has on participants’ health outcomes,
behaviors, and knowledge, there are three different potential designs:
1) Experimental Design:
It is used to determine if a program or intervention is more effective
than the current process.
Involves randomly assigning participants to a treatment or control
group.
This type of design is often considered to be the gold standard against
which other research designs are judged, as it offers powerful technique
for evaluation cause and effect.
2) Quasi – Experimental Design:
It does not have a random assignment component, but may involve
comparing a treatment group to a similar group that is not participating
in the program.
Quasi – experimental methods are used to estimate the effect of a
treatment, policy, or intervention when controlled experiments are not
feasible.
3) Non – Experimental Design:
Does not involve a comparison group.
It may include pre- and post – intervention studies with no control or
comparison group, case study approaches, and post – intervention –
only approaches, among others.
The key feature of this is the lack of a control group.
While non-experimental evaluation studies are likely to produce
actionable findings regarding program outcomes, best practices, and
performance improvement, they cannot control for extraneous factors
that could influence outcomes, such as a community contextual factors
or selection bias.
Other frameworks that have been used to evaluate rural initiatives or
programs include:
1) Process Evaluation: It is a systematic, focused plan for collecting data
to determine whether the program model is implemented as
originally intended and, if not, how operations differ from those
initially planned.
2) Outcome Evaluation: It examines how well a project achieved the
outcomes it set at the beginning.
3) Impact Evaluation: It reviews the effect that a program had on
participants and stakeholders of the project.
4) Performance Monitoring: It is ongoing evaluation of the program to
have data at the baseline and at key milestones in the work plan.
5) Cost-Benefit Evaluation: It studies the cost-effectiveness of the
program by reviewing the relationship between the project costs and
outcomes from the program.
Stakeholder Map
A Stakeholder Map is a visual representation that helps identify and analyze
the stakeholders involved in a project, initiative, or problem.
It provides insights into their interests, influence, and relationships, allowing
for effective engagement and decision-making.
By plotting stakeholders on a grid based on their level of influence and
interest, you can determine how to prioritize engagement efforts and address
their needs.
Identify Individual People:
Identify everyone connected with or impacted by the project on the
whiteboard. Make a point of including precise names and roles.
Stakeholder Map:
The key stakeholders are:
1) Customers: The aim of the project is to attract or serve the customer.
2) Suppliers: The suppliers play a critical role in the project, providing
essential components, materials, or expertise.
3) Finance: Financial contributors’ needs to be informed about a project’s
progress at intervals convenient to them and communicated in a manner
that meets their preferences, as well as their initial need to feel
confident that their money would be used wisely.
4) Governments: To a large extent, governments are responsible for
establishing the laws and controlling how citizens and other actors
behave.
5) Employees: Because the company needs a certain amount of man
strength to finish the job, the employees are its most valuable asset.
6) Purchase: Procurement is the method of discovering and agreeing to
terms and purchasing goods, services, or other works from an external
source, often with the use of tendering or competitive bidding process.
7) Trade Association
8) Marketing and Sales
Make a circular diagram with all the 8 points (just name) and mark the arrow
to the centre with the 9th term named Project.
Brainstorming Session in Design Thinking:
Brainstorming is a key activity in the design thinking methodology.
It is a collaborative session that encourages participants to generate a wide
range of ideas and solutions to a specific problem or challenge.
The goat is to stimulate creativity, promote diverse perspectives, and foster
innovation.
Various Brainstorming Techniques used in design thinking are:
1) Traditional Brainstorming: Participants freely contribute ideas without
any judgement or critique. The goal is to generate a large quantity of
ideas, encouraging a flow of creativity and diverse perspectives.
2) Mind Mapping: A Visual technique that starts with a central idea and
branches out into related concepts. It stimulates associative thinking.
3) SCAMPER (Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to another use,
Eliminate, and Reverse): Each participant needs to think about ways to
modify or enhance existing ideas or concepts.
4) Worst Possible Idea: Participants deliberately propose the worst or most
outrageous ideas. This technique encourages thinking outside the box
and often leads to unexpected insights and innovative solutions.
5) Role Storming: Participants take on different roles/personas to generate
ideas from their perspectives.
6) Six Thinking Hats: Participants wear different metaphorical hats, each
representing a different thinking style. This technique helps explore
ideas from multiple angles and encourages balanced thinking.
7) Random word association: Random words or objects are presented, and
participants must associate them with the problem/challenge at hand.
Promotes creative thinking and unexpected connections.
8) SCAMPER Questions: A series of questions based on SCAMPER
technique.
9) 3-12-3 Technique: Participants brainstorm individually for 3 mins, then
share their ideas in groups of 3 for 12 minutes, followed by a group
presentation of the top 3 ideas. Promotes individual ideation as well as
collaboration and synthesis.