Immersive Technologies to Accelerate Innovation

4User-Centered Innovation Methods: Design Thinking, Double Diamond, Lean UX and Time to Concept

Knowing how to listen means possessing, in addition to one’s own, the brains of others.

LEONARDO DA VINCI

4.1. Design Thinking

Design Thinking is a user-centered innovation approach developed by Rolf Faste in the 1980s at Stanford University. This approach is structured to take into account, as much as possible, the characteristics, needs and expectations of the potential future users of the innovation being designed. This also means that the approach is not techno-centric. In other words, the designer does not start their project using the technologies they master; the designer enters in contact with the users of the service/product to identify needs, without presuppositions about the solutions. This point is far from neutral: it implies that the starting point of a Design Thinking approach is neither an identified need nor a technological opportunity, but a desire to innovate. A typical situation in which Design Thinking is particularly relevant is when a company wants to improve an existing service or product.

The Design School of Stanford University defines the Design Thinking process in five successive steps. It includes occasional loops and backtracking.

The purpose of empathy is to identify all the needs of users with regard to the task in hand. This involves an analysis of the context and constraints based on various specific methods such as interviews or shadowing¹.

The ...