Blog Post

Shelters are one of the three primary needs of man, as we spend up to 90% of our lives in buildings. But as the world civilised over the years, specialisation grew, and today countless stakeholders make up the design, delivery, and management process of buildings. Often, built industry professionals focus more on the structures we deliver and less on the end-users. The outcome is a suboptimal user experience within the facilities.

Other sectors face similar challenges but have increasingly embraced user-centric processes to guide their product iterations, design, delivery, and updates. A popular process and mindset that have seen global adoption across every industry today is Design Thinking.

This article discusses the concept of Design Thinking and its application to the Building Construction Industry, especially Architecture practices.

First, What is Design Thinking?

Design thinking is a way to get a team to think creatively about its products and services from its customer's perspectives.

The Design Thinking exercise involves representatives from every discipline - business, IT, marketing, legal, design, user research, testers, operations, etc. This ensures that all perspectives are covered, and everyone is on the same page. The process helps a team identify and fix actual customer pain points. It also gives a team an early measurable understanding of which of its ideas is likely to be successful with its customers.

Stages of Design Thinking

The Design Thinking process involves three major stages:

1. Ideation: this involves all the different disciplines in a team - a rounded insight based on a holistic view produces creative solutions. Ideation fuels the creative process for everyone else, leading to great ideas and a sense of shared ownership of the solution.
2. Paper Prototyping: Paper Prototypes are typically sticky notes on copier papers. It is a fast, cheap, and straightforward way to cover all angles after ideation. The prototype can be created in a day and usability-tested with consumers the next day to see how well it works for them and the needed changes before product development. The low fidelity of paper prototypes encourages honest customer feedback because they will realise the team is still open to making changes. Customer feedback can be brutal, but it's much better to hear it early - paper prototyping is much cheaper than rework.



3. Implementation Plan: After the build, test, and learn cycle with the paper prototype, follows a high-level plan for building the product. The plan is incremental, set up to deliver business benefits early in the process and add functionality piece by piece after each new revision. That lets the team test at multiple points whether they are on track to meet their goals and deliver something people will use. Because the whole team was involved in creating the plan, it's much more likely achievable.

The beauty of the design thinking process lies in getting early customer-centric design input and prototype feedback. The frequent deliverables and opportunities to measure progress against initial goals allow course corrections through product development and implementation.

Advantages of Design Thinking and Agile Methodologies

1. Design Thinking creates clear project goals with early-prototyped and tested products.
2. The early collaborations bring about high feasibility of the products.
3. They provide precise costing due to set phases, built-in test points, and metrics.
4. They provide multiple opportunities to measure, change direction, and deliver the right product.
5. They enable people from outside the team to understand and, more importantly, contribute to project deliverables.
6. They reduce time to market by creating the essential bits that deliver the most business benefit earlier - while the team fills in the spaces around that core product in subsequent iterations.