Confidence and Motivation in Design Thinking

Confidence and Motivation in Design Thinking

• Creating teams out of people with different backgrounds, known as interdisciplinarity, is an essential prerequisite for design thinking.
• The purpose of this paper is to explore the possible gaps created by the varying experience level of design thinking practitioners.
• How the practitioner feels - Empathy between practitioner and stakeholder is important. A stakeholder should trust a practitioner to keep study and design thinking a top priority.
• Design Thinking Traits - Design thinking process navigates using three constraints; feasibility, viability, desirability. Some steps to navigate with are; empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. Inspiration can come from; creativity, ambidextrous thinking, teamwork, user-centeredness, curiosity and optimism.
• 4 principles to design thinking are:
• 1) The Human Rule - All design activity is social in nature.
• 2) The Ambiguity Rule - Innovation demands experimentation at the limits of our knowledge and the freedom to see things differently.
• 3) The re-design Rule - We must understand social change to better estimate social and technical conditions we will encounter in the future.
• 4) The Tangibility Rule - Prototypes that are tangible are better communicated and understood.
• Personal Practitioner Traits - We need to look at the practitioner as an individual and see the different aspects of insecurities and doubt that they may have so that a team can work on these before it effects a project in the long term.
• Creativity - There are 5 discovery skills essential for innovation; Associating, Questioning, Observing, Networking, and Experimenting.
• Combination of Expertise(technical and intellectual), Creative thinking skills(How flexibly and imaginative) and motivation(intrinsic value of thought) equals Creativity
• Constraints - Creativity needs constraints
• Causal vs. Effectual Reasoning - As an entrepreneur you have to be creative given the constraints on resources like time and money.
• Effectual Reasoning - Using the available resources in the right way to create a path to the solution of a problem.
• Success and value creation is dependent on creativity connecting association with ambidextrous thinking.
• Hunches - There are 2 systems in the working brain.
• 1) Fast Thinking - Unconscious, effortless, Automatic, no self awareness or control, Superficial impulsive, Assess the situation, Deliver updates
• 2) Slow Thinking - Deliberate and conscious effortful controlled mental process, with self awareness or control, Logical and skeptical Analytical, Seek new or missing info, Make decisions.
• Flow - Optimal experience, those times when people report feeling of concentration and deep enjoyment.
• With Flow emotional problems disappear and there is an exhilarating feeling of transcendence.
• There must be a clear set of goals.
• There must be feedback that allows adjustment for performance in flow state.
• To facilitate an environment for good Flow:
• Create Spatial arrangements
• Playground design - Charts for information input, flow graphs, project summaries, and open topics of conversation
• Parallel, Organized working.
• Target Group Focus
• Advancement of existing one.

Creating Confidence

• Creative confidence is key for jumping into risks of spending a lot of time prototyping and getting things done with creative building and communication.

Mindset

• People have different mindsets so understanding the persona and character of the people you work with in a team is a important to figuring out what part of the projects people will work best in.
• Mindsets are different for creative thinking, business management, social networking an effort in building prototypes.

Empathy

• Understanding someone and there problems and needs.

Communication

• Being able to communicate a business plan on where it is and where it should be.
• Understanding mindsets before starting a project will help communication flow when the work starts.

Experience

• Defining Experience - communication and understanding
• Process Experience - prototyping research and networking
• Background experience - To assign a practitioner with a type of experience on what their mindset and skills are.

Difference between novice and experts.

• Experts accumulate a large number of examples of problems and solutions
• Novice step back from accumulating and conceptualize abstract ideas related in their domain of expertise.
• They recognize underlying principles rather than focusing on the surface problems.

Experience as a confidence booster

• There are are actually no indications on correlations between experience confidence and performance.

Interview Structure

• These 4 points should be brought to the interview
• The human rule • The ambiguity rule • The re-design rule • The tangibility rule
• Audio from interview can be used.
• Good flow in conversation and understanding persons mindset right off the bat leads to a good interview.

• It is important to consider that there are more factors affecting how practitioners experience design thinking that just the practitioners view on the process.
• How you experience design thinking depends on the context, environment, team members and mindsets, teachers projects and communication.

Conclusion to Study

• A team and its composition plays a central role when is come to the motivation of the practitioners.
• For financial and engineering planning lack of measurable outcomes could create gaps.
• Providing examples that can link a practitioner to relate to the real word is a great way to stimulate confidence and motivation.
• Having time is important. If you feel rushed than the experience can feel un natural which can cause a gap.