After our intensive Design Thinking workshop at ISDI Madrid (leading business school in digital transformation), we repeat the experience at ISDI Barcelona on 06/22/17, within its #ISDITalks format. Once again we had the opportunity to share an agile innovation dynamic with the attendees in this one and a half hour express workshop. The workshop was given by Mónica Muñoz, co-founding partner of The Innova Room.
Design Thinking workshop at Barcelona
Tim Brown, the creator of IDEO, defines Design Thinking as “a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible, and with what a viable business strategy can do. in value for the client and in a market opportunity”.
But Design Thinking is not the heritage of designers; we can all be Design Thinkers without and innovate in the business from different angles than designers. This methodology is especially interesting in environments of high complexity, high uncertainty and limited knowledge of the data. Therefore, very suitable in phases of creation or transformation of a business.
On the other hand, the power of Design Thinking compared to other agile methodologies lies in the human approach (human centered design) and in the joint creativity of teams with a great diversity of profiles. Keys that are treated in the presentation:
- How Design Thinking is defined and which actors it involves.
- Innovation in customer experience and service design.
- Similarities and differences of Design Thinking with other agile and iterative methodologies: Lean, Agile, Scrum, Sprints…
- Tools used in each of the Design Thinking phases: Persona, Empathy Map, Affinity Map, Customer Journey, Service Blueprint, Storyboard, Role Play…
Presentation used as an introduction to the topic (in Spanish):
Case study: repositioning a hotel
After the introduction to Design Thinking we carry out a practical exercise in teams. The challenge posed was: “Reposition the (hypothetical) Hotel Bruc”. To this end, two consecutive exercises were carried out to generate ideas, select them and develop solutions. In order to increase the variety of solutions, attendees were divided into two approaches to the same challenge:
A) How to make Hotel Bruc more disruptive.
B) How to make Hotel Bruc more luxurious.
In the photo album of the session, the creative atmosphere that prevailed is intuited, as well as the quality of the proposals. Since this is a fast-paced workshop it is difficult to sort through and develop ideas, but many interesting concepts emerged. In the following phases of the Design Thinking methodology, ideas would be prototyped to confront them with potential users and with the market. But the goal of the session was to stop at the creative phase without limiting the ideas.
See all the idea sheets generated in each of the two territories, clicking on the following images: