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The Design Thinking Workbook
Book

The Design Thinking Workbook

Essential Skills for Creativity and Business Growth

Charvi Parikh and C. J. Meadows
Emerald Publishing Limited, 2022
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Editorial Rating

9

Qualities

  • Applicable
  • Concrete Examples
  • For Beginners

Recommendation

Companies are ever on the lookout for better and more efficient ways of creating designs to solve their consumers' toughest issues, but they sometimes find themselves lost in a sea of ideas without knowing how to proceed. Designers Charvi Parikh and C. J. Meadows’s handbook of design thinking tools will guide you through the innovation process, from challenge to prototype. Whether you’re a start-up founder or part of a well-established organization, this text will help you learn skills to boost your creativity, understand your customers and identify the right problems to solve.

Summary

Design thinking solves human-centered problems.

While new technology, like artificial intelligence, can measure and predict human behavior, it doesn’t answer the question of why people act they way they do – such as why people buy one type of soap over another. Creating solutions that actually address human-centered problems involves designing from the consumer’s point of view.

Companies that embrace this style of design thinking grow twice as fast and receive 75% higher returns for their stakeholders. Focusing on customer insights – such as, people buy soap based on how refreshing it sounds – rather than market trends – such as, people buy a lot of colorful soap – leads to three times the “operating income” and twice the amount of “return on assets.”

Design thinking is a lengthy process that works particularly well in solving complex, unclear people problems. For example, if you work at a hospital and notice that patients almost never return for their follow-up appointments, design thinking can help you determine why, and how you could innovate a solution to get people to come back.

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About the Authors

Charvi Parikh and Dr. C. J. Meadows are both designers and innovation consultants. 

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