Design Thinking Academy Bootcamp

Shaping a Nation of Problem Solvers

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With the ambitious goal of making Design Thinking a national competency to support the country’s drive towards sustainable and inclusive development, the Design Center has been advocating for Design Thinking for years. In November 2023, the Agency tapped Germany’s Hasso Plattner Institute for a Design Thinking Bootcamp for design and creative professionals, innovation hub managers, and industry partners at the Yard, Menarco Tower, BGC, Taguig City.

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The Bootcamp started with a lecture by HPI D-School Design Thinking Coaches Clara Weiker and Jentz Tan followed by a hands-on bootcamp on the Design Thinking process to enable an in-depth understanding of the whole process. Clara underscored the importance of the design thinking core principles indicated below as one goes through the whole process:

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• Human Centeredness – design thinking puts the user at its core, and posits that they too are part of the design team.  

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• Problem Exploration – by putting the user at the heart of the work process, it enables us to explore the problem based on what we learn from the user, from their behaviors and processes. We are asked to reframe the problem depending on the insights we get as we dig deeper into the user’s context.

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• Collaboration in Diverse Teams – different backgrounds and contexts enrich the ideation and iteration process since they provide multiple perspectives.

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• Learning through Experimentation – opportunities to experiment also provides windows to know whether the solution works or not; this also stresses that early experimentation reduces risk and cost of failures when opportunities to pivot and re-do the solution early on.  

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The Design Thinking Process

Design Thinking is a systematic approach to complex problems from all areas of life. This includes product, services, or cultural change in companies. The approach goes far beyond design disciplines that box the understanding of design to tangible creative outputs. In contrast to many approaches in science and practice that address tasks of technical solvability, it deepens design’s role for problem solving, ensuring prioritization of user desires and needs as well as user-oriented inventions, positioning it at the center of the process. Design thinkers look at the problem through the user's perspective and thus assume the role of the user, prior to exploring potential solutions.

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Design Thinking requires constant feedback between the development team of a solution and the target audience. Design thinkers ask end-users questions and take a close look at their processes and behaviors. Solutions and ideas are made visible and communicable as early as possible in the form of prototypes so that potential users can test and provide feedback long before they are completed or launched on the market, taking an iterative process that is open to, and promotes failure, to come up with the best and most relevant solutions. Design Thinking therefore takes the human perspective as its starting point for designing innovative, attractive, and relevant products, services, or experiences, without losing sight of the technological and economic perspective.

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HPI D-School puts perspective on the Design Thinking Process by dividing it into two spaces: the problem space and the solution space. The first three stages – understand, observe, and point of view – help in determining the right problem based on a design thinker’s processing of the user’s behaviors, thought processes, and backgrounds. Meanwhile, the solution space – ideation, prototyping, and testing – is where the design thinker comes up with a variety of solutions to the user problem, builds a product or service as the solution and tests it out as it goes through constant feedback.

Key takeaways stress how critical empathy is in the design thinking process as it enables designing meaningful solutions through observation, deep understanding of the user, and reframing challengers as point of view. Clara also highlighted that coming up with many ideas, prototyping fast, experiencing the solution to gain feedback, and discovering pain points or failures faster are part of the whole process.