[MUSIC] So we know what design thinking looks like in theory. Let's now delve into what it looks like in practice. Going back to this picture of the design process, these elements, these moments of the design process, inspiration, ideation, iteration and ultimately implementation. I want to drill down on each of the first three. Talk about what does is it really mean to listen, what does it mean to analyze, and what does it mean to test and prototype? And again we're all working towards this idea of a process that will start wide with lots of options and then eventually narrow tighter towards the best and highest value options. So let's talk first about inspiration, listening, and dreaming. What does it look like? If you want to listen to people, you have to go out and find them. People who are feeling the pain, the problem that you want to address, you have to listen. And there are two ways you can listen. You can listen externally, which is sitting, receiving facts, understanding a problem from kind of a distance. And that's important to understand a kind of a view of a problem from above and from a point of detachment. But there's a second way to listen which is to listen from the inside, and that means understanding the problem the way the person who is experiencing it is feeling it. That means getting into their heart, getting into their feelings about what they're experiencing as they go through the challenge of confronting the problem that you're interested in solving. If you listen well, you can get a lot of insights. And it can fuel the second piece, which is the process of dreaming and thinking about all the range of possibilities. So let's talk about this difference between listening and really listening. Listening, on the surface, involves kind of gathering facts, organizing them in ways that are convenient and comfortable for ourselves. We typically will go in with a sense of what we're trying to get out of the process of interviewing or listening to someone. We'll try to fit what we hear into what we already know. But there's another approach to listening that says, what if we were to suspend all of our assumptions? What if we were to suspend all of our beliefs and simply receive from the person in front of us their perspective, their sense of the problem, the feelings that they go though, the frustrations, the pain that they feel? This would give us a slightly different set of data points in terms of what we're going to learn about the problem. So I'd like you to think about two ways of listening. I'm not saying not to go into an interview with your own set of beliefs. That's fine, you can have some assumptions. You can go in and try to get some facts. That's normal. But I'm inviting you to take a second step. When you go out to try to solve a problem, find people who are experienced in the problem and allow them to come forward with their interpretation, their feelings, their deepest kind of experience of the issue at hand. So you want to be able to receive that information and process it, because it's going to be a critical point from which you're going to try to innovate and find a solution. So how do you actually listen? There are a lot of techniques. There's individual interviews, which is where you sit down with someone face-to-face and you simply ask them a series of questions. You ask them to think aloud about the problems that they're confronting, and you listen to their version of the problem. There's a second techniques which is group interviews or focus groups. Here you assemble a small group, maybe three, five, maybe seven people in a circle, and you engage them in a conversation. Now you're not just having a one on one, you're having a group process where people are sharing together and collecting together insights and experiences. You can also do what's called in context immersion. That's where you go out into the field, and you shadow and follow someone who's going through a process or an experience or a pain point. And you experience it with them. You're right next to them, you're on their shoulder. You're in the moment, you're in the immersion of the context. The fourth technique is documentation. And by documentation, I mean using photos, video, and sketches to kind of draw the picture of the problem. Here what you're trying to do is not just hear and see the problem. But you're trying to actually collect and document it and create a scrapbook of interpretations of the problem. Finally, there's another process where you start to listen, not just to a small group of people, but to an entire community. You're engaging in community discovery where you're going out and talking to lots of people in the community. Doing surveys and engaging with people who are in the street in the world that you're interested in to understand a more macro perspective on the problem. And finally, you can step out a little bit from the field and go to experts and find their perspective on the problem. There are other people who have probably worked in the area you're interested in, who've known the people that you're interested in helping. You can talk to them and get their perspectives as well. If you put all these listening techniques together, you're going to start to get some very rich information on the problem at hand, on the way in which the problems experienced by the people you're trying to help. [MUSIC]
