The Importance of Design Thinking and Teamwork

For the past couple of weeks, we have being doing a design sprint in class. Our end goal was to create a product or service that helps young Type 1 Diabetes in their everyday lives. In groups of five, we used design thinking to do research, concept thinking, prototyping, and testing to come up with our best idea to help this target audience.

What is Design Thinking?
Design thinking is a method that teaches individuals new strategies to solve problems. There are five steps to design thinking: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. I used our sprint process to explain how each of these five steps works below.

Empathize

To begin our design thinking process, we knew we had to empathize with our target audience. We each researched Type 1 Diabetes, because none of us knew that much about it. To combine and condense our research, we did concept testing. This included throwing all of our questions and ideas onto a whiteboard and sorting them into groups and categories that made sense to us.

Define

Next, we refined our question. We wanted to find a category that we felt would be most beneficial to a young Type 1 Diabetic. We came up with: How can someone with Type 1 Diabetes discretely test their insulin levels without having to carry around something that is foreign to people without diabetes? Our end goal was to create a product that could allow diabetics to test without having to make a big scene or having to leave the room. 

Ideate

In the ideation stage, we brainstormed as many possible solutions to this problem as we could think of. After looking at multiple solutions, we finally decided as a team that we wanted to create a type of watch as our final solution.

Prototype

We created two prototypes. First, we created an ugly prototype and then a final prototype. Below are pictures of both.

Ugly Prototype 

Final Prototype

Test

To test our idea, we talked to people in the Bozeman community. We were fortunate enough to talk to four young adults who actually have Type 1 Diabetes. They all loved our idea, and were impressed that we had come up with the idea ourselves in the past two weeks.

Design thinking helped us be empathetic towards our target audience. If we had not completed this sprint using design thinking, I do not believe that we would have come up with as great of a solution as we did. The design thinking process forced us to pivot and iterate multiple times, and continue to repeat all the steps of the process when we did. It's amazing how working in groups stimulates creativity. If we were to complete this design sprint individually in the time given for this assignment, the final products would most likely not be as impressive. Design thinking is one of the best methods to use as an entrepreneur.