The journey of design thinking starts with empathy. It means that a design thinker must first be capable of effortlessly understanding the perspective of the end user completely in order to realize what are his/her needs that are truly not being met with.
The concept of design thinking is such that as a design thinker , trying to come up with the solution to a problem, does not necessarily need to have any or much experience in the field of profession the problem belongs to. The thinker has to simply follow 5 steps , that is, AEIOU.
A stands for Activities and helps the design thinker explore the range of behaviour that is being exhibited by the stakeholder.
E stands for Environment, that is, the intricate details of the ecosystem with which the user is interacting with respect to the problem under observation.
I stands for Interaction and helps the design thinker to focus on how the stakeholder is actually reacting to all the events occurring in the given environment.
O stands for Objects and helps the design thinker narrow down on the items that the stakeholder is actually associating itself with.
U stands for Users and helps the design thinker to conclude who the actual stakeholders in this ecosystem are.
AEIOU supports design thinkers magnificently by enabling them to consistently concentrate on the needs of the user that are not being provided by anyone else.
It is especially quintessential when a design thinker is trying to provide solution to an exceptionally complicated problem through the collection and analysis of data in a systematic manner. It supports the design thinker to absorb each element in the problem environment entirely. And finally , it acts as a strong catalyst to creative , out of the box and innovative solutions to problem.
An example : Raymond Damadian invented magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in 1977. Immediately after it was implemented in hospitals on a large scale he made a trip to one of the biggest hospitals to collect Customer Feedback about the machine. A silent spectator to the full body scan of a 13 year old girl, he observed, from the MRI machine specialist room , how nervous and terrified the child was as soon as she arrived at the MRI room. Her parents persistently tried their best to calm her down and prepare her for the scan. She finally volunteered for the scan but half way through the scan had to be stopped as the child could not take it anymore. The MRI specialist had to give her anesthesia in order to complete the procedure. On further research Raymond Damadian learnt that most kids are given anesthesia either in the beginning of or half way through the scan in order to complete the procedure. This was a huge problem for Raymond as a brilliant and potentially life saving machine was giving patients nightmares. So he performed AEIOU as explained below:
Activity is the full body scan that patients direly need for the diagnosis of the significant health conditions they have.
Environment is the MRI machine into which patients must enter and stay in a static position for an hour for the scan to be successful.
Interaction is the fear and paranoia that claustrophobic and / or young patients experience during the scan due to the internal ambience of the machine.
Objects are the loud thundering sounds that the machine produces and the frequent violent jerks that are felt by the patient during the scanning procedure.
Users are patients who direly need to go through a full body scan but want avoid it at any cost.
The result of this exercise was a MRI machine that had a larger internal diameter and looked like a pirate ship , into which young patients must enter and go on an adventure for an hour. From the moment a patient would arrive at the MRI room an audio would begin playing, welcoming the patient and addressing it as a dangerous pirate that is going to begin its journey in the violent sea. As the patient would lie down and gradually enter into the machine, the audio would play sounds of lightening and thunder, covering the loud sounds and jerks of the machine. At the end of the scan patients would come out of the machine extremely happy and excited about the experience they just had and looking forward to the next scan.
This brilliantly creative and out of the box solution to the users problem was a result of Design Thinking, resulting into extremely happy patients who would no more feel terrified or need anesthesia to complete a full body scan.