Demystifying Design Thinking: Empathy, Innovation, and Impact

According to Tim Brown, design thinking is an innovative methodology that is based on human-centric design principles. It can also be called a mechanism that prerequisites a deep understanding of people’s wants and needs, their likes and dislikes, etc. to create products and services that cater to them. Meantime, design thinking is a discipline that values the sensibility shown by the designer and the methods used to satisfy people’s requirements. A vital aspect of design thinking is the feasibility and optimization of products and services towards a viable business opportunity, yielding value for the consumer and an opportunity in the market. Moreover, Tim Brown also highlights a few of the design thinking ethos which includes: empathy (people first approach), integrative thinking, optimism, experimentalism, and collaboration. A framework based on empathy allows the designer to understand the world from various perspectives and create solutions that meet the needs of people. An Integrative thinking hat becomes crucial which is not just based on the analytical framework of thinking but also relies on the ability to perceive all the important aspects of a particular problem that help create solutions to improvise existing realities. In the attempts to innovate potential solutions, a vital aspect of design thinking is to keep experimenting and posing questions on the prototypes. This certainly requires a lot of persistence and an optimistic mindset to achieve a potential solution. Needless to say, design thinking is not an isolated endeavor, but a collaborative effort. It requires a collective involvement of people coming from different backgrounds to have an interdisciplinary approach to design solutions. I think that summaries my understanding of design thinking after reading Tim Brown's article.

I would like to talk about India’s Aravind Eye Care System as an example of the application of design thinking from the Tim Brown article. Aravind was founded by Dr. G. Venkataswamy in 1976 as a mission to eradicate needless blindness among India’s population, including the people of rural areas. Continuing on their mission, one of the challenges Aravind faced was regarding the logistical aspects of delivering eye care support to the rural population that was far from Aravind's urban hospital center. The company was constrained to deal with the remoteness of its poverty-stricken clientele and its inaccessibility to procure expensive solutions. The company started with their eye care diagnostic services by holding eye camps (to screen for eye diseases and those which are associated with diabetes) in the rural areas, registering patients, and administering eye exams to identify the need for monitoring, surgery, or some kind of advanced diagnostic services. One of the consistent things that they adhered to was a timely analysis of their screening data that allowed them to provide specialized eye camps for certain demographic groups such as school-age children and industrial and government workers. They also employed telemedicine trucks that enabled remote care decisions by doctors of Aravind’s hospitals in the urban cities. Moreover, they availed bus services for rural patients to access urban treatment facilities. All of these services were availed free of cost for approximately 60% of the patients who could not afford the costs of the treatment. Along the same lines, they also developed a manufacturing plant in the basement of one of its hospitals, where they manufactured lens production technology that was relatively cheap compared to the lenses made in the West. This is essentially how Aravind Care System overcame its challenges in supporting its rural clientele.