What is the Design Thinking Process?
A design thinking process is using the 5 stages that can be seen below this text. To start with i will be highlighting each individual task in the process. Firstly, Empathise this means that you undesrtand the task set and you understand the certain target audience you are trying to please. Finally, you gain insights about the topic or outcome you would like to achieve in the task set. The nexts stage shown is Define, in this stage you know what you are going to do and you know how you are going to achieve it. You also look back to the target audience and look how you plan to complete that task for your audience. After the define stage we have ideate, in this stage you will be putting all ideas and insghts into pratice. It is mainly about your design development from that intial idea. After creating any ideas you would want to test them, this is where the next stage comes into play. In this stage you are creating your dieas to a near finished look and it should also please the needs of your target audience. The final stage we have is Test, this tage allows you to look back at your prototype. You can do this in many ways, this could include focus groups and reviews. These reviews could be from people come under your target audience.
Throughout this and the last project i have been using these five steps to build my design. To start with i build my knowledge in the area of this project. This includes researching all components of the project. In this project i researched different designers and how each designer showed their individual skill. By looking at this it gave me the knowledge to create my own Fanta label. By looking at the designers it showed me that i should create something unique and different. I also looked at the certain target audience that i would look to please. The target audience that i set myself was people in their teenage years. This was because most people around that age drink, drinks like Fanta so by creating a design that suites their needs would come in very handy. Next we have the define stage, this links to my own work as by the time i have researched and chosen my target audience i should have a firm idea of what i am going to create. Also, by knowing what i should create i should know the way i am going to do it. So in this project i had a rough start i went with an idea and after seeing that idea i knew it wasn't going to work. So back to the drawing board i went and came up with another flavour. Luckily this flavour still accounts for those in the target audience, and by the time i knew the flavour i was going to use i knew the ways i could do it. So i went onto creating a Pumpkin and Spice icon, these were made in Illustrator and i also made some clouds for the Logo to sit on. This takes us onto the ideate stage. In this stage i was testing different ways the logo could look and also starting to design and change the way the background looked. This was the part that didn't take too long. This was because in the previous stage you are always planning the ideas in your head and by then you should have a strong image of what you want you idea to look like. This is why it makes it so easy for the ideate stage. The longest part has to be the prototype stage, this is where the work completed is nearly finished. In this stage i would run into all my problems. I would see what ideas worked and what other ideas didn't. So after the ideas didn't work i would have to go back to the drawing board and think of ways i could fix it. After all the problems are completed and you feel that the design is complete it can lay onto the testing stage. For me this would be where i would get to see the label i created on a bottle and overall visualize the work i have completed. Still in this stage there would be some problems because some problems within the label don't show until you see it in person. For me this was the text problem. When the label was in the Adobe software the text would be easy to read when printed but that wasn't the way it went. I had numerous attempts at fixing the text problem so after finally finishing it i was very happy. This is the stage that you can see you are finally finished once all problems are fixed and no more present themselves, it is finally time to say the work you have completed is finished. Using this type of thinking when designing can come in very handy. This is because when you finally reach your final outcome, you know that you have made every move needed to create a really high quality final outcome. The thought process enables you to see the problems that occur when designing and also by seeing those problems you are not only building your knowledge but you are improving the quality of your work. So overall using this form of thought can help you in many ways and i have to say it has helped me throughout this project and will continue to help me going on.