When we hear or read about something that involves the term “design,” such as design thinking, our mind coerces us to associate it with something alien. But do we really have to think it is some exclusive area related to designers? Not really. Everyone who has innovated and keeps innovating something in literature, art, business, music, engineering, science, and movies has it in them.
If we have to be specific, design thinking is nothing but having a problem-solving approach with the motive to improve products and situations you’re involved in. It helps extract, teach, learn and apply many human-centred techniques to solve problems creatively and innovatively, whether in designs, businesses or our lives.
When the famous disability lawyer and design-thinker, Elise Roy said, “I believe losing my hearing was one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever received,” we got curious enough to know more about it. That is when exploring a little more about design thinking suddenly became an interesting topic.
Elise likes to believe that being deaf gave her a unique way to experience and reframe the ways of the world. According to her, there are five main steps involved in design thinking: defining the problem, empathizing, ideation, prototyping and testing, and sustaining. Defining the problem is about getting an understanding of the constraints associated with it. The second step, empathizing, is about observing people in real-life situations, whereas the third step, ideation, involves throwing as many ideas as possible to solve the problem. Prototyping involves gathering everything one can to mimic the suggested solution along with testing and refining it. The final step of design thinking is to ensure that the solution you came up with lasts.
So when you come across people who like to ask questions while working on something, you can spot design-thinking abilities in them. One of the major capabilities of design thinkers is that they believe in bringing people from all walks of life as they are open to multiple perspectives. It helps them merge different ideas while creating something new.
As an artisan too, Elise believed that her unique experience with the world has helped inform her solution. She also emphasises that it helped her keep running to more solutions. There is a learning for all of us here- through design thinking, we fail through continuous trial and error only to succeed later.
Here is how Elise explained it in her awe-inspiring TED talk.
“Now, I also believe that people with disabilities have great potential to be designers within the design thinking process. Without knowing it from a very early age, I’ve been a design thinker, fine-tuning my skills. Imagine listening to a conversation and only understanding 50% of what is said. You can’t ask them to repeat every single word, they’ll get frustrated with you. So my solution was to take the muffled sound that I heard that was a beat, turn it into a rhythm and place it with the lips that I read. Years later, someone commented that my writing had a rhythm to it. This is because I experience conversations as rhythms.”
Elise also talked about how a person with hearing impairment has the benefit of having a wider visual spectrum compared to the visual spectrum of the norm, and how it has helped her to be better at sports. Though we never think seriously about how people with disabilities have a sharp vision that helps them approach a problem with a solution from a different angle, they help us look sideways to solve some of the greatest problems in our daily lives.
