Design Thinking: Back Into the Garage

The Design Thinking “back to the garage” approach is a unique methodology that combines several practices and techniques aimed at mastering new skills and learning new ways of working. Since it integrates practices based on experience, it can help improve delivery and operations, foster digital, and enable site reliability engineering. This methodology drives enterprise design thinking and is built on agile principles for a co located and distributed team. Here are some important Design Thinking stages of the Garage Methodology.

Design Thinking - Garage Methodology Stages

Know Your User Needs

As the first step, this stage focuses on the empathic understanding of the problem. It involves talking to experts to know more about the problem while engaging and empathizing with your users. You may also want to gain a deeper understanding of the experiences and motivations of users.

Since it's a human-centered design process, it allows one to set aside their own assumptions about the world and get insights from real users. With this method, you’ll gather a good amount of information to use during the next stage. This stage aims to develop the best possible understanding of your users and their needs.

Define Your User Needs

In this stage, you'll organize and analyze your observations to define the main problems that you’ve identified. While designing the problem, you must do it in a human-centered manner and ensure it's your own goal or need of the company.

Create Ideas and Challenge Assumptions

As the third stage of the design thinking process, this stage involves generating ideas. Once you’ve understood your users' needs and analyzed your observations, you can start looking at the problem from different perspectives and come up with solutions to the problem. You can start by brainstorming ideas and techniques, stimulating free thinking, and boosting your space. This way, you can generate as many ideas and pick other ideation techniques that can help you investigate and test your ideas.

Create Solutions

In this stage, you produce inexpensive, scaled-down versions of the product while investing in the key solutions generated in the ideation phase. Once these have been produced, they can be shared and tested within the team, other departments, or on a small group of people outside the design team.

At the experimental stage, the aim is to identify the best possible solution for each problem that was identified. Since the solutions are implemented based on the prototypes they can either be accepted, improved, or rejected depending on the user’s experiences.

Try Your Test

In this stage, the designers will test the complete product and redefine one or more further problems. This stage aims to help you investigate the conditions of use and how people behave and think towards the product. Once you are done you can proceed with further alterations and refinements to rule out any alternative solutions.

Final Thoughts

Design Thinking is an iterative, non-linear process that ensures collaboration between the designers and users. Consisting of different stages, this process brings innovative solutions to life based on how users think and behave. The purpose of the Garage Methodology is to foster an innovative culture in the workplace that encourages experimentation and working with startup speed, and applying this to enterprises that have scale. This means you and your team can carry these stages out simultaneously, and even repeat them. However, it is also important to stay framed and remain on topic. This way, you can get out of the corporate framework and approach problems differently