Although Tim Silk doesn’t explicitly teach design thinking, his new product development class certainly encompasses the concepts.
Undergraduate students in his class spend the semester developing a new product from the ground up. First, they study why new products fail.
“So many fail, not because they don’t provide a benefit, but because the need is not evident to consumers,” he said.
People often misunderstand the barriers to new product adoption because they don’t observe consumer behavior closely enough. After learning from the common mistakes of others, students study data techniques and idea generation.
“There’s a perception gap between what we think people want and what they actually want,” Silk said. “So you have to look at the data.”
Students then screen the ideas they generate.
“You have to explore ideas, but you need a second stage to confirm their validity.”
Next, they make design tradeoffs.
“We’d all like a laptop that is super light and has unlimited battery life, but because of this thing gravity that we’re forced to deal with, we can’t really have both,” Silk said.
Finally, students optimize design of the final product.
“Identifying tradeoffs becomes a great motivation to engineer around them,” he said. “You find sweet spots that the market values the most.”
Sure, the process doesn’t match design thinking perfectly, but Silk’s class provides a similar framework to generate thoughtful insights and find optimal solutions.
For example, one student developed an iPhone application targeted at novice wine drinkers that allowed them to make good wine purchases.