Response to “Design Thinking”

According to the shopping cart video and Tim Brown of IDEO, the key method to design thinking is composed of three facets: inspiration, ideation, and implementation. Within those sectors, there are “key ingredients” that make up the “recipe for innovation.”

Inspiration starts with a people-forward approach. This means identifying the problem and what the need is before jumping to a solution. It is about understanding how technology can help certain groups of people and the constraints or limits of doing so.

Next comes ideation. Ideation is the process of brainstorming, thinking creatively, and communicating with the team. Eventually, prototyping and testing come into play as a means to make sure that the customers are on the same page as the developers.

Implementation is the last step in the cycle, which is more about the execution of the idea and the technology in the real world. This entails applying the vision to the group of people who are targeted and spreading it around the world.

In terms of the case of Aravind Eye Care, design thinkers could not follow a model similar to the United States because India has an enormous rural population, with many people unable to afford proper eye care or hospital visits. As a result, Aravind set up camps in rural areas of India to assess patients for eye problems that require surgery and provided buses for those patients to be transported to hospitals. In the United States, many people in rural areas have vehicles and can get themselves to a hospital, but this is not the case in India. In addition, Aravind recognized the problem of expenses in terms of lenses, which many people in rural India could not afford at the market price of $200. In return, they created their own factory to produce lenses using low-cost materials and made their products far more accessible at just $4 for a pair of lenses.