MAKE IT. A Design Thinking mindset.
The mindsets of Design Thinking are paramount for the approach’s success. These are one of the first steps to understand, learn and acknowledge when embracing this creative and innovative way of thinking and working. I am surprised about the amount of initiatives and activities promoted without even training and teaching people to the crucial mindsets of Design Thinking. If people don’t change wrong habits or obsolete assumptions, the implementation of the approach is pointless.
One of those mindsets is usually named as “MAKE IT”. When we look around through a “make it” lens, we are eager to transit from theory to practice. We want to make our ideas tangible in a certain way so we can test them in the real world and understand if they might or not work across a potential future implementation. When we “make things”, we hunt facts and evidence over theory and assumptions. We prototype, test and iterate. We look for answers and solutions in the real world with real people, not behind a screen solely committed to desktop research.
But why are people so resistant to embrace this mindset? Why do people prefer to trust their guts continuously instead of dropping its risk of failure by making something that can be experimented and tested? Why don’t people allocate time nor space to make it?
“Make it” is also falsely perceived as hard to implement or complex to start with. Below is a short video where I demystify this premise. And here is my personal related story about: with the increase of video calls and meetings over the past months, I ended up using my mobile phone more often, whether for facetime, zoom or google meet, as examples. This meant I had (in the absence of my notebook), most of the time, to grab the phone in one hand to watch or talk with people. The discomfort of having to grab the phone in one of the hands with my fingers rolled and slightly tensioned enough for long periods of time, started to annoy me. To pull the phone towards something and be hands-free while on a video call did not always work well (specially when charging the phone with bottom cable connection) so I had to find a way to discover a solution for my pain. I decided to test an idea I had in mind and this way give it life through a physical prototype. I ended up iterating this prototype 2 more times until I reached a solution that, today, fits my needs. And I love it! I find it kind of stylish I must confess. The mindset “MAKE IT” allowed me to quickly build a physical prototype that I was able to test and learn. When I say “quickly” I really mean it. It took me just about 10 to 15 minutes to build this thing. With no financial cost attached! One of the positives of all is that, when we make things, when we prototype and experiment, it works either to test a physical, digital, service or environment scenario.
So I made the video below to share with you exactly how simple and easy it is to engage the “make it” mindset and start creating or building something, no matter the challenge you may face. Watch it and think about how you can lock into the mindset “MAKE IT”, apply it daily to fit your needs and, thus, drop the risk of failure of certain vicious theories: