Design Thinking Is Not Just About UI/UX
To me, While doing any task “What” and “How” of the work are important but the most important is “Why’s”. A strong why helps me to come up with solutions, ideas, and sources of motivation in a long run. And while being in the somehow chaos of learning and making the right decision on design tools and principles in the development and engineering journey I decided to take a pause and search for its why’s (Heavily inspired from the book “Start with why” by Simon Sinek).
The terminology “Design Thinking” is a pragmatic approach to a system before its implementation. In simple words, it is just a process of ‘thinking and designing’ that meets the specification and requirements of the system before we start to work on it. TBH You will find a lot of content on what it is and how’s to it. The main idea behind this post is rather to focus on the foundation on which the concept lies.
Before diving into the mainstream, Let’s have background knowledge on design thinking; the topic itself. IDEO is often credited with inventing “design thinking” and its practice. The terminology is mostly used for UI/UX and rightly so mainly because it is used as a synonym term for ‘ discussion of the project requirement and making design and prototype files that serves the application purpose.’
As its meaning and purpose evolution continued, I wouldn’t mind introducing it into the world of programming and system designing as a whole. Wait You can argue with me (esp. designers) all you want but first hear me out!
As a developer, architect, or IT engineer, other than dealing with codes, bugs and meetings you deal with Design Principles like SOLID, DRY, KSS/KISS, YAGNI, etc, and Design Patterns for the creational, structural, or behavioral of your objects and functions And Architectural Principles for your project. They all are practiced rigorously before getting started and even during the project which usually results in a beautiful project. And the initial stages of your career in using them it is quite challenging to decide on the right set of principles and methods from the all the above lists for your project but as you get familiar and experience you know those principle's foundation and understand their why’s; You not only make the right use but also start exploiting them for the best use case and that’s what we call the experts “Someone who always knows the right principles to use and the right way to exploit them for the benefits when necessary”.
Enough preface! Let's get to the point. All these principles of development (design pattern, design principle, architecture principles) lie on a common foundation that is well explained and documented by the ‘design thinking principle (with a few updates to them). The design thinking principle roots in easy representation, easy communication, and ease to change. And well the secret to making the correct decisions and implementation of all principles of development more or less lies in those “Why’s” (hope all the experts agree with me on this).
Either talking about putting all the configs, constraints, and environment variables to a single place for ease to change or generating all the instances from a single class for easy representation, talking about modularization for easy to change and easy communication between modules, either coupling and creating highly cohesion functions for easy to scale and represent or talking about removing redundancy, adding comments, for easy communication. In a sky-level view, all these are what our design principles, design patterns, and architecture patterns are about and their sole purpose is for the exact principles on which ‘design thinking’ lies.
Now knowing a clear “why’s” of all engineering and design principles, I will always be relaxed as long as the purpose is fulfilled without being worried about whether the principles are implemented correctly/perfectly or not. And So can you, the removal of burn down from it can really leave greater space for exploration and finding new solutions.
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