To design is to value the right question more than the right answer to the wrong question. Design Thinking draws from the designer's toolbox for non-typical design contexts, like business strategy or social innovation. As an approach to innovation, it combines exploring problems, building empathy and prototyping solutions. This combination maps well to the challenges in platforming:
- ****EXPLORE the ecosystem to design for. The people, organisations and things acting in context, and the trends and forces as they surface in that context. Gather data without judgement and build understanding.
- ****SYNTHESISE actionable insights from the data gathered. Identify reoccurring problems, expose unexpressed needs and uncover sought after convenience. Capture and prioritise these in a platform model.
- ****DEVELOP validating solutions. Deconstruct the platform model into its hypotheses and bring it to life with a series of pass/fail tests to run in front of the envisioned platform participants. Build, measure, learn.
The process is non-prescriptive and its three phases are wholly complementary. Each phase feeds into the next, and each sets clear boundaries for the others. Each phase also leverages a different and well-established discipline:
- Strategic Design to explore (internal resources and capabilities, and external trends and forces).
- Service Design __to synthesise (a point of view with qualitative research and ideation techniques).
- __Customer Development to develop (solutions in search of a repeatable and scalable business).
FAST leverages these disciplines without atom-smashing them into one convoluted and confused process. This aspect is a key and discerning advantage to FAST.
