Design Thinking with Fraunhofer

Design Thinking is a process which fosters creativity and human-centricity. It is particularly useful for innovating on existing products and processes or for venturing into a new domain. User-Centered Design aims at adjusting a concrete product idea to the user needs as good as possible, e.g. in order to achieve high usability and user experience.

Both procedures make use of a similar set of methods. At the same time, there are some important aspects which define both approaches.

  • Involvement of stakeholders from the beginning to the end
  • Collaborative interaction between an interdisciplinary team
  • Well-suited space for creative work
  • Established process
  • Chance to learn from new insights, improve your concept and re-evaluate

Steps of the Iterative Design Thinking Process with Fraunhofer

Fraunhofer combines Design Thinking with User-Centered Design and adjusts the focus of the individual steps to the particular objective. We start to dig deep into the problem space by identifying stakeholder groups and empathizing with them.

The identified requirements are defined in a technology and solution independent way.
The solution space is entered by generating solution specific ideas to address the specified requirements.
The ideas are made tangible by creating rapid prototypes.
The solution prototypes are evaluated as to whether they are heading towards the right direction.

Detecting drawbacks of the prototypes is part of the process; improvements are made in the next iteration.

Contact

Marc Jentsch

Contact Press / Media

Dr. Marc Jentsch

Innovation Engineering Lead

Phone +49 2241 14-3777

Constanze Ritzmann

Contact Press / Media

Constanze Ritzmann

Phone +49 2241 14-3603