Several challenges face the engineering industry. Addressing them requires innovative solutions and structured processes, such as design thinking.
If you’re an engineer who wants to develop business skills, here's an overview of design thinking and seven engineering challenges it can help solve.
What Is Design Thinking?
Design thinking is one of the most effective approaches to problem-solving. It’s a solutions-based methodology focused on human-centered design and observing problems with empathy.
In the online course Design Thinking and Innovation, Harvard Business School Dean Srikant Datar structures the process using a four-stage framework. The stages are:
- Clarify
- Ideate
- Develop
- Implement
Clarify
In the clarification stage, you observe a situation or challenge without bias and frame your findings in the form of a problem statement.
“Before you begin to generate innovative solutions for your own design problem, you must always think hard about how you’re going to frame that problem,” Datar says in the course.
Reframing the problem as a question is an excellent way to do this. For example, using "how might we" instead of "the problem is" can encourage empathy in the design process and shift your mindset toward potential solutions.
These questions are particularly important when considering empathetic design. According to the Harvard Business Review, engineers who put themselves in their audience's shoes while designing often develop innovative products. By understanding your audience’s unexpressed needs, you can effectively leverage your technical knowledge to create innovative solutions to previously unknown problems.
Ideate
Once you've made your observations, you can explore potential solutions. The ideate stage is for divergent thinking—the process of exploring as many ideas as possible. It involves:
- Finding and categorizing similarities in users' pain points
- Considering the resources available to you and how you can use them to solve a problem
- Brainstorming potential solutions
Creativity and an open mind are vital at this stage. As you explore ideas, they can highlight other problems you were unaware of.
Develop
The development stage focuses on turning your ideas into workable prototypes. For ideas to be innovative, they must be both new and useful; many, though creative, aren't feasible.
"As you prototype concepts in phase three, you may discover results that force you to return to phases one and two to reframe your question," Datar says in Design Thinking and Innovation.
This iteration can occur in any of the four stages because each involves a different level of exploration that highlights new problems, questions, or solutions. This isn't cause for discouragement.
"Do not think of this as a setback,” Datar says in the course. “Iterating on solutions is a normal and expected result of design thinking.”
Implement
Design thinking’s ultimate objective is finding effective, workable solutions. The implementation phase involves finalizing developments and communicating their value to stakeholders.
This final stage can be challenging for many engineers. Since their work is so technical, it’s sometimes difficult for stakeholders to understand their impact on the organization. As a result, engineers should develop effective communication skills to ensure their ideas are implemented.
The Importance of Design Thinking in Engineering
Design thinking is a valuable skill for engineers to learn for several reasons. For one, engineering positions are among the most common occupations requiring design thinking skills.
Since engineers are often responsible for solving complex problems, it’s easy to get lost in the details and set creative problem-solving skills aside. Creativity in business is beneficial because it:
- Encourages innovation
- Boosts productivity
- Allows for adaptability
- Fosters growth
Leveraging design thinking skills to pursue innovation not only helps professionals find creative solutions but identify business opportunities, evaluate market needs, and design new products and services.
Engineers’ responsibilities can vary. Whether creating new products or maintaining existing ones, engineering revolves around design. For this reason, a systematic approach is highly valuable when encountering industry challenges.
7 Engineering Challenges Design Thinking Can Solve
Some of the challenges engineers often face include:
- Identifying obscure problems
- Overcoming cognitive fixedness
- Designing sustainable innovations
- Addressing the skilled labor shortage
- Encouraging diversity
- Keeping up with advancing technology
- Overcoming status-quo bias
Here’s an overview of how design thinking can help solve these problems.
1. Identifying Obscure Problems
Engineers often encounter problems that are difficult to identify. As a result, it can be easy for them to jump to conclusions based on preexisting knowledge of a design or situation. Datar discourages this in Design Thinking and Innovation.
"Whenever you have a difficult problem, you tend to solve the fringes of it,” Datar says. “But try and go for the most important part that you need to solve."
For example, if you're trying to remove a major obstacle preventing a project’s completion, you might be tempted to search for a cause equal in scope to its impact. However, some of the biggest design problems can be caused by something as simple as a misplaced hyphen or a loose screw. Often, the best approach is to consider the bigger picture. Is there anything in the design you don't understand?
The clarification stage in the design thinking framework encourages you to obtain insights through unbiased observation. An effective tool to accomplish this is journey mapping, which involves creating a chronological visual timeline of everything you know about a problem.
According to Design Thinking and Innovation, the three steps to developing a journey map are:
- Creating observations about the user's journey
- Writing those observations on a timeline
- Organizing the observations into different stages
Creating a timeline of events can help identify when a problem occurs, as well as what precedes and follows it. This can enable you to narrow down its cause.
2. Overcoming Cognitive Fixedness
Cognitive fixedness is a mindset that assumes there's just one way to accomplish tasks. It considers every situation through the lens of past decisions. Thinking "if it worked in the past, it'll work now" is easy to follow, especially in the engineering industry, where replicating past successes is often the best way to proceed.
For example, while new technology trends can succeed in the market because of their innovative features, incorporating those features into an existing design might not be feasible—and even prevent you from meeting critical deadlines. Furthermore, in areas with high risk to human life—such as submarine design—it may be advisable to incorporate technology that’s proven effective before creating something new.
While caution is important, cognitive fixedness can prevent innovation, resulting in obsolescence. You must strike a balance between the operational and the innovation worlds.
The difference between the two worlds is described in Design Thinking and Innovation:
- The operational world represents a business’s routine procedures.
- The innovation world facilitates open-endedly exploring ideas.
Although the operational world is important, it can result in cognitive fixedness and prevent ideas’ progression. If you're struggling to overcome cognitive fixedness—whether your own or someone else's—consider why there's an unwillingness to change to determine the next steps.
3. Designing Sustainable Innovations
Climate change is a pressing issue impacting businesses around the globe. An increasing number of organizational leaders are addressing it by focusing on the triple bottom line. According to the HBS Online course Sustainable Business Strategy, the triple bottom line considers:
- Profit: Satisfying shareholders and producing a profit
- People: Impacting society in a positive, measurable way
- The planet: Making a positive impact on the environment
By reframing problems and pursuing workable solutions that don't sacrifice profit, you can effectively incorporate sustainability into business strategies.
4. Addressing the Skilled Labor Shortage
The United States is experiencing a shortage of engineers, which has put a strain on employers hoping to hire qualified candidates in a shrinking market.
Consider how you'd approach this challenge from a design thinking perspective. Clarifying the problem might highlight opportunities you didn't previously think of. For instance, companies such as Google and Microsoft have invested in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education, enabling more people to pursue careers in those industries.
Other companies have sought ways to attract engineering talent. It can be easy to draw candidates by raising salaries or increasing benefits, but many engineers aren't comfortable working for organizations that harm the environment. Your firm should consider adopting a sustainable business strategy that could benefit the planet and attract qualified applicants.
5. Encouraging Diversity
Engineering has historically been a male-dominated field. One of the primary causes of this imbalance is the workplace stereotype that STEM careers are masculine. This has resulted in implicit—and often direct—discouragement of women from pursuing STEM careers.
In the context of design thinking, clarifying and reframing the problem might result in questions like, "How can we empower more women to pursue STEM careers?"
Through exploring potential solutions, you may discover that encouraging and empowering a diverse population to pursue engineering can help address other challenges, such as the skilled labor shortage.
6. Keeping Up with Advancing Technology
Technology is continuously advancing; companies that fail to adapt might get left behind. For example, Blackberry was once one of the fastest-growing smartphone companies in the world. Yet, its products became obsolete when the company refused to adopt touch-screen technology. This resulted in Blackberry losing 90 percent of its market share between 2009 and 2013.
Design thinking encourages continual awareness to avoid these downward trends. Learning how to recognize opportunities and communicate them to others can prevent a business from falling behind.
7. Overcoming Status-Quo Bias
Resistance to change doesn't just occur within an organization—it happens among customers, too. This is known as status-quo bias, which is a challenge you must address during implementation.
The challenge is how to retain existing customers while appealing to the current market and acquiring new ones. Avoid assuming users will understand a design change you’ve implemented just because it makes sense to you.
According to Datar in Design Thinking and Innovation, you should consider three views during the implementation phase:
- The developer's view: The designer with knowledge and understanding of a design's utility and benefits
- The neutral view: Someone who doesn't have a preexisting opinion about the design
- Stakeholders' view: Existing customers and users who have existing opinions based on the status quo
Learning how to overcome status-quo bias is critical to successful innovation.
Improving Your Design Thinking Skills
Whether encountering one of the engineering challenges mentioned above or something more niche, design thinking can be a valuable tool for solving them.
Learning about the process and its business applications can enable you to climb the corporate ladder and make an impact on your organization.
Ready to learn the tools you need to innovate? Enroll in our online certificate course Design Thinking and Innovation—one of our entrepreneurship and innovation courses—and develop in-demand skills that can benefit your engineering career. If you aren’t sure which HBS Online course is right for you, download our free flowchart to explore your options.
