How I explained Double Diamond to my English teacher
Introducing a design thinking model to non-designers.
Once a month, I have to prepare and present something in my English class. It's a way to put in practice the organization of ideas and planning storytelling in this second language. The subject is free to choose and the duration of the presentation is only five minutes.
Here I will talk about one of these presentations I did, about Double Diamond. The purpose was to introduce this concept to a person who has no idea about design thinking, and also show how she could use this model to solve some problem or challenge in her life.
Last, but not least, I have to say that I use a lot of GIFs of Rihanna to give some humor and beauty to the presentation, of course, 😆✨ So, let's go!
What is Double Diamond?
According to Wikipedia,
“Double Diamond is the name of a design process model popularized by the British Design Council in 2005, and adapted from the divergence-convergence model proposed in 1996 by Hungarian-American linguist Béla H. Bánáthy.”
This "divergence-convergence model" is a way of thinking: first, you create choices or collect all knowledge about something, opening your vision about this topic (it could be a problem or a challenge) — it is the divergence step; then, with all this knowledge or ideas, you have to make choices, select what you will experiment — it is the convergence step. The image below explains very well:
And we called it "double diamond", because there are two moments of divergence and convergence of thinking, at least, involving the steps of discovery, defining, developing, and delivery. Like this image below:
How to use it?
Designers usually use this method to understand problems or discover more about a context that they are working with, before proposing a solution. So, they start a discovery about a question, challenge or client briefing (point A of the image below). After research, designers have to synthesize all insights and focus on an opportunity they found. Then start the second "diamond" with ideation of solutions or ways of test that opportunity selected in the first "diamond". And the last step, they build test and iterate, converging to an answer or a product solution (point B of the image below).
Ok, but… Is it only for designers?
It's not only for designers. And it can be very useful for non-designers!
Let's imagine an example:
Vivian is a College Professor. In this year of pandemic, she noted that her students are not engaging with remote classes. Usually, she could imagine a solution to engage her students, before really understanding why they are looking less engaged. Maybe this solution could solve the problem, but maybe not.
So after imagining a solution and to put in practice Double Diamond, Vivian could start with a discovery moment, researching the problem. She could interview her students or send an anonymous questionnaire to them, asking about their feelings, their moments, and so on.
With all the information of research, Vivian could have an insight of the real problem. They are feeling alone, they miss family and friends, and they said just listen to the professor is not enough, for example. So she could define the real problem as: "How might we make students feel connected with each other and feel less alone?".
Based on this question, Vivian could start a divergence step of ideation: brainstorming a lot of ideas to help her students feel less alone and more active in classes. Then she could test some of those ideas and collect students' feedbacks. Test and iterate until having an outcome: engaged and happier students.
The benefits of Double Diamond
- Avoid thinking about a solution before really understand the problem
- Ideate some solutions and test them
- Avoid waste of money investing in a solution that would not fit to the problem
- Last, but not least: practice empathy, which is very important on our days.
So now you can apply this method of thinking to a lot of problems or challenges you would have in your personal or professional life… And with it, you can shine bright like a diamond… No, sorry, much better:
I hope you enjoy this funny and very fast presentation about Double Diamond. Of course, there are a lot of details about this method, but the purpose here was just to share with everyone my way of presenting to non-designers this design thinking model in a simple and fresh way 😌
If you want to see the slides, here is the file:
