What Design Thinking Means to MAKO Design + Invent

How Our Invention Design Firm Defines Design Thinking

Our invention design firm defines design thinking as the process that designers, inventors, engineers, and innovators take when trying to understand a common consumer or user problem and try to redefine the problem by identifying a new way to solve it.

Design thinking involves using alternative or new ways to approach a solution in an innovative way that may not have been obvious from the beginning. Not only does design thinking involve an amount of mental creative approach, but also a hand-on approach that involves trial and error.

Design thinking looks at taking into the perspective of the user seeing where any liability, or problem can occur in a situation or product, and thinking about ways in which the design can be improved for a more seamless and effortless experience and solution for the user.

Why Design Thinking is Important When Inventing Your New Product

When inventing a new product, there are a lot of different aspects to consider, especially if you are entering the world of small businesses. The time, effort, and cost that goes along with making a product are especially important to new business owners, which is why thoroughly going through the design thinking process is important for your new product.

As an experienced invention design firm, we know that a level of empathy is required for the inventor to take into perspective and consider the way that your target audience might interact with and experience your product.

If you are able to encounter and recognize all the possible liabilities and complications that your product design might initially have, you can quickly fix these problems and improve your product design before moving into more costly stages of the product design process, such as prototyping and manufacturing.

Design thinking is a deep, experimental, articulated process, so it requires stepping outside of your own vision and seeing your product design in many different human-centric ways that overall help to improve your product.

The Stages of Design Thinking

Design thinking always varies depending on the inventor, designer, engineer, and unique thought processes based on their experiences with designing. However, below are what our invention design firm the main and skeletal design thinking phases that will help you build your product.

Empathize: As mentioned before, stepping outside of your own vision and considering the viewpoint of your target audience as well as their experience with your product is the best way to understand how they will interact with your product. When you empathize with your audience, you gain a more advanced perspective on how your product will work and if it truly solves the problem you set out to fix.

Define: Defining your goals within the design thinking process is vital to staying on track and having a clear goal. It’s important to take the time to step outside of your own business goals and see what goals your users would have when interacting with and using your product. Define their needs, their problems, and their experiences in order to see different ways in which your design can be better improved to suit the needs of your desired audiences. This also helps an invention design firm like MAKO Design + Invent help you develop your product idea.

Ideate: Ideate is to come up and think about different ideas. It’s important to include taking time to ideate within the design thinking process to allow yourself to challenge your assumptions and create new ideas for innovative solutions to both the efficiency of your product design and what your product will solve.

Prototype: Prototyping is one of the most crucial stages within both design thinking and product design. You must prototype your product to see how it works, if you encounter any problems, and have more hands-on experience that allows you to create better solutions.  Working with an invention design firm like MAKO can help you quickly build your prototype with design thinking.

Test: Testing your product yourself or with your target audience is one of the final steps in evaluating the viability of your product and if your product provides a clear solution to your audiences’ problem.

If you have a great new invention and you’d like to learn more about this process, get in touch with MAKO today and visit our website to find out more. Or feel free to give us a call at 1-888-806-MAKO, and we can set you up on a call with our product strategist!

About: MAKO Design + Invent is the original firm providing world-class consumer product development services tailored to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors. Simply put, we are the leading one-stop-shop for developing your physical product from idea to store shelves, all in a high-quality, cost-effective, and timely manner. We operate as one powerhouse 30-person product design team spread across 4 offices to serve you (Austin, Miami, San Francisco, & Toronto). We have full-stack in-house industrial design, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, patent referral, prototyping, and manufacturing services. To assist our startup and inventor clients, in addition to above, we help with business strategy, product strategy, marketing, and sales/distribution for all consumer product categories. Also, our founder Kevin Mako hosts The Product Startup Podcast, the industry's leading hardware podcast. Check it out for tips, interviews, and best practices for hardware startups, inventors, and product developers. Click HERE to learn more about MAKO Design + Invent!