How design thinking helped me carve a new career path

On a fine morning in 2016, after months of agonising and contemplating, I decided to switch careers and turn to ‘design’. This was no easy decision after working as an IT professional for a year. Not to mention four tedious years of studying engineering and planning a fancy career around the ever-booming, ever-expanding IT industry. While I did all this, my heart was somewhere else—it belonged with colours and creativity. Not just now, but even as a child. I was always skilled at painting and creating. Creating anything. It just had to be artistic.

So, the time I worked as an IT professional, I probably went through the greatest dilemma of my life. Whether to quit and do what my heart craved or stick to what the plan was all along and try to do my best. The truth was, I had the skills for design and art, but here I was writing code. Cut to that fine morning, I made up my mind.

It is easier said than done. I was a long way from answering the HOWs and WHATs of ‘design as a career’. And just like that, my luck turned. Over a cup of coffee on a cold winter evening, I came across the concept that was to change my life forever. ‘Design Thinking’—a solution-based approach to problem-solving, read the Google search result.

Just to set the context right for you, Design Thinking was first mentioned by American economist and cognitive psychologist Herbert Simon in his 1969 book, The Sciences of the Artificial. Simon defined it as a tool that helps you unchain yourself from problems using design strategies. He primarily discovered this iterative technique to help individuals make decisions, eliminating doubt and confusion. The first steps of the process of design thinking are generating ideas, testing those ideas, and recording feedback from every problem until you have a viable solution.

And so I did exactly this—I came up with various career ideas, tested those ideas, and recorded my feedback on each idea.

Here’s a snapshot of how I used design thinking to navigate a new career path using these five key steps: Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. And what did I gain in the process? Saved time and money, and bypassed the frustration of leaving my comfort zone and entering the unknown.

Empathise

In the first step of design thinking, you observe and engage with a problem from a user’s perspective.

In my case, the problem was a career shift, the user was me, and the required outcome was a clear roadmap for the career in design. Once these pointers were in place, I interacted with a few designers, who were either working as designers or were studying it. By doing so, I learned about the space, and the challenges I could face while pursuing design as a career.

Define

In this stage of design thinking, you process and analyse the information you gathered during phase one. With the insights you get, you begin to define your needs. To do so, I started with a question, what do I want to design? Should it be physical products? Or should it be ads for a marketing company? Or should I create animations? I made a pro-con list for every niche I was remotely interested in. Finally, I narrowed it down to Communication Design and Film Design.

The next question I had to figure out was how do I start a career in design? I had two options—either get a formal education from a college or self-teach myself. I decided to try my hands on both.

I knew what I had to do, but it wasn’t easy. It was a stressful time, to say the least. But now I have realised, all the self-doubt, fear, and anxiety were normal and necessary.

Through ideation, I learned an important lesson. There cannot be one or two solutions to a problem, there can be many.