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Hi! Welcome to Ideaflow Design Thinking Studio
A studio for creative problem solving, design and workshops
Oriole Bolus
Design Thinking Consultant
Meet a design thinker and coach
Oriole is a design thinker based in Cape Town who has a vast experience within the design industry and Design Education. While growing a great passion for Design Thinking over the years. Ideaflow Studio is a place for showcasing his experiences as consultant and practitioner. In the past, he has taught design, created Design Thinking education programmes from scratch and helped companies and early-stage startups design impactful products and services using a Design Thinking methodology, visualisation approaches, ethnographic-based user research, usability design, UX architecture, prototyping and various other design strategies.
Get 1-on-1 support from a Design Thinking expert
Oriole is qualified Design Thinking coach from the Hasso Plattner School of Design Thinking. If you are an organisation, business or student and you’d like to fastrack your Design Thinking project or just up-skill on how to use the methodology.
Book a free starter no obligation 1 hour One-on-One Design Thinking coach session with Oriole.
Certified Coach
Oriole is a certified Design Thinking coach from the Hasso Plattner School of Design Thinking
Teacher and Design Practitioner
Oriole has taught design and ideation for many years, while also working in the industry on a variety of complex real world Design Thinking projects
Expert on Design Thinking
Oriole is an expert, majoring is Design Thinking for his Masters Thesis, while also studying Design Innovation and Strategy Aalto University in Finland
Why Design Thinking? because it is the main driving force that gives designers and teams the ability to render their intent, requiring a particular way of thinking about the future state of a service, product or system and then putting fourth the right activities to make that outcome become realised based on the user needs .
What’s the focus of the studio?
Design Thinking Education & Facilitation
From an education perspective, Ideaflow Studio can help you develop Design Thinking courses for your organisation and play a role as a Design Thinking coach or facilitator to assist teams with Design Thinking lead project management and programme design
User Experience Research &
Design
From a user experience perspective, Ideaflow Studio can help you discover real customer or user insights through research and translate these into user journeys and new features, designing the optimal user experience and testing these designs to ensure they are desirable to the user
New Product & Service Design
From a design perspective, Ideaflow Studio can help you develop a new product or service using Design Thinking and Service Design approaches, while at the same time build a viable business model or align these to the existing one
Design Thinking takes a human-centered approach.
Discovering the real needs of the customer and jobs-to-be-done
The ‘fuzzy’ front end of any design process requires flows between research, ideation and prototyping with the aim create a desirable solution. Yet to design something that people want, the designer or design team need to understand the problems and realities of the people they are designing for. This is why Design Thinking uses ethnographic and user research approaches to uncover the latent needs of the user. With the aim to build useful solutions and eradicate any frustrations that a user may encounter using the product or service.
What is the foundation of good design?
Drive.
Passionate about the power of Design Thinking and its impact
Building up the passion behind a project, can be just as much of a challenge as it is to solve the problem itself. However, once a designer experiences how effective Design Thinking is as a methodology for change, it ignites a passion to see the change develop as you shape the solution. That’s why the passion behind a good designer can actually be driven by what their understanding of what Design Thinking is actually capable of doing and by those in management who understand its power as a methodology and value in different areas of the business.
Approach.
Breakthroughs happen by Principle
Good designers are led by principle. Some of these principles are to embrace empathy – with aim to discover critical user needs and challenges, to preserve ambiguity – as way to foster constant change, to relook and rethink – in order to learn from what has been done before and to make things tangible -all with the aim to visualise the problem and solution and gain a common understanding between stakeholders.
Diversity & collaboration.
Dynamic knowledge and diversity
Diversity and collaboration are crucial to thriving, fast moving and innovative design projects. At the same time encouraging multi-disciplinary teamwork and participatory design encourage innovation. There is also a mutual consensus within the design community that a mix of facilitators, researchers, psychologists and engineers ect. can bring about an interesting fusion of perspectives to the energy and the outcome of any project.
We've tackled a variety of challenges.
Passion based co-creation is the driving force behind successful Design Thinking projects. Oriole has been involved in a variety of collaborative work experiences ranging from Design Thinking workshops, User Experience Design, to award winning Industrial Design projects.
Method.
How to address the emotional states with the Service Blueprint
Service Blueprints are great tools for communicating the design of services in a practical manner. Both for understanding the user experience and the operational guidelines of an existing or new service. In one of our last workshops we adapted the Service Blueprint framework and wrote about how it worked.
On a project with DYDX Management Consultants we developed a Service Blueprint in the workshop pictured above that addresses and visualises the emotional states of the customer journey. Becoming an integrated user journey and operational map of the service.