"Once the problem to be solved is framed in a way that invites creative solutions, it is time for the design thinking team to discover what people's needs are. Traditional ways of doing this, such as focus groups and surveys, rarely yield important insights. In most cases, these techniques simply ask people what they want. Conventional research can be useful in pointing toward incremental improvements, but those don't usually lead to the type of breakthroughs that leave us scratching our heads and wondering why nobody ever thought of that before.

Henry Ford understood this when he said, "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said, 'a faster horse'." Although people often can't tell us what their needs are, their actual behaviors can provide us with invaluable clues about their range of unmet needs.

A better starting point is for designers to go out into the world and observe the actual experiences of smallholder farmers, schoolchildren, and community workers as they improvise their way through their daily lives. Working with local partners who serve as interpreters and cultural guides is also important, as well as having partners make introductions to communities, helping build credibility quickly and ensuring understanding. Through "homestays" and shadowing locals at their jobs and in their homes, design thinkers become embedded in the lives of the people they are designing for."

- An excerpt from, "Design Thinking for Social Innovation" by Tim Brown and Jocelyn Wyatt (2^nd link below)