The ambidextrous balance of combining quantitative and qualitative approach is crucial to achieve business innovation in our ever-changing society. While exploring the early stages of a problem space, profound and iterative observations of human behaviors allow designers to discover unusual insights and users’ needs. In this regard, the purpose of this study is to introduce the Needfinding Practice course at KAIST and emphasize the importance of observational research to frame new business opportunities. Main learning goal of this course is to expand the problem finding phase for enhancing students’ creativity and divergent thinking abilities. In this study, we have conducted a literature review on needfinding through observation and how the early stage of design thinking process is related to understanding users deeply. By presenting students’ field research projects, we highlighted the process of identifying unexpected latent needs to gain qualitative data for future business implications.

As design thinking became popularized, practitioners in the field pointed out that design thinking rarely takes stakeholders and contexts into account as a result of focusing solely on end-users. We believe such a limitation can be complemented with speculative design, which critiques the future that an idea depicts and interrogates relationships with social, cultural, economical, and political systems. This paper, through pilot interviews with 10 participants and a thematic analysis on interviews with 12 participants, explores possible interaction between design thinking and speculative and critical depiction of the future. Speculative and critical inquiries allowed the participants to consider various social contexts and stakeholders, and further helped them shape and brainstorm the ideas’ potential values and challenges faced during adoption. The overall critical speculation influenced various steps of the design thinking process. The paper contributes to the literature by reporting a novel application of speculative design to the conventional design thinking process. In the future, we hope to further explore other elements of speculative design and their impact on design outcomes.