Design thinking

Design thinking is a human-centred approach to innovation that combines disciplined analysis with imaginative exploration. It moves repeatedly between understanding people, framing the challenge, creating possibilities and testing concrete prototypes. Learning through evidence replaces both technology-led cleverness and reliance on a sudden “eureka” moment.

When to use it

• Use it to understand how innovation can emerge in an organisational setting.
• Use it to develop or improve products, services and experiences.
• Use it to build a more experimental, collaborative innovation culture.

Origins

Design thinking draws on two traditions. Herbert Simon’s The Sciences of the Artificial, published in 1969, described professions such as engineering, medicine, business and architecture as concerned with how things might be—not only how they are. Industrial design and design engineering contributed the practice of integrating form, function and human use.

IDEO, led by David Kelley, brought this way of working into mainstream business during the nineteen nineties; Kelley later helped establish Stanford’s d.school. Tim Brown and Roger Martin further formalised and popularised the approach. Design thinking gathers established practices—ethnographic research, brainstorming, user-centred innovation and rapid prototyping—into an iterative method.

What it is

Design thinking searches for an intersection among human desirability, technical feasibility and business viability. It is solution-oriented without being solution-fixated: teams begin with a point of view, treat it as a hypothesis and revise both the problem and the proposed answer as evidence accumulates.

Unlike analysis that defines every parameter before acting, design thinking tolerates ambiguity long enough to discover a better frame. Critical thinking often decomposes an idea; design thinking also builds possible wholes. It is associated with abductive reasoning—forming plausible hypotheses about what could be—then testing them in the world.

Effective design thinkers are:

empathic

they observe situations from the perspective of the people affected;

optimistic

they believe improvement is possible without ignoring constraints;

experimental

they make ideas testable and expect many attempts to fail;

collaborative

they integrate different disciplines and share ownership of the result.