Definition of Design Thinking

What is Design Thinking?

Design Thinking is a highly popular human-centered design strategy that is a form of Developmental Design. Currently, it is perhaps the most popular form of Developmental Design. 

As a methodology, Design Thinking’s focus is on empathizing with users and asking about their problems and needs and then developing solutions to these problems. It has been systematized into a four step method of: Empathize, Ideate, Prototype, Make.

It is important to understand Design Thinking as a response to historical design practices that began at a radical remove from actual users and actual needs – rather focusing on the ideas of designers. This is the classical method of Ideate, Plan, Make. By beginning with actual users, Design Thinking develops an effective way of improving existing designs to meet the existing needs of users. 

A second important development that Design Thinking takes advantage of is the emergence and formalization of processes of prototyping. Where more classical methods of design refined ideas into products fully before allowing users to engage with them, the prototyping process does the opposite. Prototyping allows products to co-emerge and co-evolve via use. 

All this said, Design Thinking as a method for creativity has significant limitations. While empathizing is important, Design Thinking is not an effective method to develop disruptive or qualitatively novel innovations. Because it begins from the logic of solving existing problems, it is inherently only involved in incremental forms of change and cannot assist in any form of Disruptive Design. 

But the limits of Design Thinking go beyond its inability to engage with qualitative forms of creative processes. By being an “ideate first” process it cannot get beyond the conservative logic of ideation. 

While there are benefits and reasonable use cases for variations of Design Thinking – on the whole there are better approaches to developmental creativity and design that avoid the limitations of ideation-driven innovation and work far more effectively with processes of co-emergence.

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See: Making, What is Innovation?