Design Thinking

What is Design Thinking?

Design thinking is a management tool that combines creative and analytical methods. It aims to release maximum creative potential among all stakeholders of an innovation project to solve complex problems or tasks in a customer systematically- and above all, user-oriented manner.

The Key Principles of Design Thinking:

• An attitude that focuses on the concerns of the user and his reality of life.

  • Open and willing to learn
  • Empathetic
  • Practical and pragmatic
  • Accepting complexity
  • Externalizing
  • Iterating

• An iterative design thinking process that deals intensively with the problem, solution, and associated methods.

• Framework conditions that make this approach efficient.

The Design Thinking Process

The design thinking process requires careful consideration of the design problem and its context, gathering multiple perspectives and ideas, prototyping solutions, testing with users, refining designs, and finally, creating a final practical design.

Using this design thinking process, project teams can incorporate design thinking into their workflows to ensure design decisions are always well thought-out and beneficial to the user. By understanding the user first, projects can move forward confidently and hit their goals faster.

Phases of the Design Thinking Process

Problem Space:

• Understand
• Observe
• Define point of view

Solution Space:

• Find ideas
• Develop prototypes
• Test

Figure 1: Design Thinking Process (Source: HPI School of Design Thinking)

Learn more about design thinking in our article:
The 6 Steps Design Thinking Process