Design Thinking

Design thinking is an iterative process in which you seek to understand your users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions which you can prototype and test. The overall goal is to identify alternative strategies and solutions that are not instantly apparent with your initial level of understanding.

Design thinking is more than just a process; it opens up an entirely new way to think, and it offers a collection of hands-on methods to help you apply this new mindset.

In essence, design thinking:

• Revolves around a deep interest to understand the people for whom we design products and services.

• Helps us observe and develop empathy with the target users.

• Enhances our ability to question: in design thinking you question the problem, the assumptions and the implications.

• Proves extremely useful when you tackle problems that are ill-defined or unknown.

• Involves ongoing experimentation through sketches, prototypes, testing and trials of new concepts and ideas.

Sourced from Interaction Design Foundation

Design thinking originally came about as a way of teaching engineers how to approach problems creatively, like designers do. One of the first people to write about design thinking was John E. Arnold, professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University. In 1959, he wrote “Creative Engineering,” the text that established the four areas of design thinking. From there, design thinking began to evolve as a “way of thinking” in the fields of science and design engineering—as can be seen in Herbert A. Simon’s book “The Sciences of the Artificial” and in Robert McKim’s “Experiences in Visual Thinking”. 

Design thinking is both an ideology and a process that seeks to solve complex problems in a user-centric way. It focuses on achieving practical results and solutions that are:

• Technically feasible: They can be developed into functional products or processes;

• Economically viable: The business can afford to implement them;

• Desirable for the user: They meet a real human need

Sourced from inVISION

According to multiple sources, Design Thinking is generally agreed to be a way of thinking/ideology where problems are addressed with a creative mindset and solutions to problems are efficient and feasible. This can be used to improve current technology and make new technology that will help us humans more than ever before.