What is Design Thinking?

An extract from Tim Brown’s Change by Design.

Who is a Design Thinker?

Someone who has a talent for balancing technical, commercial, and human considerations? Someone who does not subscribe to commoditization?

What is Design Thinking?

An approach to innovation that is powerful, effective and broadly accessible, that can be integrated into all aspects of business and society, and that individuals and teams can use to generate breakthrough ideas that are implemented and therefore have an impact.

By integrating what is desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable, designers have been able to create the products we enjoy today. Design thinking takes the next step, which is to put these tools into the hands of people who may have never thought of themselves as designers and apply them to a vastly greater range of problems.

Design thinking taps into the capacities we all have but that are overlooked by conventional problem-solving practices. Design thinking relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognise patterns, to construct ideas that have emotional meaning as well as functionality, to express ourselves in media other than words or symbols.

Difference between being a designer and thinking like a designer?

Design is no longer a link in a chain but a hub of the wheel.

Design has become too important to be left to designers.

Behind the soaring rhetoric of “genius” and “visionary”, Steve Jobs, Akio Morita, .., all showed a basic commitment to the principles of design thinking. All of them have a human-centered rather than technology-centered world view.

If you are managing a hotel, design thinking can help you to rethink the very nature of hospitality. If you are working with a philanthropic agency, design thinking can help you grasp the needs of the people you are trying to serve. If you are a VC, design thinking can help you peer into the future. Restructuring a health care foundation? Helping a century old manufacturing firm better understand it’s clients? Alternative learning environments for an elite university? Have more impact on the world with design thinking.

Design is no longer limited to the introduction of new physical products but includes new sorts of processes, services, interactions, entertainment forms, and ways of communicating and collaborating.