design thinking for problem solving and strategic innovation

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Design Thinking for Problem Solving and Innovation: Achieve Breakthrough Solutions

Course Provider

Centre for Professional and Continuing Education (PaCE@NTU)

Certification

Continuing Education and Training Certificate

Introduction

Traditionally, design thinking was thought to be an important tool for designers and engineers and technologists. However, design thinking can be used for any aspect of human endeavour and all industries.

Design thinking embraces both the physiological and psychological aspect of a product or service from the perspective of the user. Instead of focusing on standardization of products or services, a design thinker will see ways to humanize them. This would require two very important components that gives the formula for design thinking which is creativity and empathy.

Today, we talk more, share more, and expect more. This disruption has changed the way organizations and people do things – be it solving a problem, deciding and assessing a situation. In this environment, the traditional ways of running a business just won’t work anymore.

Therefore, organizations and staff need to pay attention to design thinking. Imagine your ability to adapt design thinking and see how you become effective in solving complex problems objectively and come up with breakthrough solutions and human-centric innovation.

The more you practise and adapt design thinking in your life the more opportunities you will have to demonstrate strategic innovation. In this workshop you should discover for yourself that design thinking brings major opportunities to change your perspective and how you can adapt this to transform your way of solving problems and discover breakthrough solutions that are workable and productive in nature.

Upon successful completion of the entire course, participants will receive an "NTU Certificate of Completion".

Course Availability

Date(s): 28 to 29 Aug 2024

Time: 9:00AM to 5:00PM

Venue: NTU@one-north campus, Executive Centre (Buona Vista)

Registration is closed.

Date(s): 14 to 15 Oct 2024

Registration Closing Date: 19 Sep 2024

Date(s): 19 to 20 Dec 2024

Registration Closing Date: 28 Nov 2024

What you will learn and apply by the end of the workshop:

1. How to apply design thinking for short-term and long-range planning.

2. Immediately learn and apply the five tenets of design thinking.

3. Why every staff in the organization needs to be a good design thinker?

4. The 10 principles of design thinking and how to adapt this to your organization.

5. Use ethnographic research tools to identify the real needs of internal and external customers.

6. Begin to integrate the Six Human Needs into design thinking.

7. Notice how you can use design thinking to address the nature of the problem.

8. Using NLP™ Neuro Logical Level in designing your thinking for breakthrough solutions and human-centric innovation.

9. Classifying problems as either being fuzzy or clear-cut and using design thinking to consider options.

10. Recognize systems in design thinking.

11. Learning to look at the big picture with design thinking.

12. How to create a design thinking culture within your organization.

1. What is design thinking and what is it used for?

2. To introduce DT tools and methods that can help visualise a system understanding of business activities

3. To show how powers of empathy can be used to develop a personalised customer service

4. To use brainstorming and ideation strategies and techniques

5. To show how innovation can be integrated into a business model

6. Seeing systems in design thinking

7. Collective imagination and the fifth order of design

8. Understand and apply strategic foresight

Looking forward: Future possibilities

Methodology As you go through this workshop, you will see changes in the way you think and act. You will question your existing belief systems when it comes to innovation and problem solving. You will learn through the intricacy of design thinking how much more effective you will be in problem solving and developing breakthrough solutions. You might find yourself thinking about design thinking and feeling the positive impact it brings to the way you go about doing your job. As you focus your awareness in design thinking and notice that you do so, it will begin to work its magic and allow you to come up with breakthrough solutions.

This workshop has been intricately designed for all levels of management in an organization. It is especially valuable workshop for policy makers, administrators, educators and managers.

Standard Course Fee: S$1,308.00

• NTU/NIE alumni may utilise their $1,600 Alumni Course Credits. Click  here  for more information.

Theyagu, Daniel

Mr Daniel Theyagu is a training consultant and performance evaluator since 1989. He has designed and delivered customised training for many organisations ranging from small and medium enterprises, multi-national corporations and the public sector. His participants have come from various countries including: Malaysia, Indonesia, Myanmar, Mauritius, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, China, South Korea, Japan, Thailand, Brazil, Germany, Sweden, France, USA, United Kingdom, Denmark, Norway, Russia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. Daniel is well known in his field as a highly humourous and innovative trainer who engages his participants actively and assist them in realising the returns of investment for the course they attend. His participants include, doctors, lawyers, judges, senior government official, military personnel, students and job-seekers.

His area of specialty includes the following:

• Leadership and Learning Organisation
• Critical and Creative thinking
• Emotional and Social Intelligence
• Crisis and Conflict Management
• Speed Reading and Memorisation Technique for Professionals
• Negotiation Strategies
• Personal and Organisational Competency-based Training

Daniel is the author of the following books:

• Thinking Critically using the Sun Tzu Art of War Techniques
• Extremely Busy People Guide to: Read Faster! Memorise Better! Think Clearer
• Gravitating Towards Success
• Making Memory Work For You
• Guide to Success in Studies for Mature Students
• Developing True Leadership Potential

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Continuing Education

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Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation: A Proven Approach to Business Growth

Design thinking is a powerful approach to problem-solving and innovation, combining empathy, creativity, and logic to find meaningful solutions to complex challenges. By incorporating design thinking principles into business strategy , companies can foster a culture of innovation and re-energize their practices. Utilizing design thinking allows for better understanding of the user’s needs, making it possible to develop products, services, or solutions that create true value for the customers.

Key Takeaways

Understanding design thinking.

The core of design thinking lies in its focus on empathy and understanding the users’ needs and perspectives. This enables designers and innovators to create solutions and experiences tailored to their users’ requirements. By placing emphasis on empathy, design thinking encourages a more human-centric approach to problem-solving, leading to more effective and meaningful solutions.

As described by Idris Mootee in his book “Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation,” the design thinking practice can be a powerful catalyst for organizational growth and transformation. In a world where change is constant and unpredictable, it becomes crucial for companies to innovate to remain competitive. By implementing design thinking, businesses can develop strategic innovation, enabling them to adapt and succeed in a rapidly evolving landscape.

Innovation and Strategy

One effective method for fostering strategic innovation is through design thinking . This human-centered technique involves empathy, experimentation, and iteration, allowing organizations to develop innovative solutions that cater to the needs and desires of their target audience. By employing design thinking, leaders can make informed decisions that align with their organization’s goals and support continuous growth.

Problem-Solving with Design Thinking

Design Thinking is a powerful approach for tackling complex and ambiguous problems that arise in today’s fast-paced, rapidly changing world. It shifts the focus from a traditional problem-solving mindset to a more creative and human-centered one, enabling businesses and organizations to develop innovative solutions and stay ahead of the competition.

The Design Thinking process is typically characterized by five stages: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. These stages help break down the problem-solving process into manageable steps, ensuring that each aspect of the problem is thoroughly considered, leading to more effective solutions.

Research, Insight, and Creativity

In the realm of design thinking for strategic innovation, the concepts of research, insight, creativity, and mental models all play an essential role. Research is the foundation upon which innovative solutions are built, allowing practitioners to dive deep into understanding the problems they are trying to solve. By gathering relevant information and data, they can develop a clear and concise understanding of the challenges at hand.

Mental models are the internal representations individuals use to make sense of complex situations. They provide a framework for understanding, interpreting, and predicting phenomena in the world. When applying design thinking to strategic innovation, it is important to recognize that different individuals may have different mental models, leading to diverse perspectives on the problem to be solved. Encouraging the exploration and comparison of these various mental models can lead to a richer understanding of the issue and a broader range of potential solutions.

Design Thinking in Management

Managers who embrace design thinking have the opportunity to develop a better understanding of their customers, employees, and stakeholders. By empathizing with these individuals, managers can gain insights into their needs, preferences, and challenges, leading to more informed decision-making. This approach allows leadership teams to craft innovative solutions that address the core issues faced by their organizations.

Moreover, design thinking equips managers with practical tools to navigate complex business problems . Using techniques such as brainstorming, prototyping, and iterative testing, managers can explore various approaches to finding viable solutions. This helps them to be more agile and adaptive in the face of ever-changing market conditions and customer expectations.

In conclusion, incorporating design thinking into management practices redefines the way organizations approach problem-solving and decision-making. By fostering empathy, creativity, and collaboration, this methodology not only allows managers to tackle complex challenges but also unlocks the potential for strategic innovation that drives business success.

Business and Design Thinking

Harvard Business School recognizes the importance of design thinking in today’s business world. Their online course on design thinking and innovation teaches professionals to apply these principles to real-life business situations, leading to more effective problem-solving and decision-making.

Tools and Frameworks

One fundamental aspect of design thinking is the use of a strategy summary framework . This framework helps in clarifying the objectives of a project, identifying the targeted audience, and determining the resources required. It serves as a roadmap that guides teams throughout the innovation process.

In addition to the aforementioned methods, tools such as software applications can bolster design thinking efforts. These digital platforms can facilitate collaboration, simplify data analysis, and support visualization, all of which are crucial elements in the design process.

Application and Implementation

The application of design thinking begins with gaining a deep understanding of the problem at hand. Immersion in the context allows organizations to empathize with customers, stakeholders, and end-users, helping to identify the root of the issue. This step is essential in finding relevant opportunities for innovation.

From these ideas, prototyping and testing are employed to assess their potential impact and feasibility. This iterative process enables organizations to refine their ideas, making necessary adjustments before full-scale implementation. By experimenting with different prototypes, businesses can minimize risks associated with introducing new products, services, or strategies.

Design Thinking and User Experience

Design thinking is an iterative, non-linear process that focuses on collaboration between designers and users, ultimately leading to innovative solutions based on real user behavior, thoughts, and feelings. The design thinking process typically consists of five core stages: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. By incorporating user experience (UX) into every aspect of design thinking, businesses can create products and services that truly resonate with their target audience.

The Ideate stage is the creative heart of design thinking. In this phase, designers brainstorm and generate diverse ideas and solutions to address their users’ needs. The goal is to explore a variety of possible solutions, encouraging unconventional approaches and risk-taking. Collaborative brainstorming sessions, sketching, and rapid prototyping techniques foster creativity and innovation.

Combining design thinking and user experience ensures that products and services are built with users’ needs and wants at the forefront, contributing to successful, user-centered innovations. By maintaining a laser focus on user experience throughout the entire design thinking process, designers are better equipped to create solutions that resonate with their target audience, setting businesses apart from their competitors in an increasingly competitive market.

Collaboration and Group Dynamics in Design Thinking

A productive design thinking team should embrace diversity, valuing the unique insights and experiences each member brings to the table. Effective communication is crucial in ensuring that all voices are heard and understood. Encouraging open dialogue and active listening can help create an inclusive environment where everyone feels comfortable sharing their thoughts and ideas without fear of judgment.

Lastly, successful design thinking teams should cultivate empathy among members. Understanding the needs and concerns of others within the team, along with end-users, allows for better decision-making and fosters an environment where innovation thrives. Empathy-driven design thinking can lead to more user-centric solutions, ensuring that the final product or service meets the needs of its target audience.

The Power of Iteration, Ideation and Prototyping

Iteration is a fundamental concept in design thinking, whereby ideas are developed, tested, and refined continuously throughout the process. This approach enables businesses to adapt and evolve their strategies, ensuring that solutions remain relevant and effective as conditions change. The iterative nature of design thinking encourages constant learning and improvement, fostering a growth mindset and driving continuous innovation.

The combination of iteration, ideation, and prototyping in design thinking provides businesses with a comprehensive framework for strategic innovation. This approach encourages continuous learning, improvement, and collaboration, yielding robust and effective solutions that address the needs of all stakeholders. By incorporating these elements into their innovation strategies, organizations can confidently and effectively navigate the complexities of the modern business landscape.

The Role of Emotion and Logic in Design Thinking

On the other hand, logic is the driving force behind the structured and methodical steps of the Design Thinking process. It helps designers refine ideas and generate actionable insights by evaluating facts and data. Logical reasoning is crucial in navigating multiple options and contrasting possibilities, as well as determining the feasibility and effectiveness of potential solutions.

Challenges and Solutions in Design Thinking

In the realm of strategic innovation, design thinking plays a significant role. Like any creative process, it comes with its own set of challenges and roadblocks. In this section, we’ll explore some of these challenges and their corresponding solutions.

The ideation stage too can pose challenges as it requires generating a wide range of innovative solutions. Traditional ways of thinking, organizational culture, and resistance to change can hinder the ideation process. Encouraging open-mindedness, fostering a collaborative environment, and introducing brainstorming techniques like mind mapping and sketching can greatly aid in producing more innovative ideas .

Design Thinking Principles and Values

Design thinking is an innovative approach that combines creativity with strategy to develop unique solutions and optimize business processes. Its principles and values draw from various disciplines, such as design, management, and marketing, to create a comprehensive framework that fosters collaboration, experimentation, and iteration in problem-solving. This section will discuss some of the core design thinking principles and values that contribute to successful strategic innovation.

Collaboration is also essential in design thinking as it promotes the sharing of diverse ideas, knowledge, and skills. By assembling cross-functional teams from various departments, organizations can harness the unique expertise of each member to create more holistic solutions. This collaborative approach enables companies to go beyond departmental silos and establish an environment that fosters innovation across the entire organization.

Online Design Thinking Resources

There are several well-known online resources available for those interested in exploring design thinking for strategic innovation. One prime example is the Design Thinking Course offered by Harvard Business School Online. This course introduces learners to structured methods of problem-solving, creative solutions, and behavior-change analysis in innovation development and internal team processes.

Additionally, the HubSpot Blog provides a concise definition of design thinking, stressing the importance of balancing business and art, along with exploring a human-centered approach to strategic innovation. This resource offers valuable insights in a more casual, blog-style format.

Design Thinking in Marketing

Design thinking is an approach that focuses on understanding the needs and preferences of consumers to create innovative and effective solutions. It revolves around human-centered design and is applicable in the field of marketing, which aims to understand and connect with the target audience better.

The Define phase involves analyzing the collected data and identifying patterns to craft a problem statement. By defining the problem, marketers can streamline their focus and develop targeted strategies that address the concerns of their customers.

Finally, the Test phase allows marketers to evaluate the effectiveness of their prototypes through customer feedback. Adjustments can be made accordingly, ensuring that the final product or marketing strategy meets the needs and preferences of the target audience.

Design Thinking in Various Industries

In the healthcare industry , design thinking plays a crucial role in improving patient experience and health outcomes. By empathizing with patients and medical professionals, design thinking helps in creating personalized treatments and seamless patient experiences, ultimately leading to enhanced healthcare services.

The manufacturing industry has embraced design thinking to streamline processes, reduce waste, and develop innovative products that cater to dynamic market demands. This human-centered approach has helped companies address production challenges and strengthen their competitive advantage while also reducing their environmental impact.

Case Study: IDEO And Design Thinking

One of the key aspects of IDEO’s design thinking process is empathy – understanding the needs, desires, and motivations of the users. This deep understanding of users allows IDEO to create products, services, and experiences that resonate with them and solve their problems. The process includes stages such as defining the challenge, researching the users, ideating possible solutions, prototyping, and testing.

In conclusion, IDEO’s approach to design thinking has proven to be successful in driving innovation and creating value across various industries. By focusing on empathy, collaboration, and rapid experimentation, design thinking ensures organizations remain adaptable and responsive to the ever-changing needs of their users and the market.

The Future of Design Thinking

In the future, design thinking will need to address the growing complexities of global challenges, such as climate change, sustainability, and social equity issues. By incorporating these aspects into the problem-solving process, design thinking practitioners will develop solutions that not only drive innovation but also contribute positively to the world.

In conclusion, the future of design thinking will be characterized by its ability to adapt, evolve, and tackle increasingly complex global challenges. By embracing emerging technologies and striving to understand the diverse needs of the global community, design thinking will continue to drive strategic innovation and contribute positively to the world.

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Design Thinking and Innovation

Design Thinking and Innovation from Harvard Business School (HBS) Online will teach you how to leverage fundamental design thinking principles and innovative problem-solving tools to address business challenges.

Associated Schools

Harvard Business School

What you'll learn.

Break cognitive fixedness and approach problems with a new mindset that integrates creative problem-solving and management

Develop an innovation toolkit, and determine when to apply design thinking frameworks, tools, and exercises to your own strategic initiatives

Practice empathy and apply human-centered design through techniques such as ideation, prototyping, user journey mapping, and analyzing mental models

Assess group dynamics and maximize your team’s potential for developing and iterating prototypes and managing the implementation of new designs

Understand how leaders can create the optimal environment and team dynamics to guide innovation and collaboration

Put design thinking into action by collaborating with peers from a wide range of professional experiences and backgrounds

Course description

Design Thinking and Innovation, through Harvard Business School (HBS) Online, equips current and aspiring innovation managers with the design thinking principles and innovative problem-solving tools to solve business challenges and guide their organization’s strategy. The course features five weeks of course content and two weeks of cohort project work, enabling the opportunity to put learning into practice. Leaders interviewed include Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel, Royal Philips CEO Frans van Houten, and T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert, among others. Participants will walk away with an innovation toolkit of frameworks and exercises for identifying business opportunities and generating possible solutions for their organization’s initiatives.

Instructors

Srikant Datar

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How to solve problems with design thinking

May 18, 2023 Is it time to throw out the standard playbook when it comes to problem solving? Uniquely challenging times call for unique approaches, write Michael Birshan , Ben Sheppard , and coauthors in a recent article , and design thinking offers a much-needed fresh perspective for leaders navigating volatility. Design thinking is a systemic, intuitive, customer-focused problem-solving approach that can create significant value and boost organizational resilience. The proof is in the pudding: From 2013 to 2018, companies that embraced the business value of design had TSR that were 56 percentage points higher than that of their industry peers. Check out these insights to understand how to use design thinking to unleash the power of creativity in strategy and problem solving.

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Why Design Thinking Works

• Jeanne Liedtka

While we know a lot about practices that stimulate new ideas, innovation teams often struggle to apply them. Why? Because people’s biases and entrenched behaviors get in the way. In this article a Darden professor explains how design thinking helps people overcome this problem and unleash their creativity.

Though ostensibly geared to understanding and molding the experiences of customers, design thinking also profoundly reshapes the experiences of the innovators themselves. For example, immersive customer research helps them set aside their own views and recognize needs customers haven’t expressed. Carefully planned dialogues help teams build on their diverse ideas, not just negotiate compromises when differences arise. And experiments with new solutions reduce all stakeholders’ fear of change.

At every phase—customer discovery, idea generation, and testing—a clear structure makes people more comfortable trying new things, and processes increase collaboration. Because it combines practical tools and human insight, design thinking is a social technology —one that the author predicts will have an impact as large as an earlier social technology: total quality management.

It addresses the biases and behaviors that hamper innovation.

Idea in Brief

The problem.

While we know a lot about what practices stimulate new ideas and creative solutions, most innovation teams struggle to realize their benefits.

People’s intrinsic biases and behavioral habits inhibit the exercise of the imagination and protect unspoken assumptions about what will or will not work.

The Solution

Design thinking provides a structured process that helps innovators break free of counterproductive tendencies that thwart innovation. Like TQM, it is a social technology that blends practical tools with insights into human nature.

Occasionally, a new way of organizing work leads to extraordinary improvements. Total quality management did that in manufacturing in the 1980s by combining a set of tools—kanban cards, quality circles, and so on—with the insight that people on the shop floor could do much higher level work than they usually were asked to. That blend of tools and insight, applied to a work process, can be thought of as a social technology.

• JL Jeanne Liedtka is a professor of business administration at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business.

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A complete guide to the design thinking process

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Learn the five stages of the design thinking process, get practical tips to apply them, and get templates to seamlessly run design thinking exercises.

How many projects have you worked on that stalled because your team couldn’t align on the best path forward? How many more got shelved because they didn’t meet user needs or expectations? And how many got delayed in rounds and rounds of never-ending feedback? 

Thankfully, you don’t have to keep repeating those experiences month after month. The (not so) secret weapon: design thinking .

Design thinking gives teams a new way to approach their projects and overcome some of those well-known challenges. It can help teams understand their users' needs and challenges, then apply those learnings to solve problems in a creative, innovative way. Understanding design thinking can transform your team’s problem-solving approach — and how you work together.

What is design thinking?

Design thinking is an iterative process where teams seek to understand user needs, challenge assumptions, define complex problems to solve, and develop innovative solutions to prototype and test. The goal of design thinking is to come up with user-focused solutions tailored to the particular problem at hand.

While often used in product design, service design, and customer experience, you can use design thinking in virtually any situation, industry, or organization to create user-centric solutions to specific problems.

Design thinking process 101: Definitions and approaches

The design thinking process puts customers’ and users’ needs at the center and aims to solve challenges from their perspective.

Design thinking typically follows five distinct stages:

Empathize stage

The first stage of design thinking lays the foundation for the rest of the process because it focuses on the needs of the real people using your product. At this stage, you want to get familiar with the people experiencing the problems you’re trying to solve, understanding their point of view, and learning about their user experience. You want to understand their challenges and what they need from your product or company to address them.

The goal of this stage is for your team to develop a user-centered vision of the core problem you need to solve. The idea is to challenge any assumptions or biases teams have, instead using their customer perspective as a guiding source. This is important because it aligns the team on what needs to be considered during the rest of the design thinking process. 

To help you get a solid understanding of the problems you’re solving, you can ask a lot of questions to build empathy with your users. These will invite people to share their experiences and observations to help your team better understand the problem. Then, you can move on to some specific exercises for the empathy stage of the process.

As you build up your understanding of your users, it's helpful to visualize their experience. A common way to do this is to assemble a customer journey map . This helps identify areas of friction and understand customer preferences.

Learn more: 7 types of questions to build empathy for design thinking

Ideate stage

Your priority here is to think outside the box and source as many ideas as possible from all areas of the business. Bring in people from different departments so you benefit from a wider range of experiences and perspectives during ideation sessions. Don’t worry about coming up with concrete solutions or how to implement each one — you’ll build on that later. The goal is to explore new and creative ideas rather than come up with an actual plan.

Key steps in the ideation phase:

• Define your problem : Creating a problem statement ensures that your team can focus on solving the right problem and staying aligned with your end-user or customer’s problem
• Start ideating : Choose a brainstorming technique to help organize team participation that fits your goal (More on that in the next section.)
• Prioritize your ideas : Once you have several ideas, prioritize them based on how well they take into account the customer’s needs‍ ‍
• Choose the best solution : Choose the best ideas to move forward to either the define stage or the prototype stage

Learn more: The ideation stage of design thinking: What you need to know

Your priority here is to generate as many ideas as possible, without judging or evaluating them. This step encourages designers to think creatively and push the boundaries of what's possible. We’ve put together a list of different brainstorming techniques to help your teams come up with creative new ideas. 

Put it into practice: How to facilitate a brainstorming session

Prototyping stage

At this stage, your team’s goal is to remove uncertainty around your proposed solutions. This is where you start thinking about them in more detail, including how you’ll bring them to life. Your prototypes should help the team understand if the design or solution will work as it’s intended to. 

Here, the focus is on speed and efficiency — you don’t want to invest a ton of time or resources into these solutions yet because you’re not sure they’re the best ones for the problem you’re trying to solve. You just need a functional, interactive prototype that can prove your concept. These are learning opportunities to help you spot any issues or opportunities before you take it any further.

Learn more: A guide to prototyping: the 4th stage of design thinking

Testing stage

The testing stage is normally one of the last stages of the design thinking process. After you’ve developed a concept or prototype, you need to test it in the real-world to understand its viability and usability. It’s where your product, design, or development teams evaluate the creative solutions they’ve come up with, to see how real users interact with them. 

Testing your concepts and observing how people interact with them helps you understand whether or not the prototype solves real problems and meets their needs, before you invest in it fully.

However, design thinking is an iterative process: You may go through the ideation, prototyping, and testing phases multiple times to improve and refine your solutions as you learn more from your users.

Read the guide: Testing: A guide to the 5th stage of design thinking

The relationship between human-centered design and design thinking

These two terms are often used together, because they complement one another. However, they’re two different things, so understanding their differences is important. 

Simply put, design thinking is a working process, while human-centered design is a mindset or approach.

The first step in finding success with design thinking is to foster a culture of human-centered design within your team. This is because design thinking focuses so heavily on the users and customers — the people using your product or service.

To inspire your team, we’ve put together four human-centered design examples — and explain why they work so well.

Benefits of design thinking

For organizations who’ve never run a design thinking workshop before, it can feel like a big change in how you approach the design process. But it can offer many benefits for your business.

Foster a true design culture within your organization

Design thinking is an iterative process — it’s not something you do once and call it done. The more you do it, the more you’ll see a design-focused culture emerge within your organization, which is much more effective than going to one-off creative retreats or setting up expensive innovation centers that no one ever uses.

This mindset and cultural shift can help scale design thinking within the business. But it’s important to know how to avoid  some of the pitfalls companies can face when trying to create a design culture internally.

Learn more: How to use the LUMA System of Innovation for everyday design thinking

Encourage collaboration across departments

Design thinking isn’t just for the designers on the team. The earlier stages of the process — Empathize, Define, and Ideate — are perfect for bringing in people from across the business. In fact, bringing in varied viewpoints and perspectives can help you come up with more creative or effective solutions.

You can use the design thinking process to get more people involved, and help everyone contribute ideas.

Improve understanding of user needs

So many companies say they’re “customer focused,” but lack a clear understanding of what really matters most to their customers in the context of their product or service. Design thinking puts the user front and center, with the Empathize stage dedicated to understanding and discovering user needs.

Learn more: How to identify user needs and pain points

Skills and behaviors needed for successful design thinking

To get the most out of a design thinking exercise, you’ll need a collaborative and creative mindset within your team. The team needs to be willing to explore new ideas, and laser-focused on customer or user needs. 

Here are some specific skills to help your design thinking process run smoothly.

Divergent and convergent thinking

Divergence and convergence is a human-centered design approach to problem-solving. It switches between expansive and focused thinking, giving you a process that balances understanding people’s problems and developing solutions. 

It focuses on understanding a user's needs, behaviors, and motivations, to help you develop empathy for their problems. Then, it encourages experimentation and iteration to help you effectively design solutions to meet those needs.

Collaborative working

Design thinking isn’t a solo activity. You’ll bring in people from different teams or business areas. To get the most out of the process, everyone needs to collaborate and communicate effectively. Teams that are good at collaborating drive the best outcomes, while also making it an enjoyable experience working together.

There are several core collaboration skills your team needs to succeed:

• Open-mindedness
• Communication
• Adaptability
• Organization
• Time management

Learn more about why these skills are so important and how you can improve them individually or as a team: 7 collaboration skills your team needs to succeed

Participatory or collaborative design

For many design teams and creative folks, the idea of designing something with other people can be enough to make them shudder. “Design by committee” is their idea of a nightmare. But the design thinking process isn’t about “making the logo 10% bigger” or “using a different shade of blue.” It’s user- and solution-focused.

You’ll get the best outcomes if you bring insights, perspectives, and expertise from multiple stakeholders. That includes at the Prototype and Test stages, as everyone will have ideas to contribute to help you bring solutions to life.

Learn more: What is co-design? A primer on participatory design

Common challenges in design thinking

If your team hasn’t mastered or fully committed to each one of the design thinking steps, you may encounter problems that make it harder to reap the benefits of design thinking.

Here are 4 common challenges that teams face when implementing design thinking practices.

• A company culture that doesn't foster collaboration
• An inability to adjust to non-linear processes
• A lack of in-depth user research
• Getting too invested in a single idea

Learn how to address these in Mural's guide on design thinking challenges .

Design thinking tools and templates to help you get started

Using mural for design thinking.

There are lots of tools you can use to run design thinking workshops — including Mural. We help designers work as effectively as possible, so they can get to better solutions quicker. We’ve incorporated some design thinking shortcuts and “hidden” features into our application, making it perfect for in-person or remote (or even asynchronous) collaborative sessions. These include:

• Use the C-key shortcut to quickly connect ideas with arrows
• Seamlessly import existing information from spreadsheets
• Duplicate elements you already created for faster visualization
• Fit your canvas to your screen and zoom in
• Get even more options using the right-click menu

And to help you get started, we’ve hand-picked some Mural templates relevant to each stage of the design process below.

Templates for the Empathy stage

The empathy map template helps you visualize the thoughts, feelings, and actions of your customersto help you develop a better understanding of the their experiences. The map is divided into four quadrants, where you record the following:

• Thoughts: the customer’s internal dialogue and beliefs
• Feelings: the customer’s emotional responses
• Actions: the customer’s actions and behaviors
• Observations: what the customer is seeing and hearing.

Try Mural’s empathy map template

Templates for the Define stage

This exercise helps you understand a situation or problem by identifying what’s working, what’s not, and areas for improvement. You start by listing out the problem, then identifying the positive aspects (the rose), negatives (thorn), and possible solutions for improvement (the buds).

You can use this template to run the exercise individually or in groups. It gives you a way to gather new ideas and perspectives on the problem you’re solving in real-time.

Try Mural’s Rose, thorn, bud template

Templates for the Ideate stage

The round robin brainstorming exercise is a collaborative session where every person contributes multiple ideas. This is a great way to come up with lots of different ideas and solutions in the ideation stage of design thinking, where you’re focusing on quantity and creativity. 

Bringing in ideas from every team member encourages people to share their unique perspectives, and can also help you avoid groupthink. 

Try Mural’s Round robin template

Templates for the Prototype stage

This template helps you map out how an idea will work in practice, as a functional system. Schematic diagramming is very flexible, so it can be used in many types of projects to make sure your idea is  structurally sound. It can help you map out workflows and identify any decisions you need to make to bring your idea to life.

Try Mural’s Schematic diagramming template

Templates for the Test stage

In think aloud testing, users test out a product or prototype and talk through the relevant tasks as they complete them. You can use this template to record the feedback, insights, and experiences of your testers, and identify the success and failure points in your proposed solution.

Try Mural’s Think aloud testing template

Design thinking examples: What it looks like in practice

Design thinking is a very flexible approach that works for companies of any size, from large enterprises to small startups. 

Here are some examples of how companies use design thinking, for many types of creative projects.

IBM uses design thinking to design at scale

IBM was traditionally an engineering-led organization, but now it's shifting its focus onto design, working to spread a design culture throughout the business. One of the main ways of doing that is by launching IBM Design Camps.

These camps are comprehensive educational programs that help people understand the concept of design thinking and how it specifically works at IBM. 

Learn more about how IBM runs design thinking workshops with remote or distributed teams .

Somersault Innovation uses design thinking to transform its sales process

Somersault Innovation has used design thinking methods to help their sales team co-create solutions with their customers. It’s helped sellers become more customer-centric. 

Now, their sellers can create mutual success plans with their prospects, making it easier for them to find a path forward together.

Mural uses design thinking to drive growth

At Mural, our marketing team is constantly following new trends, evaluating metrics, and working to deliver the best experiences for our customers. Design thinking helps us adopt a customer-centric approach by ensuring that we're focused on the right problems. This helps us have the biggest impact on the company’s long-term growth while creating the most value for our users.

David J. Bland planned a book using the design thinking methodology

It’s not just visual creative projects that can benefit from the design thinking process. Founder, speaker, and author David J. Bland used the methodology to plan out his book and collaborate with other team members in the process. In addition to helping him refine and adjust the structure, Bland also used it to gather feedback from early readers and target audiences, which helped get the final product just right.

Support design thinking with tools that facilitate creative collaboration

While we’ve covered some of the skills and behaviors you need to successfully run design thinking exercises, having the right tools can help a lot, too. A collaborative platform helps teams communicate, share ideas, and turn those ideas into solutions together.

Mural helps teams visualize their ideas in a collaboration platform that unlocks teamwork . This helps everyone stay on the same page, while giving them the ability to add their own ideas freely and easily. Mural facilitates effective collaboration both in person and remotely, making it ideal for design thinking workshops for co-located and distributed teams. Plus, it has tons of ready-to-use templates (like the ones we listed above) to help you get started.

Ready to give it a try? Start your Free Forever account today, and run your next design thinking workshop in Mural.

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Design Thinking (DT)

What is design thinking (dt).

Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative process that teams use to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions to prototype and test. It is most useful to tackle ill-defined or unknown problems and involves five phases: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test.

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Why Is Design Thinking so Important?

“Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer's toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.”

— Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO

Design thinking fosters innovation . Companies must innovate to survive and remain competitive in a rapidly changing environment. In design thinking, cross-functional teams work together to understand user needs and create solutions that address those needs. Moreover, the design thinking process helps unearth creative solutions.

Design teams use design thinking to tackle ill-defined/unknown problems (aka wicked problems ). Alan Dix, Professor of Human-Computer Interaction, explains what wicked problems are in this video.

Wicked problems demand teams to think outside the box, take action immediately, and constantly iterate—all hallmarks of design thinking.

Don Norman, a pioneer of user experience design, explains why the designer’s way of thinking is so powerful when it comes to such complex problems.

Design thinking offers practical methods and tools that major companies like Google, Apple and Airbnb use to drive innovation. From architecture and engineering to technology and services, companies across industries have embraced the methodology to drive innovation and address complex problems. 

The End Goal of Design Thinking: Be Desirable, Feasible and Viable

The design thinking process aims to satisfy three criteria: desirability (what do people desire?), feasibility (is it technically possible to build the solution?) and viability (can the company profit from the solution?). Teams begin with desirability and then bring in the other two lenses.

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0

Desirability: Meet People’s Needs

The design thinking process starts by looking at the needs, dreams and behaviors of people—the end users. The team listens with empathy to understand what people want, not what the organization thinks they want or need. The team then thinks about solutions to satisfy these needs from the end user’s point of view.

Feasibility: Be Technologically Possible

Once the team identifies one or more solutions, they determine whether the organization can implement them. In theory, any solution is feasible if the organization has infinite resources and time to develop the solution. However, given the team’s current (or future resources), the team evaluates if the solution is worth pursuing. The team may iterate on the solution to make it more feasible or plan to increase its resources (say, hire more people or acquire specialized machinery).

At the beginning of the design thinking process, teams should not get too caught up in the technical implementation. If teams begin with technical constraints, they might restrict innovation.

Viability: Generate Profits

A desirable and technically feasible product isn’t enough. The organization must be able to generate revenues and profits from the solution. The viability lens is essential not only for commercial organizations but also for non-profits. 

Traditionally, companies begin with feasibility or viability and then try to find a problem to fit the solution and push it to the market. Design thinking reverses this process and advocates that teams begin with desirability and bring in the other two lenses later.

The Five Stages of Design Thinking

Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, commonly known as the d.school, is renowned for its pioneering approach to design thinking. Their design process has five phases: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. These stages are not always sequential. Teams often run them in parallel, out of order, and repeat them as needed.

Stage 1: Empathize —Research Users' Needs

The team aims to understand the problem, typically through user research. Empathy is crucial to design thinking because it allows designers to set aside your assumptions about the world and gain insight into users and their needs.

Stage 2: Define—State Users' Needs and Problems

Once the team accumulates the information, they analyze the observations and synthesize them to define the core problems. These definitions are called problem statements . The team may create personas to help keep efforts human-centered.

Stage 3: Ideate—Challenge Assumptions and Create Ideas

With the foundation ready, teams gear up to “think outside the box.” They brainstorm alternative ways to view the problem and identify innovative solutions to the problem statement.

Stage 4: Prototype—Start to Create Solutions

This is an experimental phase. The aim is to identify the best possible solution for each problem. The team produces inexpensive, scaled-down versions of the product (or specific features found within the product) to investigate the ideas. This may be as simple as paper prototypes .

Stage 5: Test—Try the Solutions Out

The team tests these prototypes with real users to evaluate if they solve the problem. The test might throw up new insights, based on which the team might refine the prototype or even go back to the Define stage to revisit the problem.

These stages are different modes that contribute to the entire design project rather than sequential steps. The goal is to gain a deep understanding of the users and their ideal solution/product.

Design Thinking Frameworks

There is no single definition or process for design thinking. The five-stage design thinking methodology described above is just one of several frameworks.

Hasso-Platner Institute Panorama

Ludwig Wilhelm Wall, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Innovation doesn’t follow a linear path or have a clear-cut formula. Global design leaders and consultants have interpreted the abstract design process in different ways and have proposed other frameworks of design thinking.

Head, Heart and Hand by the American Institution of Graphic Arts (AIGA)

The Head, Heart, and Hand approach by AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) is a holistic perspective on design. It integrates the intellectual, emotional, and practical aspects of the creative process.

More than a process, the Head, Heart and Hand framework outlines the different roles that designers must perform to create great results.

© American Institute of Graphic Arts, Fair Use

“ Head ” symbolizes the intellectual component. The team focuses on strategic thinking, problem-solving and the cognitive aspects of design. It involves research and analytical thinking to ensure that design decisions are purposeful.

“ Heart ” represents the emotional dimension. It emphasizes empathy, passion, and human-centeredness. This aspect is crucial in understanding the users’ needs, desires, and experiences to ensure that designs resonate on a deeper, more personal level.

“ Hand ” signifies the practical execution of ideas, the craftsmanship, and the skills necessary to turn concepts into tangible solutions. This includes the mastery of tools, techniques, and materials, as well as the ability to implement and execute design ideas effectively.

Inspire, Ideate, Implement by IDEO

IDEO is a leading design consultancy and has developed its own version of the design thinking framework.

IDEO’s design thinking process is a cyclical three-step process that involves Inspiration, Ideation and Implementation.

© IDEO, Public License

In the “ Inspire ” phase, the team focuses on understanding users’ needs, behaviors, and motivations. The team empathizes with people through observation and user interviews to gather deep insights.

In the “ Ideate ” phase, the team synthesizes the insights gained to brainstorm a wide array of creative solutions. This stage encourages divergent thinking, where teams focus on quantity and variety of ideas over immediate practicality. The goal is to explore as many possibilities as possible without constraints.

In the “ Implement ” phase, the team brings these ideas to life through prototypes. The team tests, iterates and refines these ideas based on user feedback. This stage is crucial for translating abstract concepts into tangible, viable products, services, or experiences.

The methodology emphasizes collaboration and a multidisciplinary approach throughout each phase to ensure solutions are innovative and deeply rooted in real human needs and contexts.

The Double Diamond by the Design Council

In the book Designing Social Systems in a Changing World , Béla Heinrich Bánáthy, Professor at San Jose State University and UC Berkeley, created a “divergence-convergence model” diagram. The British Design Council interpreted this diagram to create the Double Diamond design process model.

As the name suggests, the double diamond model consists of two diamonds—one for the problem space and the other for the solution space. The model uses diamonds to represent the alternating diverging and converging activities.

© Design Council, CC BY 4.0

In the diverging “ Discover ” phase, designers gather insights and empathize with users’ needs. The team then converges in the “ Define ” phase to identify the problem.

The second, solution-related diamond, begins with “ Develop ,” where the team brainstorms ideas. The final stage is “ Deliver ,” where the team tests the concepts and implements the most viable solution.

This model balances expansive thinking with focused execution to ensure that design solutions are both creative and practical. It underscores the importance of understanding the problem thoroughly and carefully crafting the solution, making it a staple in many design and innovation processes.

With the widespread adoption of the double diamond framework, Design Council’s simple visual evolved.

In this expanded and annotated version, the framework emphasizes four design principles:

Be people-centered.

Communicate (visually and inclusively).

Collaborate and co-create.

Iterate, iterate, iterate!

The updated version also highlights the importance of leadership (to create an environment that allows innovation) and engagement (to connect with different stakeholders and involve them in the design process).

Common Elements of Design Thinking Frameworks

On the surface, design thinking frameworks look very different—they use alternative names and have different numbers of steps. However, at a fundamental level, they share several common traits.

Start with empathy . Focus on the people to come up with solutions that work best for individuals, business, and society.

Reframe the problem or challenge at hand . Don’t rush into a solution. Explore the problem space and look at the issue through multiple perspectives to gain a more holistic, nuanced understanding.

Initially, employ a divergent style of thinking (analyze) . In the problem space, gather as many insights as possible. In the solution space, encourage team members to generate and explore as many solutions as possible in an open, judgment-free ideation space.

Later, employ a convergent style of thinking (synthesize) . In the problem space, synthesize all data points to define the problem. In the solution space, whittle down all the ideas—isolate, combine and refine potential solutions to create more mature ideas.

Create and test prototypes . Solutions that make it through the previous stages get tested further to remove potential issues.

Iterate . As the team progresses through the various stages, they revisit different stages and may redefine the challenge based on new insights.

Design thinking is a non-linear process. For example, teams may jump from the test stage to the define stage if the tests reveal insights that redefine the problem. Or, a prototype might spark a new idea, prompting the team to step back into the ideate stage. Tests may also create new ideas for projects or reveal insights about users.

Design Thinking Mindsets: More than a Process

A mindset is a characteristic mental attitude that determines how one interprets and responds to situations . Design thinking mindsets are how individuals think , feel and express themselves during design thinking activities. It includes people’s expectations and orientations during a design project.

Without the right mindset, it can be very challenging to change how we work and think.

The key mindsets that ensure a team can successfully implement design thinking are.

Be empathetic: Empathy is the ability to place yourself, your thinking and feelings in another person’s shoes. Design thinking begins from a deep understanding of the needs and motivations of people—the parents, neighbors, children, colleagues, and strangers who make up a community. 

Be collaborative: No one person is responsible for the outcome when you work in a team. Several great minds are always stronger than just one. Design thinking benefits from the views of multiple perspectives and lets others’ creativity bolster your own.

Be optimistic: Be confident about achieving favorable outcomes. Design thinking is the fundamental belief that we can all create change—no matter how big a problem, how little time, or how small a budget. Designing can be a powerful process no matter what constraints exist around you.

Embrace ambiguity: Get comfortable with ambiguous and complex situations. If you expect perfection, it is difficult to take risks, which limits your ability to create radical change. Design thinking is all about experimenting and learning by doing. It gives you the confidence to believe that new, better things are possible and that you can help make them a reality. 

Be curious: Be open to different ideas. Recognize that you are not the user.

Reframe: Challenge and reframe assumptions associated with a given situation or problem. Don’t take problems at face value. Humans are primed to look for patterns. The unfortunate side effect of these patterns is that we form (often false and sometimes dangerous) stereotypes and assumptions. Design thinking aims to help you break through any preconceived notions and biases and reframe challenges.

Embrace diversity: Work with and engage people with different cultural backgrounds, experiences, and ways of thinking and working. Everyone brings a unique perspective to the team. When you include diverse voices in a team, you learn from each other’s experiences, further helping you break through your assumptions.

Make tangible: When you make ideas tangible, it is faster and easier for everyone on the team to be on the same page. For example, sketching an idea or enacting a scenario is far more convenient and easy to interpret than an elaborate presentation or document.

Take action: Run experiments and learn from them.

Design Thinking vs Agile Methodology

Teams often use design thinking and agile methodologies in project management, product development, and software development. These methodologies have distinct approaches but share some common principles.

Similarities between Design Thinking and Agile

Iterative process.

Both methodologies emphasize iterative development. In design thinking, teams may jump from one phase to another, not necessarily in a set cyclical or linear order. For example, on testing a prototype, teams may discover something new about their users and realize that they must redefine the problem. Agile teams iterate through development sprints.

User-Centered

The agile and design thinking methodologies focus on the end user. All design thinking activities—from empathizing to prototyping and testing—keep the end users front and center. Agile teams continually integrate user feedback into development cycles.

Collaboration and Teamwork

Both methodologies rely heavily on collaboration among cross-functional teams and encourage diverse perspectives and expertise.

Flexibility and Adaptability

With its focus on user research, prototyping and testing, design thinking ensures teams remain in touch with users and get continuous feedback. Similarly, agile teams monitor user feedback and refine the product in a reasonably quick time.

In this video, Laura Klein, author of Build Better Products , describes a typical challenge designers face on agile teams. She encourages designers to get comfortable with the idea of a design not being perfect. Notice the many parallels between Laura’s advice for designers on agile teams and the mindsets of design thinking.

Differences between Design Thinking and Agile

While design thinking and agile teams share principles like iteration, user focus, and collaboration, they are neither interchangeable nor mutually exclusive. A team can apply both methodologies without any conflict.

From a user experience design perspective, design thinking applies to the more abstract elements of strategy and scope. At the same time, agile is more relevant to the more concrete elements of UX: structure, skeleton and surface. For quick reference, here’s an overview of the five elements of user experience.

Design thinking is more about exploring and defining the right problem and solution, whereas agile is about efficiently executing and delivering a product.

Here are the key differences between design thinking and agile.

Design Thinking

It primarily originates in design and borrows from multiple disciplines, including psychology, systems thinking, and business strategy.

It primarily originates from software development and borrows from disciplines such as manufacturing and project management.

Primary Focus

Problem-solving and innovative solutions.

Efficient product delivery.

Phase of Application

Usually, toward the beginning of a project. Aims to define the problem and test and pick a solution.

Usually, after teams have a clear solution. Aims to deliver that solution and continuously iterate on the live product.

Structure and Documentation

Fluid process, less formal and relatively lesser documentation.

Structured and formal process with extensive documentation.

End product

An idea or solution, usually with a prototype, may not be tangible.

Tangible, working product (usually software) shipped to end users.

Design Sprint: A Condensed Version of Design Thinking

A design sprint is a 5-day intensive workshop where cross-functional teams aim to develop innovative solutions.

The design sprint is a very structured version of design thinking that fits into the timeline of a sprint (a sprint is a short timeframe in which agile teams work to produce deliverables). Developed by Google Ventures, the design sprint seeks to fast-track innovation.

In this video, user researcher Ditte Hvas Mortensen explains the design sprint in detail.

Learn More about Design Thinking

Design consultancy IDEO’s designkit is an excellent repository of design thinking tools and case studies.

To keep up with recent developments in design thinking, read IDEO CEO Tim Brown’s blog .

Enroll in our course Design Thinking: The Ultimate Guide —an excellent guide to get you started on your design thinking projects.

Questions related to Design Thinking

You don’t need any certification to practice design thinking. However, learning about the nuances of the methodology can help you:

Pick the appropriate methods and tailor the process to suit the unique needs of your project.

Avoid common pitfalls when you apply the methods.

Better lead a team and facilitate workshops.

Increase the chances of coming up with innovative solutions.

IxDF has a comprehensive course to help you gain the most from the methodology: Design Thinking: The Ultimate Guide .

Anyone can apply design thinking to solve problems. Despite what the name suggests, non-designers can use the methodology in non-design-related scenarios. The methodology helps you think about problems from the end user’s perspective. Some areas where you can apply this process:

Develop new products with greater chances of success.

Address community-related issues (such as education, healthcare and environment) to improve society and living standards.

Innovate/enhance existing products to gain an advantage over the competition.

Achieve greater efficiencies in operations and reduce costs.

Use the Design Thinking: The Ultimate Guide course to apply design thinking to your context today.

A framework is the basic structure underlying a system, concept, or text. There are several design thinking frameworks with slight differences. However, all the frameworks share some traits. Each framework: 

Begins with empathy.

Reframes the problem or challenge at hand.

Initially employs divergent styles of thinking to generate ideas.

Later, it employs convergent styles of thinking to narrow down the best ideas,

Creates and tests prototypes.

Iterates based on the tests.

Some of the design thinking frameworks are:

5-stage design process by d.school

7-step early traditional design process by Herbert Simon

The 5-Stage DeepDive™ by IDEO

The “Double Diamond” Design Process Model by the Design Council

Collective Action Toolkit (CAT) by Frog Design

The LUMA System of Innovation by LUMA Institute

For details about each of these frameworks, see 10 Insightful Design Thinking Frameworks: A Quick Overview .

IDEO’s 3-Stage Design Thinking Process consists of inspiration, ideation and implementation:

Inspire : The problem or opportunity inspires and motivates the search for a solution.

Ideate : A process of synthesis distills insights which can lead to solutions or opportunities for change.

Implement : The best ideas are turned into a concrete, fully conceived action plan.

IDEO is a leader in applying design thinking and has developed many frameworks. Find out more in 10 Insightful Design Thinking Frameworks: A Quick Overview .

Design Council's Double Diamond diagram depicts the divergent and convergent stages of the design process.

Béla H. Bánáthy, founder of the White Stag Leadership Development Program, created the “divergence-convergence” model in 1996. In the mid-2000s, the British Design Council made this famous as the Double Diamond model.

The Double Diamond diagram graphically represents a design thinking process. It highlights the divergent and convergent styles of thinking in the design process. It has four distinct phases:

Discover: Initial idea or inspiration based on user needs.

Define: Interpret user needs and align them with business objectives.

Develop: Develop, iterate and test design-led solutions.

Deliver: Finalize and launch the end product into the market.

Double Diamond is one of several design thinking frameworks. Find out more in 10 Insightful Design Thinking Frameworks: A Quick Overview .

There are several design thinking methods that you can choose from, depending on what stage of the process you’re in. Here are a few common design thinking methods:

User Interviews: to understand user needs, pain points, attitudes and behaviors.

5 Whys Method: to dig deeper into problems to diagnose the root cause.

User Observations: to understand how users behave in real life (as opposed to what they say they do).

Affinity Diagramming: to organize research findings.

Empathy Mapping: to empathize with users based on research insights.

Journey Mapping: to visualize a user’s experience as they solve a problem.

6 Thinking Hats: to encourage a group to think about a problem or solution from multiple perspectives.

Brainstorming: to generate ideas.

Prototyping: to make abstract ideas more tangible and test them.

Dot Voting: to select ideas.

Start applying these methods to your work today with the Design Thinking template bundle .

For most of the design thinking process, you will need basic office stationery:

Pen and paper

Sticky notes

Whiteboard and markers

Print-outs of templates and canvases as needed (such as empathy maps, journey maps, feedback capture grid etc.) You can also draw these out manually.

Prototyping materials such as UI stencils, string, clay, Lego bricks, sticky tapes, scissors and glue.

A space to work in.

You can conduct design thinking workshops remotely by:

Using collaborative software to simulate the whiteboard and sticky notes.

Using digital templates instead of printed canvases.

Download print-ready templates you can share with your team to practice design thinking today.

Design thinking is a problem-solving methodology that helps teams better identify, understand, and solve business and customer problems.

When businesses prioritize and empathize with customers, they can create solutions catering to their needs. Happier customers are more likely to be loyal and organically advocate for the product.

Design thinking helps businesses develop innovative solutions that give them a competitive advantage.

Gain a competitive advantage in your business with Design Thinking: The Ultimate Guide .

The evolution of Design Thinking can be summarised in 8 key events from the 1960s to 2004.

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Herbert Simon’s 1969 book, "The Sciences of the Artificial," has one of the earliest references to design thinking. David Kelley, founder of the design consultancy IDEO, coined the term “design thinking” and helped make it popular.

For a more comprehensive discussion on the origins of design thinking, see The History of Design Thinking .

Some organizations that have employed design thinking successfully are:

Airbnb: Airbnb used design thinking to create a platform for people to rent out their homes to travelers. The company focused on the needs of both hosts and guests . The result was a user-friendly platform to help people find and book accommodations.

PillPack: PillPack is a prescription home-delivery system. The company focused on the needs of people who take multiple medications and created a system that organizes pills by date and time. Amazon bought PillPack in 2018 for $1 billion .

Google Creative Lab: Google Creative Lab collaborated with IDEO to discover how kids physically play and learn. The team used design thinking to create Project Bloks . The project helps children develop foundational problem-solving skills "through coding experiences that are playful, tactile and collaborative.”

See more examples of design thinking and learn practical methods in Design Thinking: The Ultimate Guide .

Innovation essentially means a new idea. Design thinking is a problem-solving methodology that helps teams develop new ideas. In other words, design thinking can lead to innovation.

Human-Centered Design is a newer term for User-Centered Design

“Human-centred design is an approach to interactive systems development that aims to make systems usable and useful by focusing on the users, their needs and requirements, and by applying human factors/ergonomics, and usability knowledge and techniques. This approach enhances effectiveness and efficiency, improves human well-being, user satisfaction, accessibility and sustainability; and counteracts possible adverse effects of use on human health, safety and performance.”

— ISO 9241-210:2019(en), ISO (the International Organization for Standardization)  

User experience expert Don Norman describes human-centered design (HCD) as a more evolved form of user-centered design (UCD). The word "users" removes their importance and treats them more like objects than people. By replacing “user” with “human,” designers can empathize better with the people for whom they are designing. Don Norman takes HCD a step further and prefers the term People-Centered Design.

Design thinking has a broader scope and takes HCD beyond the design discipline to drive innovation.

People sometimes use design thinking and human-centered design to mean the same thing. However, they are not the same. HCD is a formal discipline with a specific process used only by designers and usability engineers to design products. Design thinking borrows the design methods and applies them to problems in general.

Design Sprint condenses design thinking into a 1-week structured workshop

Google Ventures condensed the design thinking framework into a time-constrained 5-day workshop format called the Design Sprint. The sprint follows one step per day of the week:

Monday: Unpack

Tuesday: Sketch

Wednesday: Decide

Thursday: Prototype

Friday: Test

Learn more about the design sprint in Make Your UX Design Process Agile Using Google’s Methodology .

Systems Thinking is a distinct discipline with a broader approach to problem-solving

“Systems thinking is a way of exploring and developing effective action by looking at connected wholes rather than separate parts.”

— Introduction to Systems thinking, Report of GSE and GORS seminar, Civil Service Live

Both HCD and Systems Thinking are formal disciplines. Designers and usability engineers primarily use HCD. Systems thinking has applications in various fields, such as medical, environmental, political, economic, human resources, and educational systems.

HCD has a much narrower focus and aims to create and improve products. Systems thinking looks at the larger picture and aims to change entire systems.

Don Norman encourages designers to incorporate systems thinking in their work. Instead of looking at people and problems in isolation, designers must look at them from a systems point of view.

In summary, UCD and HCD refer to the same field, with the latter being a preferred phrase.

Design thinking is a broader framework that borrows methods from human-centered design to approach problems beyond the design discipline. It encourages people with different backgrounds and expertise to work together and apply the designer’s way of thinking to generate innovative solutions to problems.

Systems thinking is another approach to problem-solving that looks at the big picture instead of specific problems in isolation.

The design sprint is Google Ventures’ version of the design thinking process, structured to fit the design process in 1 week.

There are multiple design thinking frameworks, each with a different number of steps and phase names. One of the most popular frameworks is the Stanford d.School 5-stage process.

Design thinking is an iterative and non-linear process. It contains five phases: 1. Empathize, 2. Define, 3. Ideate, 4. Prototype and 5. Test. It is important to note the five stages of design thinking are not always sequential. They do not have to follow a specific order, and they can often occur in parallel or be repeated iteratively. The stages should be understood as different modes which contribute to the entire design project, rather than sequential steps.

For more details, see The 5 Stages in the Design Thinking Process .

IDEO is a leading design consultancy and has developed its own version of the design thinking framework and adds the dimension of implementation in the process.

IDEO’s framework uses slightly different terms than d.school’s design thinking process and adds an extra dimension of implementation. The steps in the DeepDive™ Methodology are: Understand, Observe, Visualize, Evaluate and Implement.

IDEO’s DeepDive™ Methodology includes the following steps:

Understand: Conduct research and identify what the client needs and the market landscape

Observe: Similar to the Empathize step, teams observe people in live scenarios and conduct user research to identify their needs and pain points.

Visualize: In this step, the team visualizes new concepts. Similar to the Ideate phase, teams focus on creative, out-of-the-box and novel ideas.

Evaluate: The team prototypes ideas and evaluates them. After refining the prototypes, the team picks the most suitable one.

Implement: The team then sets about to develop the new concept for commercial use.

IDEO’s DeepDive™ is one of several design thinking frameworks. Find out more in 10 Insightful Design Thinking Frameworks: A Quick Overview .

Answer a Short Quiz to Earn a Gift

What are the stages in the design thinking process?

• Brainstorm, Prototype, Design, Launch, Test
• Define, Ideate, Research, Design, Test
• Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test

Why is empathy critical in the design thinking process?

• It allows designers to understand and address the real needs of users.
• It helps designers maintain control over the creative process.
• It makes sure the solution is inexpensive and easy to create.

What is the primary purpose of the prototyping phase in design thinking?

• To explore potential solutions and how they might work in real-world situations
• To finalize the product design for mass production
• To sell the idea to stakeholders with a high-fidelity (hi-fi) demonstration

What is a "wicked problem" in design thinking?

• Problems that are complex, ill-defined and have no single correct answer.
• Problems that are straightforward and have a clear, single solution.
• Problems that are tricky, but can be solved quickly with conventional methods.

Why is the iterative process important in design thinking?

• It allows design teams to use up all available resources.
• It allows for the improvement of solutions based on user feedback and testing.
• It makes sure the solution remains unchanged throughout development.

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Literature on Design Thinking (DT)

Here’s the entire UX literature on Design Thinking (DT) by the Interaction Design Foundation, collated in one place:

Learn more about Design Thinking (DT)

Take a deep dive into Design Thinking (DT) with our course Design Thinking: The Ultimate Guide .

Some of the world’s leading brands, such as Apple, Google, Samsung, and General Electric, have rapidly adopted the design thinking approach, and design thinking is being taught at leading universities around the world, including Stanford d.school, Harvard, and MIT. What is design thinking, and why is it so popular and effective?

Design Thinking is not exclusive to designers —all great innovators in literature, art, music, science, engineering and business have practiced it. So, why call it Design Thinking? Well, that’s because design work processes help us systematically extract, teach, learn and apply human-centered techniques to solve problems in a creative and innovative way—in our designs, businesses, countries and lives. And that’s what makes it so special.

The overall goal of this design thinking course is to help you design better products, services, processes, strategies, spaces, architecture, and experiences. Design thinking helps you and your team develop practical and innovative solutions for your problems. It is a human-focused , prototype-driven , innovative design process . Through this course, you will develop a solid understanding of the fundamental phases and methods in design thinking, and you will learn how to implement your newfound knowledge in your professional work life. We will give you lots of examples; we will go into case studies, videos, and other useful material, all of which will help you dive further into design thinking. In fact, this course also includes exclusive video content that we've produced in partnership with design leaders like Alan Dix, William Hudson and Frank Spillers!

This course contains a series of practical exercises that build on one another to create a complete design thinking project. The exercises are optional, but you’ll get invaluable hands-on experience with the methods you encounter in this course if you complete them, because they will teach you to take your first steps as a design thinking practitioner. What’s equally important is you can use your work as a case study for your portfolio to showcase your abilities to future employers! A portfolio is essential if you want to step into or move ahead in a career in the world of human-centered design.

Design thinking methods and strategies belong at every level of the design process . However, design thinking is not an exclusive property of designers—all great innovators in literature, art, music, science, engineering, and business have practiced it. What’s special about design thinking is that designers and designers’ work processes can help us systematically extract, teach, learn, and apply these human-centered techniques in solving problems in a creative and innovative way—in our designs, in our businesses, in our countries, and in our lives.

That means that design thinking is not only for designers but also for creative employees , freelancers , and business leaders . It’s for anyone who seeks to infuse an approach to innovation that is powerful, effective and broadly accessible, one that can be integrated into every level of an organization, product, or service so as to drive new alternatives for businesses and society.

You earn a verifiable and industry-trusted Course Certificate once you complete the course. You can highlight them on your resume, CV, LinkedIn profile or your website .

All open-source articles on Design Thinking (DT)

What is design thinking and why is it so popular.

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Personas – A Simple Introduction

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Stage 2 in the Design Thinking Process: Define the Problem and Interpret the Results

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What is Ideation – and How to Prepare for Ideation Sessions

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Stage 4 in the Design Thinking Process: Prototype

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Stage 3 in the Design Thinking Process: Ideate

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Stage 1 in the Design Thinking Process: Empathise with Your Users

Empathy Map – Why and How to Use It

What Is Empathy and Why Is It So Important in Design Thinking?

10 Insightful Design Thinking Frameworks: A Quick Overview

Define and Frame Your Design Challenge by Creating Your Point Of View and Ask “How Might We”

Design Thinking: Get Started with Prototyping

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5 Common Low-Fidelity Prototypes and Their Best Practices

Design Thinking: New Innovative Thinking for New Problems

The History of Design Thinking

Test Your Prototypes: How to Gather Feedback and Maximize Learning

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The Ultimate Guide to Understanding UX Roles and Which One You Should Go For

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Stage 5 in the Design Thinking Process: Test

What Are Wicked Problems and How Might We Solve Them?

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Design Thinking Driven Problem Solving and Innovation

“Design is not what is looks like or feels like. Design is how it works.” – Steve Jobs

Design Thinking: An Introduction

Design thinking is a problem-solving approach that is becoming increasingly popular across various industries. It is a user-centric approach that involves understanding the needs, wants, and behaviors of users to create innovative solutions that are both practical and feasible.

Design thinking is not just limited to the field of design; it can be applied to any problem-solving situation where creativity and innovation are needed. In this article, we will explore what design thinking is, its benefits, the design thinking mindsets, methods, and tools, applications, and best practices.

What Is Design Thinking?

Design thinking is a human-centered approach to problem-solving . It is a way of thinking that focuses on understanding the needs of users and creating solutions that meet those needs. The process involves empathy, experimentation, and iteration. Design thinking is a creative and iterative process that involves the following stages:

• Empathize: Understand the user’s needs and pain points.
• Define: Define the problem you are trying to solve.
• Ideate: Generate a wide range of ideas and solutions.
• Prototype: Create a tangible prototype of the best solution.
• Test: Test the prototype with users and gather feedback.

Design thinking is not a linear process; it is a cyclical process that involves going back and forth between the different stages. The goal of design thinking is to create a solution that meets the needs of the user and is feasible and practical.

Benefits of Design Thinking

Design thinking has many benefits, including:

• User-Centricity: Design thinking focuses on the needs and wants of the user. This ensures that the solution is tailored to the user’s needs.
• Innovation: Design thinking encourages creativity and out-of-the-box thinking. This leads to innovative solutions that may not have been thought of before.
• Continuous Improvement: Design thinking is an iterative process that involves testing and refining solutions. This leads to solutions that are continually improving.
• Collaboration: Design thinking is a collaborative process that involves multiple stakeholders. This encourages teamwork and fosters a sense of ownership.

Design Thinking Mindsets

Design thinking requires a specific mindset that is characterized by the following:

• Empathy: Understanding the needs and wants of the user.
• Curiosity: Asking questions and seeking out new information.
• Creativity: Generating new ideas and solutions.
• Resilience: Being able to handle setbacks and failures.
• Collaboration: Working together with others to create solutions.

Design Thinking Methods and Tools

Design thinking has various methods and tools that can be used to facilitate the process. Some of these include:

• Empathy Mapping: Understanding the user’s needs and wants.
• Journey Mapping: Mapping out the user’s experience from start to finish.
• Brainstorming: Generating a wide range of ideas and solutions.
• Rapid Prototyping: Creating a tangible prototype of the best solution.
• User Testing: Testing the prototype with users and gathering feedback.

Applications of Design Thinking

Design thinking can be applied to various problem-solving situations, such as product design, service design, organizational change, and social innovation. Some examples of where design thinking has been successfully applied in government, non-profits, and industries include:

• Healthcare: Design thinking can be used to improve patient experiences, create better medical devices, and develop new healthcare services that meet patients’ needs.
• Education: Design thinking can be used to create innovative learning experiences, develop new educational technologies, and design learning spaces that enhance students’ learning.
• Banking and Finance: Design thinking can be used to create better banking experiences, develop new financial products and services, and improve the user experience of financial apps and websites.
• Retail: Design thinking can be used to create innovative retail experiences, design better store layouts, and develop new products and services that meet customers’ needs.
• Manufacturing: Design thinking can be used to improve manufacturing processes, create new products that are more sustainable, and develop better packaging that is more user-friendly.
• Non-profits: Design thinking can be used to develop innovative solutions to social and environmental problems, design better programs and services that meet the needs of marginalized communities, and create campaigns that raise awareness and drive positive change.
• Government: Design thinking can be used to improve public services, create citizen-centric policies, and design better public spaces that enhance people’s lives.

Best Practices for Design Thinking

To get the most out of design thinking, it is important to follow best practices, including:

• Start with empathy : Understand the user’s needs and wants.
• Stay curious : Ask questions and seek out new information.
• Encourage collaboration : Work together with others to create solutions.
• Iterate and refine : Continually test and refine solutions.

In conclusion, design thinking is a problem-solving approach that prioritizes understanding the needs of users and creating innovative solutions to meet those needs. Its benefits include being user-centric, innovative, iterative, and collaborative.

Design thinking requires a specific mindset characterized by empathy, curiosity, creativity, resilience, and collaboration. Various methods and tools, such as empathy mapping, brainstorming, and rapid prototyping, can facilitate the process.

Design thinking can be applied to various problem-solving situations, such as product design, service design, organizational change, and social innovation.

To maximize its benefits, it is essential to follow best practices, such as starting with empathy, staying curious, encouraging collaboration, iterating and refining, and being open-minded. Incorporating design thinking into problem-solving processes can lead to more effective, efficient, and user-friendly solutions, ultimately driving innovation and success.

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• How to solve problems using the design ...

How to solve problems using the design thinking process

The design thinking process is a problem-solving design methodology that helps you develop solutions in a human-focused way. Initially designed at Stanford’s d.school, the five stage design thinking method can help solve ambiguous questions, or more open-ended problems. Learn how these five steps can help your team create innovative solutions to complex problems.

As humans, we’re approached with problems every single day. But how often do we come up with solutions to everyday problems that put the needs of individual humans first?

This is how the design thinking process started.

What is the design thinking process?

The design thinking process is a problem-solving design methodology that helps you tackle complex problems by framing the issue in a human-centric way. The design thinking process works especially well for problems that are not clearly defined or have a more ambiguous goal.

One of the first individuals to write about design thinking was John E. Arnold, a mechanical engineering professor at Stanford. Arnold wrote about four major areas of design thinking in his book, “Creative Engineering” in 1959. His work was later taught at Stanford’s Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design (also known as d.school), a design institute that pioneered the design thinking process. 

This eventually led Nobel Prize laureate Herbert Simon to outline one of the first iterations of the design thinking process in his 1969 book, “The Sciences of the Artificial.” While there are many different variations of design thinking, “The Sciences of the Artificial” is often credited as the basis. 

Anatomy of Work Special Report: How to spot—and overcome—the most crucial enterprise challenges

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A non-linear design thinking approach

Design thinking is not a linear process. It’s important to understand that each stage of the process can (and should) inform the other steps. For example, when you’re going through user testing, you may learn about a new problem that didn’t come up during any of the previous stages. You may learn more about your target personas during the final testing phase, or discover that your initial problem statement can actually help solve even more problems, so you need to redefine the statement to include those as well. 

Why use the design thinking process

The design thinking process is not the most intuitive way to solve a problem, but the results that come from it are worth the effort. Here are a few other reasons why implementing the design thinking process for your team is worth it.

Focus on problem solving

As human beings, we often don’t go out of our way to find problems. Since there’s always an abundance of problems to solve, we’re used to solving problems as they occur. The design thinking process forces you to look at problems from many different points of view. 

The design thinking process requires focusing on human needs and behaviors, and how to create a solution to match those needs. This focus on problem solving can help your design team come up with creative solutions for complex problems. 

Encourages collaboration and teamwork

The design thinking process cannot happen in a silo. It requires many different viewpoints from designers, future customers, and other stakeholders . Brainstorming sessions and collaboration are the backbone of the design thinking process.

Foster innovation

The design thinking process focuses on finding creative solutions that cater to human needs. This means your team is looking to find creative solutions for hyper specific and complex problems. If they’re solving unique problems, then the solutions they’re creating must be equally unique.

The iterative process of the design thinking process means that the innovation doesn’t have to end—your team can continue to update the usability of your product to ensure that your target audience’s problems are effectively solved. 

The 5 stages of design thinking

Currently, one of the more popular models of design thinking is the model proposed by the Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design (or d.school) at Stanford. The main reason for its popularity is because of the success this process had in successful companies like Google, Apple, Toyota, and Nike. Here are the five steps designated by the d.school model that have helped many companies succeed.

1. Empathize stage

The first stage of the design thinking process is to look at the problem you’re trying to solve in an empathetic manner. To get an accurate representation of how the problem affects people, actively look for people who encountered this problem previously. Asking them how they would have liked to have the issue resolved is a good place to start, especially because of the human-centric nature of the design thinking process. 

Empathy is an incredibly important aspect of the design thinking process.  The design thinking process requires the designers to put aside any assumptions and unconscious biases they may have about the situation and put themselves in someone else’s shoes. 

For example, if your team is looking to fix the employee onboarding process at your company, you may interview recent new hires to see how their onboarding experience went. Another option is to have a more tenured team member go through the onboarding process so they can experience exactly what a new hire experiences.

2. Define stage

Sometimes a designer will encounter a situation when there’s a general issue, but not a specific problem that needs to be solved. One way to help designers clearly define and outline a problem is to create human-centric problem statements. 

A problem statement helps frame a problem in a way that provides relevant context in an easy to comprehend way. The main goal of a problem statement is to guide designers working on possible solutions for this problem. A problem statement frames the problem in a way that easily highlights the gap between the current state of things and the end goal. 

Tip: Problem statements are best framed as a need for a specific individual. The more specific you are with your problem statement, the better designers can create a human-centric solution to the problem. 

Examples of good problem statements:

We need to decrease the number of clicks a potential customer takes to go through the sign-up process.

We need to decrease the new subscriber unsubscribe rate by 10%. 

We need to increase the Android app adoption rate by 20%.

3. Ideate stage

This is the stage where designers create potential solutions to solve the problem outlined in the problem statement. Use brainstorming techniques with your team to identify the human-centric solution to the problem defined in step two. 

Here are a few brainstorming strategies you can use with your team to come up with a solution:

Standard brainstorm session: Your team gathers together and verbally discusses different ideas out loud.

Brainwrite: Everyone writes their ideas down on a piece of paper or a sticky note and each team member puts their ideas up on the whiteboard. 

Worst possible idea: The inverse of your end goal. Your team produces the most goofy idea so nobody will look silly. This takes out the rigidity of other brainstorming techniques. This technique also helps you identify areas that you can improve upon in your actual solution by looking at the worst parts of an absurd solution. 

It’s important that you don’t discount any ideas during the ideation phase of brainstorming. You want to have as many potential solutions as possible, as new ideas can help trigger even better ideas. Sometimes the most creative solution to a problem is the combination of many different ideas put together.

4. Prototype stage

During the prototype phase, you and your team design a few different variations of inexpensive or scaled down versions of the potential solution to the problem. Having different versions of the prototype gives your team opportunities to test out the solution and make any refinements. 

Prototypes are often tested by other designers, team members outside of the initial design department, and trusted customers or members of the target audience. Having multiple versions of the product gives your team the opportunity to tweak and refine the design before testing with real users. During this process, it’s important to document the testers using the end product. This will give you valuable information as to what parts of the solution are good, and which require more changes.

After testing different prototypes out with teasers, your team should have different solutions for how your product can be improved. The testing and prototyping phase is an iterative process—so much so that it’s possible that some design projects never end.

After designers take the time to test, reiterate, and redesign new products, they may find new problems, different solutions, and gain an overall better understanding of the end-user. The design thinking framework is flexible and non-linear, so it’s totally normal for the process itself to influence the end design. 

Tips for incorporating the design thinking process into your team

If you want your team to start using the design thinking process, but you’re unsure of how to start, here are a few tips to help you out. 

Start small: Similar to how you would test a prototype on a small group of people, you want to test out the design thinking process with a smaller team to see how your team functions. Give this test team some small projects to work on so you can see how this team reacts. If it works out, you can slowly start rolling this process out to other teams.

Incorporate cross-functional team members : The design thinking process works best when your team members collaborate and brainstorm together. Identify who your designer’s key stakeholders are and ensure they’re included in the small test team. 

Organize work in a collaborative project management software : Keep important design project documents such as user research, wireframes, and brainstorms in a collaborative tool like Asana . This way, team members will have one central source of truth for anything relating to the project they’re working on.

Foster collaborative design thinking with Asana

The design thinking process works best when your team works collaboratively. You don’t want something as simple as miscommunication to hinder your projects. Instead, compile all of the information your team needs about a design project in one place with Asana. 

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Amid shifting landscapes and ever-evolving technologies, one constant drives innovation and impact – Design thinking. Putting the user at the heart of the solution, this set of strategic and cognitive practices creates fresh perspectives capable of achieving what matters most to customers and, when applied cross-operationally, can propel a business forward.

As the world becomes increasingly interconnected and complex, we face new challenges daily; from climate change to a global pandemic, recessions to hunger. We are in constant flux; whether you’re a business owner or beginning your career, launching a start-up, or simply adapting to an ever-changing plan, we all need to thrive in unprecedented change and uncertainty. Design thinking provides a tool to tackle these problems with a solution-focused, action-oriented and human-centred framework. As Albert Einstein said,  "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."

Tim Brennan of Apple's Creative Services department drew a picture that illustrates design thinking: he drew a question mark to the left, an entangled line as a road map in the middle, and a dollar sign to the right to convey that questions can be converted into profits with design. Unlike many other problem-solving methodologies, design thinking is not problem-focused. This process draws upon reason, intuition, imagination, and systemic logic, to explore possibilities of what could be.

A design-driven mindset considers humans behind devices, users behind applications, and desired outcomes behind problems. The process starts with a   deep empathic understanding and a set of strategic and cognitive practices focusing on what matters most to users. Rooted in motivation to create desired outcomes that benefit customers, empathy builds a deep understanding of what we design. One can design the way to operate, lead, create and innovate. As Roger Martin, author of  The Design of Business  and former Dean of Rotman School of Management, states, "Design-thinking firms stand apart in their willingness to engage in the task of continuously redesigning their business… to create advances in both innovation and efficiency — the combination that produces the most powerful competitive edge."

Producing innovative solutions with design thinking

To remain competitive, organisations must innovate new approaches and techniques to stand out. Successful leaders of design-centric companies in the S&P 500 are aware of the Design Value Index results and the return on investment of design. These leaders know that they can   leverage their business if they blend people’s desires with technologically and economically feasible solutions. Innovative thinking and design skills are most relevant at this intersection. 

Consider the design of one of the United States' most impressive urban spaces: Central Park in New York. In 1857, the country's first public landscape design competition was held to select the plan for this park. The fundamental challenge — allowing intercity vehicular traffic without disturbing the park's pastoral atmosphere — was deemed impossible by all the other participants in the competition. Of all the applications, only one — by Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted — met all design requirements. Unlike other participants, Olmsted and Vaux applied design thinking to their problem-solving approach and dispelled the assumption that the park is two-dimensional. Instead, they imagined the park in three dimensions and submerged four roads 2.5 meters below its surface to create one of the world’s most iconic parks. Design thinking nurtures fresh perspectives that spark imaginative and unconventional solutions.  

Human-centred approach and empathy

The design thinking approach converts empathy-based, facilitated, and structured processes into actionable strategies. Think of Microsoft, one of the biggest companies in the world; wherever you go, you will see its logo — a reason why Bill Gates is one of the world’s wealthiest business magnates. Microsoft made computers user-friendly and affordable, thus allowing more people worldwide to work more efficiently. Moura Quayle, the author of  Designed Leadership , asserts, "Great leaders aspire to manage by design, with a sense of purpose and foresight. When applied to management, lessons learned from the design world can turn leaders into collaborative, creative, deliberate, and accountable visionaries."

The world's most successful entrepreneurs understand the relationship between design thinking and impact. Impact, driven by innovation, requires a design mindset to empathise with users truly and properly define the problem to shape sustainable solutions. Tim Brown, CEO and President of IDEO, puts it, "It’s not ‘us versus them’ or even ‘us on behalf of them.’ For a design thinker, it has to be ‘us with them’."

Strategy, design and impact

Strategic design is the backbone of innovation. This mindset cultivates creativity with new ways of thinking about people, products, processes, business, leadership, and management so companies can adapt to rapid change. Applying design thinking principles to a business strategy’s foundation meets customer needs in a way that future-proofs businesses. 

Organisations of all sizes benefit greatly from embedding design thinking across operations. Embracing this problem-solving method requires trial and error and the guidance of trusted partners. The possibilities are endless with design thinking. 

About the author behind the article

Ogan  Ozdogan is a senior leader in the IT industry with over 15 years of experience in sales, data management and consulting and he worked with large enterprises, government entities and senior executives and has an entrepreneurial spirit. Ela Unlucerci is a Strategy and Execution Analyst at Metyis, who has international experience in management consulting, financial analysis and organisational development.

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Ideas Made to Matter

Design thinking, explained

Rebecca Linke

Sep 14, 2017

What is design thinking?

Design thinking is an innovative problem-solving process rooted in a set of skills.The approach has been around for decades, but it only started gaining traction outside of the design community after the 2008 Harvard Business Review article [subscription required] titled “Design Thinking” by Tim Brown, CEO and president of design company IDEO.

Since then, the design thinking process has been applied to developing new products and services, and to a whole range of problems, from creating a business model for selling solar panels in Africa to the operation of Airbnb .

At a high level, the steps involved in the design thinking process are simple: first, fully understand the problem; second, explore a wide range of possible solutions; third, iterate extensively through prototyping and testing; and finally, implement through the customary deployment mechanisms. 

The skills associated with these steps help people apply creativity to effectively solve real-world problems better than they otherwise would. They can be readily learned, but take effort. For instance, when trying to understand a problem, setting aside your own preconceptions is vital, but it’s hard.

Creative brainstorming is necessary for developing possible solutions, but many people don’t do it particularly well. And throughout the process it is critical to engage in modeling, analysis, prototyping, and testing, and to really learn from these many iterations.

Once you master the skills central to the design thinking approach, they can be applied to solve problems in daily life and any industry.

Here’s what you need to know to get started.

Understand the problem 

The first step in design thinking is to understand the problem you are trying to solve before searching for solutions. Sometimes, the problem you need to address is not the one you originally set out to tackle.

“Most people don’t make much of an effort to explore the problem space before exploring the solution space,” said MIT Sloan professor Steve Eppinger. The mistake they make is to try and empathize, connecting the stated problem only to their own experiences. This falsely leads to the belief that you completely understand the situation. But the actual problem is always broader, more nuanced, or different than people originally assume.

Take the example of a meal delivery service in Holstebro, Denmark. When a team first began looking at the problem of poor nutrition and malnourishment among the elderly in the city, many of whom received meals from the service, it thought that simply updating the menu options would be a sufficient solution. But after closer observation, the team realized the scope of the problem was much larger , and that they would need to redesign the entire experience, not only for those receiving the meals, but for those preparing the meals as well. While the company changed almost everything about itself, including rebranding as The Good Kitchen, the most important change the company made when rethinking its business model was shifting how employees viewed themselves and their work. That, in turn, helped them create better meals (which were also drastically changed), yielding happier, better nourished customers.

Involve users

Imagine you are designing a new walker for rehabilitation patients and the elderly, but you have never used one. Could you fully understand what customers need? Certainly not, if you haven’t extensively observed and spoken with real customers. There is a reason that design thinking is often referred to as human-centered design.

“You have to immerse yourself in the problem,” Eppinger said.

How do you start to understand how to build a better walker? When a team from MIT’s Integrated Design and Management program together with the design firm Altitude took on that task, they met with walker users to interview them, observe them, and understand their experiences.  

“We center the design process on human beings by understanding their needs at the beginning, and then include them throughout the development and testing process,” Eppinger said.

Central to the design thinking process is prototyping and testing (more on that later) which allows designers to try, to fail, and to learn what works. Testing also involves customers, and that continued involvement provides essential user feedback on potential designs and use cases. If the MIT-Altitude team studying walkers had ended user involvement after its initial interviews, it would likely have ended up with a walker that didn’t work very well for customers. 

It is also important to interview and understand other stakeholders, like people selling the product, or those who are supporting the users throughout the product life cycle.

The second phase of design thinking is developing solutions to the problem (which you now fully understand). This begins with what most people know as brainstorming.

Hold nothing back during brainstorming sessions — except criticism. Infeasible ideas can generate useful solutions, but you’d never get there if you shoot down every impractical idea from the start.

“One of the key principles of brainstorming is to suspend judgment,” Eppinger said. “When we're exploring the solution space, we first broaden the search and generate lots of possibilities, including the wild and crazy ideas. Of course, the only way we're going to build on the wild and crazy ideas is if we consider them in the first place.”

That doesn’t mean you never judge the ideas, Eppinger said. That part comes later, in downselection. “But if we want 100 ideas to choose from, we can’t be very critical.”

In the case of The Good Kitchen, the kitchen employees were given new uniforms. Why? Uniforms don’t directly affect the competence of the cooks or the taste of the food.

But during interviews conducted with kitchen employees, designers realized that morale was low, in part because employees were bored preparing the same dishes over and over again, in part because they felt that others had a poor perception of them. The new, chef-style uniforms gave the cooks a greater sense of pride. It was only part of the solution, but if the idea had been rejected outright, or perhaps not even suggested, the company would have missed an important aspect of the solution.

Prototype and test. Repeat.

You’ve defined the problem. You’ve spoken to customers. You’ve brainstormed, come up with all sorts of ideas, and worked with your team to boil those ideas down to the ones you think may actually solve the problem you’ve defined.

“We don’t develop a good solution just by thinking about a list of ideas, bullet points and rough sketches,” Eppinger said. “We explore potential solutions through modeling and prototyping. We design, we build, we test, and repeat — this design iteration process is absolutely critical to effective design thinking.”

Repeating this loop of prototyping, testing, and gathering user feedback is crucial for making sure the design is right — that is, it works for customers, you can build it, and you can support it.

“After several iterations, we might get something that works, we validate it with real customers, and we often find that what we thought was a great solution is actually only just OK. But then we can make it a lot better through even just a few more iterations,” Eppinger said.

Implementation

The goal of all the steps that come before this is to have the best possible solution before you move into implementing the design. Your team will spend most of its time, its money, and its energy on this stage.

“Implementation involves detailed design, training, tooling, and ramping up. It is a huge amount of effort, so get it right before you expend that effort,” said Eppinger.

Design thinking isn’t just for “things.” If you are only applying the approach to physical products, you aren’t getting the most out of it. Design thinking can be applied to any problem that needs a creative solution. When Eppinger ran into a primary school educator who told him design thinking was big in his school, Eppinger thought he meant that they were teaching students the tenets of design thinking.

“It turns out they meant they were using design thinking in running their operations and improving the school programs. It’s being applied everywhere these days,” Eppinger said.

In another example from the education field, Peruvian entrepreneur Carlos Rodriguez-Pastor hired design consulting firm IDEO to redesign every aspect of the learning experience in a network of schools in Peru. The ultimate goal? To elevate Peru’s middle class.

As you’d expect, many large corporations have also adopted design thinking. IBM has adopted it at a company-wide level, training many of its nearly 400,000 employees in design thinking principles .

What can design thinking do for your business?

The impact of all the buzz around design thinking today is that people are realizing that “anybody who has a challenge that needs creative problem solving could benefit from this approach,” Eppinger said. That means that managers can use it, not only to design a new product or service, “but anytime they’ve got a challenge, a problem to solve.”

Applying design thinking techniques to business problems can help executives across industries rethink their product offerings, grow their markets, offer greater value to customers, or innovate and stay relevant. “I don’t know industries that can’t use design thinking,” said Eppinger.

Ready to go deeper?

Read “ The Designful Company ” by Marty Neumeier, a book that focuses on how businesses can benefit from design thinking, and “ Product Design and Development ,” co-authored by Eppinger, to better understand the detailed methods.

Register for an MIT Sloan Executive Education course:

Systematic Innovation of Products, Processes, and Services , a five-day course taught by Eppinger and other MIT professors.

• Leadership by Design: Innovation Process and Culture , a two-day course taught by MIT Integrated Design and Management director Matthew Kressy.
• Managing Complex Technical Projects , a two-day course taught by Eppinger.
• Apply for M astering Design Thinking , a 3-month online certificate course taught by Eppinger and MIT Sloan senior lecturers Renée Richardson Gosline and David Robertson.

Steve Eppinger is a professor of management science and innovation at MIT Sloan. He holds the General Motors Leaders for Global Operations Chair and has a PhD from MIT in engineering. He is the faculty co-director of MIT's System Design and Management program and Integrated Design and Management program, both master’s degrees joint between the MIT Sloan and Engineering schools. His research focuses on product development and technical project management, and has been applied to improving complex engineering processes in many industries.

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• General & Introductory Business & Management

Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation: What They Can't Teach You at Business or Design School

ISBN: 978-1-118-62012-0

August 2013

Digital Evaluation Copy

Idris Mootee

A comprehensive playbook for applied design thinking in business and management, complete with concepts and toolkits

As many companies have lost confidence in the traditional ways of running a business, design thinking has entered the mix. Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation presents a framework for design thinking that is relevant to business management, marketing, and design strategies and also provides a toolkit to apply concepts for immediate use in everyday work. It explains how design thinking can bring about creative solutions to solve complex business problems. Organized into five sections, this book provides an introduction to the values and applications of design thinking, explains design thinking approaches for eight key challenges that most businesses face, and offers an application framework for these business challenges through exercises, activities, and resources. 

• An essential guide for any business seeking to use design thinking as a problem-solving tool as well as a business method to transform companies and cultures
• The framework is based on work developed by the author for an executive program in Design Thinking taught in Harvard Graduate School of Design
• Author Idris Mootee is a management guru and a leading expert on applied design thinking 

Revolutionize your approach to solving your business's greatest challenges through the power of Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation .

IDRIS MOOTEE is the CEO of Idea Couture, a global innovation rm with ofces in San Francisco, Shanghai, Toronto, London, Dubai, and Mexico City. He has worked with clients such as Amex, Burberry, BMW, Boeing, Cisco, De Beers, Kraft, Nike, Samsung, and Pepsi. A leading expert on applied design thinking, Idris speaks on strategic innovation, developing strategic foresight, and business model design through the application of design thinking. He is also the author of 60-Minute Brand Strategist , also published by Wiley.

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Adopting Design Thinking for Business Success

• Adopting Design Thinking for Business…

The Role of Design Thinking in Transforming Customer Experiences

Understanding the Principles of Design Thinking

Design thinking is a methodology focused on solving problems through empathy, ideation, prototyping, and testing. The goal is to create user-centric solutions that address real needs. By following this innovative approach, we foster creativity and collaboration, which leads to more effective and sustainable outcomes.

The first step in design thinking is empathy. This involves understanding the users or customers deeply by observing their behaviour, engaging with them, and discovering their pain points and desires. Having a clear grasp of what users truly need allows us to design solutions that are both practical and highly valued. Creating detailed user personas can help us visualise and empathise with our target audience better.

Next, ideation is crucial. During this phase, team members brainstorm and generate a wide range of ideas without constraints. This encourages out-of-the-box thinking and allows for creative exploration. Prototyping follows, where these ideas are translated into tangible, but often preliminary, versions of products or services. These prototypes are then tested with real users to gain feedback and insights. Iterating on this feedback leads to refined solutions that are more likely to succeed in the real world.

Implementing Design Thinking in Business Processes

Incorporating design thinking into our business processes requires a cultural shift and commitment from our team . It involves embedding the principles of empathy, collaboration, and experimentation into everyday operations. For example, in human resources , we can use design thinking to create better employee experiences by deeply understanding their needs and designing tailored programmes that enhance job satisfaction and productivity.

In accounting and business advisory , design thinking can help us develop innovative approaches to financial management and strategic planning. By understanding the specific needs of our clients, we can offer customised solutions that address their unique challenges. This personalised approach fosters stronger client relationships and drives better results.

The implementation process typically involves cross-functional teams working together to identify problems, generate ideas, and develop solutions. Regular workshops and brainstorming sessions can foster a culture of continuous improvement and innovation. Using agile methodologies alongside design thinking can further enhance our ability to respond quickly to changing market demands and customer needs.

Applying design thinking across our various services—such as business set-up , taxation , and IT solutions —ensures that we provide comprehensive and user-centric solutions that drive business success. This holistic approach not only improves our internal processes but also enhances our ability to deliver exceptional value to our clients.

Enhancing Customer Experience Through Design Thinking

Design thinking places the customer at the centre of the development process, ensuring that their needs and preferences guide the creation of products and services. By deeply understanding what our customers want, we can deliver experiences that are not only satisfying but also exceed their expectations. One approach to achieving this is through the use of customer journey mapping.

Customer journey mapping is a visual representation of the customer’s experience with our service or product. This map helps us identify pain points and opportunities for improvement at each stage of the customer interaction. By addressing these pain points, we can create more seamless and enjoyable experiences. For example, in business setup services , understanding the challenges faced by new entrepreneurs allows us to provide smoother onboarding processes and more supportive consulting services.

Another important aspect is continuous feedback. Conducting regular surveys and gathering direct customer feedback helps us stay aligned with their evolving needs. By incorporating their feedback into our iterative design process, we ensure that the solutions we provide remain relevant and valuable. This not only improves customer satisfaction but also fosters long-term loyalty and trust.

Measuring the Impact of Design Thinking on Business Success

To understand the true value of design thinking, we must measure its impact on our business success . Quantifying the outcomes of our design thinking initiatives provides valuable insights into their effectiveness and areas for further improvement. One key metric to consider is customer satisfaction. By tracking metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) and customer retention rates, we can gauge how well our design thinking efforts are resonating with our audience.

Furthermore, measuring the efficiency of our internal processes provides a clear picture of the operational benefits gained from design thinking. Metrics such as project cycle time, error rates, and employee productivity offer tangible evidence of how design thinking has streamlined our operations. For instance, in accounting and taxation services, the reduction in processing errors and faster turnaround times highlight the effectiveness of our innovative approaches.

Financial performance is another critical aspect to measure. Increased revenue, profitability, and market share are strong indicators that our design thinking strategies are driving business growth. Analysing these financial metrics helps us understand the broader impact of our efforts and make informed decisions for future initiatives. By continuously monitoring and evaluating these metrics, we can ensure that design thinking remains a core driver of our business success.

Adopting design thinking is a transformative approach that enhances our ability to solve problems creatively and deliver exceptional value to our customers. By focusing on empathy, collaboration, and continuous improvement, we can develop solutions that truly meet the needs of our clients and drive business success. From improving internal processes to enhancing customer experiences, design thinking offers a holistic framework for innovation and growth.

At 3E Accounting Pte Ltd – Singapore , we are committed to leveraging the principles of design thinking to support our clients in achieving their business goals. Whether you need help with company incorporation in Singapore , or perhaps, business advisory or IT solutions, our expert team is here to assist you every step of the way. Contact us today to discover how we can help you succeed.

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What Is Creative Problem-Solving & Why Is It Important?

• 01 Feb 2022

One of the biggest hindrances to innovation is complacency—it can be more comfortable to do what you know than venture into the unknown. Business leaders can overcome this barrier by mobilizing creative team members and providing space to innovate.

There are several tools you can use to encourage creativity in the workplace. Creative problem-solving is one of them, which facilitates the development of innovative solutions to difficult problems.

Here’s an overview of creative problem-solving and why it’s important in business.

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What Is Creative Problem-Solving?

Research is necessary when solving a problem. But there are situations where a problem’s specific cause is difficult to pinpoint. This can occur when there’s not enough time to narrow down the problem’s source or there are differing opinions about its root cause.

In such cases, you can use creative problem-solving , which allows you to explore potential solutions regardless of whether a problem has been defined.

Creative problem-solving is less structured than other innovation processes and encourages exploring open-ended solutions. It also focuses on developing new perspectives and fostering creativity in the workplace . Its benefits include:

• Finding creative solutions to complex problems : User research can insufficiently illustrate a situation’s complexity. While other innovation processes rely on this information, creative problem-solving can yield solutions without it.
• Adapting to change : Business is constantly changing, and business leaders need to adapt. Creative problem-solving helps overcome unforeseen challenges and find solutions to unconventional problems.
• Fueling innovation and growth : In addition to solutions, creative problem-solving can spark innovative ideas that drive company growth. These ideas can lead to new product lines, services, or a modified operations structure that improves efficiency.

Creative problem-solving is traditionally based on the following key principles :

1. Balance Divergent and Convergent Thinking

Creative problem-solving uses two primary tools to find solutions: divergence and convergence. Divergence generates ideas in response to a problem, while convergence narrows them down to a shortlist. It balances these two practices and turns ideas into concrete solutions.

2. Reframe Problems as Questions

By framing problems as questions, you shift from focusing on obstacles to solutions. This provides the freedom to brainstorm potential ideas.

3. Defer Judgment of Ideas

When brainstorming, it can be natural to reject or accept ideas right away. Yet, immediate judgments interfere with the idea generation process. Even ideas that seem implausible can turn into outstanding innovations upon further exploration and development.

4. Focus on "Yes, And" Instead of "No, But"

Using negative words like "no" discourages creative thinking. Instead, use positive language to build and maintain an environment that fosters the development of creative and innovative ideas.

Creative Problem-Solving and Design Thinking

Whereas creative problem-solving facilitates developing innovative ideas through a less structured workflow, design thinking takes a far more organized approach.

Design thinking is a human-centered, solutions-based process that fosters the ideation and development of solutions. In the online course Design Thinking and Innovation , Harvard Business School Dean Srikant Datar leverages a four-phase framework to explain design thinking.

The four stages are:

• Clarify: The clarification stage allows you to empathize with the user and identify problems. Observations and insights are informed by thorough research. Findings are then reframed as problem statements or questions.
• Ideate: Ideation is the process of coming up with innovative ideas. The divergence of ideas involved with creative problem-solving is a major focus.
• Develop: In the development stage, ideas evolve into experiments and tests. Ideas converge and are explored through prototyping and open critique.
• Implement: Implementation involves continuing to test and experiment to refine the solution and encourage its adoption.

Creative problem-solving primarily operates in the ideate phase of design thinking but can be applied to others. This is because design thinking is an iterative process that moves between the stages as ideas are generated and pursued. This is normal and encouraged, as innovation requires exploring multiple ideas.

Creative Problem-Solving Tools

While there are many useful tools in the creative problem-solving process, here are three you should know:

Creating a Problem Story

One way to innovate is by creating a story about a problem to understand how it affects users and what solutions best fit their needs. Here are the steps you need to take to use this tool properly.

1. Identify a UDP

Create a problem story to identify the undesired phenomena (UDP). For example, consider a company that produces printers that overheat. In this case, the UDP is "our printers overheat."

2. Move Forward in Time

To move forward in time, ask: “Why is this a problem?” For example, minor damage could be one result of the machines overheating. In more extreme cases, printers may catch fire. Don't be afraid to create multiple problem stories if you think of more than one UDP.

3. Move Backward in Time

To move backward in time, ask: “What caused this UDP?” If you can't identify the root problem, think about what typically causes the UDP to occur. For the overheating printers, overuse could be a cause.

Following the three-step framework above helps illustrate a clear problem story:

• The printer is overused.
• The printer overheats.
• The printer breaks down.

You can extend the problem story in either direction if you think of additional cause-and-effect relationships.

4. Break the Chains

By this point, you’ll have multiple UDP storylines. Take two that are similar and focus on breaking the chains connecting them. This can be accomplished through inversion or neutralization.

• Inversion: Inversion changes the relationship between two UDPs so the cause is the same but the effect is the opposite. For example, if the UDP is "the more X happens, the more likely Y is to happen," inversion changes the equation to "the more X happens, the less likely Y is to happen." Using the printer example, inversion would consider: "What if the more a printer is used, the less likely it’s going to overheat?" Innovation requires an open mind. Just because a solution initially seems unlikely doesn't mean it can't be pursued further or spark additional ideas.
• Neutralization: Neutralization completely eliminates the cause-and-effect relationship between X and Y. This changes the above equation to "the more or less X happens has no effect on Y." In the case of the printers, neutralization would rephrase the relationship to "the more or less a printer is used has no effect on whether it overheats."

Even if creating a problem story doesn't provide a solution, it can offer useful context to users’ problems and additional ideas to be explored. Given that divergence is one of the fundamental practices of creative problem-solving, it’s a good idea to incorporate it into each tool you use.

Brainstorming

Brainstorming is a tool that can be highly effective when guided by the iterative qualities of the design thinking process. It involves openly discussing and debating ideas and topics in a group setting. This facilitates idea generation and exploration as different team members consider the same concept from multiple perspectives.

Hosting brainstorming sessions can result in problems, such as groupthink or social loafing. To combat this, leverage a three-step brainstorming method involving divergence and convergence :

• Have each group member come up with as many ideas as possible and write them down to ensure the brainstorming session is productive.
• Continue the divergence of ideas by collectively sharing and exploring each idea as a group. The goal is to create a setting where new ideas are inspired by open discussion.
• Begin the convergence of ideas by narrowing them down to a few explorable options. There’s no "right number of ideas." Don't be afraid to consider exploring all of them, as long as you have the resources to do so.

Alternate Worlds

The alternate worlds tool is an empathetic approach to creative problem-solving. It encourages you to consider how someone in another world would approach your situation.

For example, if you’re concerned that the printers you produce overheat and catch fire, consider how a different industry would approach the problem. How would an automotive expert solve it? How would a firefighter?

Be creative as you consider and research alternate worlds. The purpose is not to nail down a solution right away but to continue the ideation process through diverging and exploring ideas.

Continue Developing Your Skills

Whether you’re an entrepreneur, marketer, or business leader, learning the ropes of design thinking can be an effective way to build your skills and foster creativity and innovation in any setting.

If you're ready to develop your design thinking and creative problem-solving skills, explore Design Thinking and Innovation , one of our online entrepreneurship and innovation courses. If you aren't sure which course is the right fit, download our free course flowchart to determine which best aligns with your goals.

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