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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.

Partner Center

A Systems View Across Time and Space

• Open access
• Published: 13 April 2023

Design thinking as an effective method for problem-setting and needfinding for entrepreneurial teams addressing wicked problems

• Rahmin Bender-Salazar   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5783-6314 1  

Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship volume  12 , Article number:  24 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

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Organizations in a wide array of fields and disciplines are increasingly using design thinking as an innovative process to create products or services that address wicked problems in their industries. Design thinking, a method of creative and collaborative problem solving originating in the tactics of designers, is a product design and development process that is, more and more, being used as a tool to move innovation forward and structure creation processes in diverse disciplines, from product development to food creation to social science research. Increasingly design thinking has become popular beyond the confines of creative and design disciplines and into the realm of wicked problems in social and ecological systems. While design thinking has many forms and applications, this study uses a refined version built upon the key themes of inspiration, ideation, and implementation as defined by Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO (2009), and situates it within the social science discipline—namely, systems thinking, organizational learning, and action research. Through a distilled design structure this flexible methodology combines insights from organizational development, social psychology, systems theory, and design research. By embedding learning and reflective practices into the structure of design thinking, a hybrid model of design thinking emerges that is a more effective tool for framing, setting in context, and solving these types of problems within teams.

From large private companies to small NGOs, academic institutions, and government entities, all are striving to learn about and create innovative services, products, and experiences that address the problems the relevant stakeholders in their industries face. Design thinking, a methodology for problem solving that has its origins in designers’ approaches, tactics, and needs to make this multi-disciplinary process explicit (Gregory, 1966 ), has increasingly emerged in recent decades as a powerful method to drive the innovation process in the pursuit of improvement. Design thinking, as described by the emerging management and innovation scholar Michael Luchs, is “…a creative problem-solving approach—or, more completely, a systematic and collaborative approach for identifying and creatively solving problems” ( 2015 , p. 1). Design thinking’s holistic approach to stakeholders and systems, coupled with its participatory nature, has made it an approachable technique to use beyond the fields of art, architecture, engineering, and technology that traditionally have design disciplines. The theories and practice of design thinking have grown in popularity and have been more heavily used in the academic discourses on management and in the business industry over the past several decades. Thus, this discipline has emerged as a problem solving tool beyond the traditional confines of design (Johansson-Sköldberg et al., 2013 ).

This leads to the following research question: to what extent does the application of design thinking, tasked with addressing wicked problems, represent an effective means for team problem setting and problem solving in organizations?

To fully grasp the concepts discussed in this proposal, it is helpful to clarify a few definitions before proceeding. Wicked problems: these are difficult and challenging problems, which appear in all fields and organizations; the most complex, multifaceted, and intractable problems with systemic impact are referred to as wicked problems (Churchman, 1967 ; Rittel & Webber, 1973 ; Roberts, 2000 ). Organizations: This term is defined as “social units (or human groupings) deliberately constructed and reconstructed to seek specific goals” (Etzioni, 1964 , p. 3) and, in this study, they are defined as seeking to solve problems through the creation of a new product or service. Design thinking: The definition of design thinking in this study can be simply understood as the use of methods and research practices to solve problems that are traditionally not in the fields of design, architecture, or engineering.

A brief history of design thinking

Design thinking was evangelized and popularized by IDEO beginning in the early 1990s (Brown, 2009 ); however, it existed in the academic discourse much earlier in various forms. To understand the current and evolving use of design thinking, a historical review of this process is beneficial. Specifically, it is essential to examine the early work examining designers’ practice and research, occurring in the latter half of the twentieth century, by the parents of modern design thought: Lawson ( 1980 ), Rowe ( 1987 ), Archer ( 1979 ), and Cross ( 1991 ).

An initial push to make a more rigorous discipline out of design thinking sprang from what Michael Barry and Sarah Beckman—current researchers exploring learning in design thinking—refer to as “…a need to make design thinking explicit and a need to embrace the many disciplines that are engaged in some way with design” (Beckman & Barry, 2007 , p. 26). The movement towards an explicit design method began in the 1960s, which would later be referred to as the first generation, and the subsequent movement in the 1970s and 1980s, known as the second generation (Rittell, 1984 ). This second generation of design thought began to emphasize the social aspects of design, by including active participants in the process (Beckman & Barry, 2007 ).

As described by Archer, “there exists a designerly way of thinking and communication that is both different from scientific and scholarly methods of enquiry when applied to its own kinds of problems” (Archer, 1979 , p. 18). This assertion from Archer accents not only the thinking aspect but the unique way of communicating used by designers applying the design thinking method towards problem solving. Similar to this, Cross explains that the design thought process is a research practice and a way of processing information, described as “designerly ways of knowing” ( 2001 ), that is an independent methodology with rich theory and should not be dependent on social science theory ( 2007 ). These two scholars lay the groundwork for design thinking to emerge as a distinct discipline for tackling problems in a myriad of disciplines.

In addition, Rowe outlined a systematic design process to problem solving that emphasized the role of the designer to address the needs of the client ( 1987 ). He described this user-centered process as design thinking, which was one of the earliest uses of the term. In Rowe’s design thinking process, a designer intervenes in a client organization; interprets the evidence gathered through quantitative and qualitative investigation; and makes an effort to address the challenges presented in the form of a product or service. In Lawson’s work, the process of design thinking, though not explicitly called that, is explored as a process that utilizes experimentation and information gathering tactics to tailor products ( 1980 ). Lawson’s definition predates Rowe’s use of the term of design thinking but similarly focuses on the designer’s expert role in assessing the needs of a client and testing possible solutions. This process is a tool that designers can masterfully use, informed by their expertise and designerly ways of knowing (Cross, 2001 ), to ultimately solve challenges that often fall into the definition of wicked problems. Rowe and Lawson focus on the intrinsically unique features of design thinking, with an emphasis on how the use of data gathering and testing make it an ideal tool for finding appropriate and optimal solutions.

These foundations of design thinking led us to Tim Brown’s definition of three overlapping, sometimes non-sequential elements—inspiration, ideation, and implementation—as outlined in Change by Design ( 2009 ) and popularized by IDEO. This simple structure serves as the foundation in which to organize the foundational theories for the proposed method in this article. This definition of design thinking is informed by the work of Lawson ( 1980 ), Rowe ( 1987 ), Archer ( 1979 ), and Cross ( 1991 , 2001 ). This foundational design method is broadly defined as the three key elements can be repeated, can overlap, and can be non-sequential (Brown & Wyatt, 2010 ).

Design thinking adapted towards addressing wicked problems

For this exploration of design thinking’s effect and innovative potential in addressing wicked problems, it is essential to understand the corresponding academic discourse and how it has evolved with design thinking. The theory was first described in an editorial by management theorist Churchman ( 1967 ) as a reaction to the term, first coined by Horst Rittel. The article was an exploration of these difficult, virtually unsolvable problems in the management science discourse and responsibility of society and academia to accept their intractability and find innovation solutions to live with them (Churchman, 1967 ). This first formal definition of the concept was further expanded with more defined parameters with the article of Rittel and Melvin Webber in 1973 as uniquely complex problems. Rittel and Webber’s ( 1973 ) work framed wicked problems within the context of social policy planning, where problems are often not clear, and contrasted that with problems in mathematics and chess, where there are clear cut solutions. As stated by modern theorists Brian Head and Wei-Ning Xiang, “…the ubiquity of wicked problems is the norm, and present in almost every pressing issue area that matters to human society today…” ( 2016 , p. 1). This description describes the growing relevance and prevalence of wicked problems on human systems and how it has grown in importance from its inception.

Herbert Simon, a pioneer in design research and artificial intelligence, wanted to use a design approach, in the vein of the one described above, as a unique discipline, to tackle “ill-structured problems,” which he described as problems with undefined characteristics ( 1969 ). Simon described his approach to design as a means of “…devising artifacts to attain goals…” (Simon, 1969 , p. 114), which continued a trend of describing design as a solution making and transformative process. This interpretation of design thinking continued to gain momentum amongst theorists and practitioners throughout the twentieth century, which resulted in design thinking as a methodology becoming synonymous with problem solving, especially as a multidisciplinary practice for framing wicked problems (Buchanan, 1992 ). Design thinking as a method to solve problems outside the creative domain began with Herbert Simon, who applied design methodologies to science and his field of artificial intelligence ( 1969 ). This movement of applying the design thinking discipline to fields not traditionally associated with design continued with the product development process used by IDEO, know as Human Centered Design or HCD (Brown, 2008 ; IDEO, 2011 ). The degree of client participation and at which stages of the process vary between methods, but they agree on a key area of design thinking—that the client or product user is the primary focus.

As design thinking moves beyond the traditional creative sphere and enters the realm of addressing wicked problems across a wide spectrum of topics, the discipline is enriched by the rigorous research practices that the social sciences have to offer. The stand-alone discipline of design thinking explored in this article integrates some of the social science methodologies to effectively adapt to the new terrain of designing for social systems. Specifically, this discipline is informed by systems theory (Bertalanffy, 1969 ; Dentoni et al., 2023 ; Meadows, 2008 ; Senge, 1996 ), organizational learning (Argyris & Schön, 1978 ; Kolb, 1984 ; Senge, 1990 ) and action research (Lewin, 1946 ).

Design and systems

Systems are an essential element to implementing a design thinking process that addresses wicked problems, because they allow the designer to see a more expansive view of the problem. To understand how to design a specific product or service, the designer often analyzes the various systems that are involved, such as social, technological, ecological, or political systems. By understanding the inner workings of these systems and collaborating with relevant stakeholders, a designer can co-create a product or service that acts as a targeted intervention to improve the system. This perspective has its origins in general systems theory, formulated by biologist Ludwig Von Bertalanffy ( 1969 ), which expands the understanding of systems beyond science and analyzes all systems in an intricate, open, and holistic manner. The majority of design thinking approaches are human-centric perspectives on general systems theory in that they focus not only on the systems involved with a specific intervention but also on how the different systems interact with each other. Though most design thinking processes are human-centered, they are not exclusively focused on social systems, because the ecological and built environment are also considered. Expanding on this viewpoint is organisimic theory (Goldstein, 1995 ), which emphasizes human interconnectedness—that humans are intrinsically and inextricably intertwined with the natural environment and the ecological systems therein. In addition, Barry Commoner, in his work The Closing Circle , further stated that everything in living systems is connected to each other and what has an effect on one affects all (Commoner, 1971 ). These ideas inform systems thinking (Dentoni et al., 2023 ; Senge, 1996 ), which is an application of systems theory to interpret the intertwined and dynamic interactions among multiple interdependent elements to inform possible interventions. This approach to interconnected systems informs the design thinking approach through the very foundation of the process—placing the human at the center of the research and looking at all the ways this individual connects with the product, service, or system.

Design thinking to stimulate learning

The principles of design thinking are human-centered, that is, the results are specifically tailored to the end-user, and are created using a process of collaboration, active engagement, and reflection (IDEO, 2011 ). This process can be further explained using the double loop learning theory (Argyris & Schön, 1978 ), which informs how reflective practice foundationally builds on learning. Double loop learning involves single loop learning—repeated attempts to address the same issue with the same method—while additionally engaging in reflective practice to learn from past performance and emphasize repeat attempts to refine approaches (Argyris & Schön, 1978 ).

David Kolb, a scholar in learning science, similarly, outlines an experiential learning model ( 1984 ) rooted in social psychology, which focuses on concrete action, learning from experience, reflection, and experimentation. This theory involves an axis of learning with the y -axis containing two opposing methods of processing experience and an x -axis of opposing methods of transforming experience. This axis of learning can be seen in Fig.  1 , and display experience processing in learning from a spectrum of concrete examples as one extreme and abstract conceptualization of ideas as the opposition. The processing of information is similarly balanced that with two opposing methods of transforming experience (Beckman & Barry, 2007 ; Kolb, 1984 ). The two diametrically opposed information transformation processes include reflective observation on one end and active experimentation on the other (Beckman & Barry, 2007 ). In simple terms, the process as seen in Fig.  1 shows two forces of learning that of processing reality and transforming it within each there is a tangible and intangible component. The work of Kolb, Argrys, and Schön increase the potential to learn from the design thinking process with rapid prototyping practice—reacting and changing the product, system, or service based on reflective practices and adapting based on those reflections. Rapid prototyping is influenced by social learning models, which emphasize interaction in learning and the importance of experimentation with both thought and action.

Kolb Learning model as adapted from Beckman and Barry ( 2007 ), Kolb ( 1984 ) and Kolb and Kolb ( 2005 )

Charles Owen, a design academic from the Illinois Institute of Technology who has advocated for design as an engine for innovation ( 2006a ), builds on the prototyping practice from Kolb, Argrys, and Schön. Owen theorized that the design process has discernable phases that, while often not in order, generally begin with the analytic research stage and end with the synthetic experimentation and creation stage (Owen, 1993). This innovation model begins with creating ideas and concepts from research and then applying them to experiments for testing. When used through the lens of learning, this proposed process, as illustrated in Fig.  2 , begins to take shape as a non-sequential, innovative method to interpret and address complex problems. This process is illustrated in the work of Beckman and Barry ( 2007 ) who combined the elements of Owen ( 2006b ) in a simple vestige of two axes and four quadrants. In this prescribed and infinitely repeatable process, concrete analysis brings about observable research that can then be applied to abstract analysis, that is, frameworks and theories. Finally, this leads to abstract synthesis, which is the creation of ideas that can be clearly synthesized to become concrete solutions.

Innovation process as adapted from Beckman and Barry ( 2007 )

Using design thinking in concert with action research

Design thinking, as described by Owen, seeks to form knowledge through action (1997), which is similar in style and approach to Action Research (Lewin, 1946 ) in the social sciences. Action research was first created for researchers to take a participatory and active role in their studies to mold and guide their experience (Lewin, 1946 ), which echoes the role of the designer in a design thinking process. The designer or researcher needs to take account of their subjects and make observations, which is a traditional research paradigm while also understanding their impact as a participant in the process. In addition, reflective practice (Argyris & Schön, 1978 ) is a means to review and learn from past experience, and with this tool, a designer or researcher is able to build on observations of the research subject or client and create the best solutions for them. A similar approach to the use of knowledge aggregated from observations and reflective practice, is the needfinding model, which is an exploration of addressing the needs of a particular subject and working to create a solution tailored to solve this problem for them (Faste, 1987 ). Needfinding in design thinking does not occur as a sequential step after reflection and observation, but rather as a method to guide both of those processes to address the needs of the intended client or product user. Similarly, in action research, needfinding is necessary for the researcher to undertake to gain context of motivations of organizations and individuals involved. In action research, the subject and researchers are all participants and collaborators in the change process and its essential to understand their needs in this context, which parallels the collaborative and solution creating work of a designer.

Schön described design, in its traditional form, as a tacit process with designers’ knowledge that is difficult to transfer or explain ( 1983 ). This situates designers as having specific expertise that is difficult for those without the professional know-how to comprehend or utilize. Design thinking seeks to clarify the discipline of design into a process more akin to implicit knowledge (Nonaka & Takechi, 1995 ), allowing design expertise to be disseminated to a larger audience, including both the designer and the client or product user. This implies that the interaction between the designer and the client is a reciprocal transaction or a communication between interacting components and systems (Germain, 1991 ; Luhmann, 1995 ). This interactive method represents the action research process, where both parties contribute to the creation process, with the designer leading the exercise. The change desired in the design thinking process, rather than research study, is an output in the form of a product or service made in collaboration with the client.

This approach to learning is common within design in that it is meant to create the ideal solution through experimentation, iteration, and continually learning from both. Using participatory action research, that is focusing on rapid learning, repetition of the practice-driven design thinking framework, and reflection, is essential for innovating and solving wicked problems (Argyris & Schön, 1991 ; Lewin, 1946 ).

Innovating through design thinking

Innovation, described as the “core renewal process” in an organization purposed with creating new products and services (Bessant et al., 2005 ), is the mechanism for addressing wicked problems. To innovate effectively to remain competitive, organizations have increasingly turned to the application of design thinking as a process for product development in recent decades (Johansson-Sköldberg et al., 2013 ; Lockwood, 2010 ). Design thinking-driven problem solving is a powerful and disruptive method that creates innovative products and services that seek to address these types of problems across diverse fields.

This article uses a foundational approach to design thinking-driven problem solving, which is, in essence, a flexible framework that does not adhere to a strict structure. Rather, it is able to ebb and flow within the design challenge and cater to the relevant stakeholders. As stated by Sydney Gregory in the seminal work The Design Method , “[the] design method is a pattern of behavior employed in inventing things…which do not yet exist. Science is analytic; design is constructive” ( 1966 , p. 6). Design, in this context, is used as an engine of product, system, and service creation that addresses individuals’ needs and challenges.

The design thinking process explained above can be considered an innovation process (Brown & Wyatt, 2010 ) and has a social learning component (Beckman & Barry, 2007 ). More specifically, this process can be defined as a problem setting method (Schön, 1983 ). Problem setting, as explained by design cognition scholar Willemien Visser is “…the process by which we define the decision to be made, the ends to be achieved, and the means that may be chose[n]” ( 2010 , p. 4). Problem setting is the first step towards innovation and tackling a wicked problem. By defining the problem and understanding all of the pieces that interact with it, one can begin to address, but not necessarily solve a wicked problem. To understand how to use design thinking as a method within this innovative problem setting process, one must understand the context of the current design thinking discourse.

Towards a refined design thinking model

Organizations are consistently looking for innovative ways to advance their products, profits, and goals, and design thinking, though not clearly defined, has emerged as a driving force to meet these challenges. Despite the varying definitions (Brown, 2008 ; Dorst, 2006 , 2010 ; Kimbell, 2015 ), there are enough similarities that describe the key elements of design thinking that bring it in line with other design and social science research methodologies. By combining a few of the fundamental elements into a hybrid model of design thinking, it can be used as a powerful tool to address wicked problems that organizations face. This method, as illustrated in Fig.  3 , brings together the elements of Charles Owen’s map of innovation ( 1998 , 2006a , 2006b ), Kolb’s experiential learning ( 1984 ), and Tim Brown’s three signature elements of the design thinking process ( 2009 ).

Hybrid model of design thinking, which is a design process workaround with design thinking and innovation adapted from the work of Beckman and Barry ( 2007 ), Brown ( 2008 , 2009 ), Brown and Wyatt ( 2010 ), Brown and Katz ( 2011 )

The components of inspiration, ideation, and implementation (Brown, 2009 ) serve as the foundation of this hybrid model. Using Brown’s simplified construction could be interpreted as embracing the recent, popular versions of design thinking as a third or independent discipline. However, its approachable three-pronged structure provides a categorical separation between steps and meshes well with Owen’s concepts of innovation—the interplay of analysis and synthesis with abstract and concrete ( 1998 , 2006a , 2006b ). This powerful combination creates a streamlined and flexible framework, where innovation can occur in a non-sequential order, dictated by the needs of the problem. Interestingly, Archer foresaw this hybrid approach when he stated, “time is rapidly approaching when design decision making and management decision making techniques will have so much in common that the one will become no more than the extension of the other” ( 1967 , p. 51). Archer’s foresight in the above hybrid design approach is in line with his third-way ( 1979 ) thought process but differs in that this design discipline works in concert with social science instead of wholly separate from it. Using this innovative hybrid design thinking model, wicked problems can be quickly identified and addressed, with an outlook towards finding specific solutions to fit users’ needs.

Research design

Building on the theoretical model, based on the literature review above, a case study was undertaken to better understand the model in practice. The case study used a participatory design thinking exercise with a cohort of students enrolled in an applied entrepreneurial Masters-level course at Wageningen University. This course was targeted at students interested in entrepreneurship and circular economy, and worked with eight student teams that were developing business ideas using renewable materials in garment production. Disruptive innovation—a product, service, or approach that fundamentally upends the status quo of an industry or field (Christensen, 1997 )—serves as a lens in this case study to analyze the effect of design thinking on problem solving and concept development of the student teams’ entrepreneurial ventures The course was focused on circular economic systems, which seeks to reuse resources in a closed, infinitely repeatable loop, which is in contrast to traditional linear economic models that use finite resources and create waste (Geissdoerfer et al., 2017 ). The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a leader in applying the circular transition, define the concept as the following:

A circular economy is an industrial system that is restorative or regenerative by intention and design. It replaces the “end-of-life” concept with restoration, shifts towards the use of renewable energy, eliminates the use of toxic chemicals, which impair reuse, and aims for the elimination of waste through the superior design of materials, products, systems, and, within this, business models. (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2012, p. 7)

Circular economy seeks to reduce humanity’s impact on the environment and climate by decreasing waste and using resources more efficiently, thus attempting to solve the wicked problem of negative human impact on the environment.

Creating a baseline

Participants in the study came from two types of academic backgrounds: a science-based one, and one rooted in the social sciences. There was an observable difference between each group in their ability to learn and apply design thinking. Students from a science-based background, such as environmental science or biochemistry, were able to learn and use design thinking concepts with greater ease than those with a social science, humanities, or management studies background. This noticeable difference may be attributable to the science-based students’ ability to mix and match frameworks as needed to find solutions to complex problems. For example, in physics, students have been taught to use one formula for one situation with its own set of variables, and another formula for another situation with a second set of variables. In other words, the situation dictates what tools are used. Similarly, in the hybrid model of design thinking, which the students were exposed to, specific elements are only applied in certain circumstances and situations. Thus, as design thinking contains elements of the scientific method, this may have resonated more with the science-based students’ usual ways of learning and applying methods.

The overall purpose of creating a baseline was to see what portion of the design thinking concepts had permeated in participants’ minds and how they described those concepts. As such, I used what participants shared as their interpretation or impression of design thinking in their own words. In many cases their descriptions were of a concept without the use of the concept name (e.g., prototype, ideation), and I compared these explanations with the concepts used in the hybrid model of design thinking in an effort to make connections where possible. The students displayed their knowledge of design thinking during the interviews and through the course by describing important elements of the process, namely, creating prototypes, building on failed attempts, and repeated reflection on the implementation of their ideas. To establish a baseline, it was not necessary for participants to use the exact names or descriptions of the design thinking concepts, as the real test of whether they understood these concepts and could apply them would be uncovered during the design thinking in action (DTiA) section of data collection.

This qualitative methods study, informed by design thinking, was conducted in three phases: Phase 1 consisted of an ethnographic observational study and Phase 2 consisted of a series of six interviews (see Table 1 ) with past participants to assess their knowledge of and ability to apply design thinking to a real world problem.

The purpose of these two phases was to collectively gather data to understand the relationship between design thinking and problem solving in a team. Specifically, the data from the two phases seeks to answer to what extent design thinking represents an effective method for team problem setting and problem solving of wicked problems in organizations. Once collected, the data was codified (see Table 2 ) into four major themes: (1) the interviewee’s personal motivation in life and vocational goals; (2) their professed knowledge in the aspects, uses, and approaches of design thinking; (3) the interviewee’s application of design thinking in a scenario; and (4) their assessment of the effectiveness of design thinking.

The research findings examine the research question, “To what extent does the application of design thinking, tasked with addressing wicked problems, represent an effective means for team problem setting and problem solving in organizations?" To answer this question, I used the four themes outlined above to conduct the data analysis, and the interpretation of the data will continue to follow these themes. For the interpretation, I split the four overarching themes into two categories. The first category incorporates the first two themes (personal motivation and knowledge of design thinking) and acts as a baseline to gauge, where the individual is academically and what design thinking concepts they have retained. This is useful information, because it paints a clearer picture of the participants’ individual characteristics, which I then paired with the second category of themes to understand whether these characteristics play a role in the participants’ application of design thinking to solve a wicked problem. The richest set of data comes from the second category. The latter two themes (application of design thinking and perceived effectiveness) are included in this second category as a way to analyze DTiA through role-playing scenarios, which gives insight into the participants’ practical knowledge and application of the hybrid design thinking model used for this experiment.

This DTiA exercise revealed three key features of the hybrid model, which combines behavioral science and traditional design methods to create a flexible and foundational model for addressing wicked problems. Three key aspects within the hybrid model that were particularly apparent in this second category were “problem setting”, “needfinding”, and “double-loop learning”. First, interviewees successfully applied problem setting by outlining all the necessary information that would be required to solve an assignment—in this case, the hypothetical scenario of working with Apple to improve the iPhone’s falling market share. Interviewees correctly prioritized the following: (1) setting up a component team to tackle the issue; (2) collecting data on competitors to compare best practices; (3) understanding the needs of potential and past customers; and (4) creating a process to experiment and iterate on failures. These priorities exemplify the hybrid model’s three central elements and how organizational learning, needfinding, and problem setting are key to the success of the model in addressing wicked problems. What’s more, the interviewees were able to link ecological systems, such as environmental value chains and social systems while looking at both consumers and stakeholders to put the question into context. Second, participants used needfinding to distinguish what aspects of the real world problem were most important to take into consideration when evaluating possible solutions. These aspects focused mostly on the needs of human and ecological systems that were involved with the problem. Third, participants used double-loop learning to test possible solutions to the problems they faced and made iterative changes based on the positive or negative results. Specifically, the interviewees showed how they questioned all of the parameters of the prompt and laid a plan for testing, retesting, and iteration of ideas.

This study’s findings suggest that the hybrid model of design thinking is an effective framework for addressing wicked problems. Namely, participants were able to recall various terms, such as “prototyping” and “ideation” when defining this hybrid model. Furthermore, they displayed implicit knowledge by successfully using aspects of the model, including “double-loop learning,” “iteration,” and “reflective practices,” to find solutions during the DTiA exercise. For example, Interviewee C specifically defined “prototyping” as “a method to create quick test solutions that can then be iterated upon and improved with future versions towards a suitable solution.” Being an explicit definition of this design thinking concept, it is clear that Interviewee C understood and retained the information learned during the course. By contrast, Interviewee A did not identify “prototyping” by name but displayed use of the concept during the role-playing exercise.

The course participants used design thinking in the formulation of their entrepreneurial ventures, which were created to address the wicked problem of environmental sustainability. Two groups of participants in particular, Epsilon and Zeta, used design thinking to address very specific problems they identified within environmental sustainability, which are outlined below.

Epsilon team’s use of the hybrid design thinking method

Epsilon’s innovative solution was developed in response to the lack of incubation spaces for sustainable entrepreneurs in Wageningen, Netherlands—that is, workspaces and offices, where like-minded entrepreneurs can work and have access to investors and experts to grow their businesses. The team focused on Wageningen specifically, because they had the most experience in this city, as students at the local university and as entrepreneurs who had attempted a previous venture here already. Note that this was the team’s second venture attempt for this study. They first explored how to grow a mushroom skin, related to the “living skin” research project, so that they could experiment with different types of coating to make the material waterproof. They planned to sell the waterproof coating to companies to make durable clothing, bags, or car interiors. Through experimentation and the prototyping process, the team tried to grow mushrooms but faced challenges with a lack of expertise and a space to grow the fungi. The team expressed frustration about these obstacles and through reflection realized that getting expert assistance and finding a space to experiment were essential to their success as a venture; however, perhaps, these were problems they could address. As such, the team shifted their focus to a new venture, which was to find an innovative solution to the lack of incubation spaces in Wageningen.

The team researched and tested their new venture concept of creating an organic, sustainably, and locally sourced café that is an office space for ventures in the city, has a network of experts to help entrepreneurs, and offers a location for entrepreneurs to sell and test their products and services. With this shift, the team then went to collect data and surveyed people around the city and the results showed that there was, in fact, demand from residents and sustainable entrepreneurs for this type of space and that Wageningen did not currently have any locations that met these entrepreneurs’ needs. Specifically, they found that a co-working space and having access to experts are actually crucial for entrepreneurs in the early stages of their ventures, because it allows them to test their ideas and learn from others as they iterate on better solutions. Similarly, the team itself was able to learn from the failure and challenges of their first venture attempt, which inspired them to address that problem directly with a different venture. Epsilon’s venture evolved to become a café, store, and incubation space for entrepreneurs in Wageningen that sought to create products or services that are environmentally sustainable and have closed-loop, circular waste streams. Their final venture concept included a plan for further development, testing, and iteration to continue learning as they grow and improve their products.

This team’s journey from one venture to another provides an exemplary use of the hybrid design thinking model. This shift embodies Argyris and Schön’s definition of double-loop learning, the students not only explored their original question related to their venture but also if it was the right question in itself. Argyris and Schön ( 1978 ) described the concept with the following metaphor:

Single loop learning can be compared with a thermostat that learns when it is too hot or too cold and then turns the heat on or off. The thermostat is able to perform this task, because it can receive information (the temperature of the room) and, therefore, take corrective action. If the thermostat could question itself about whether it should be set at 68 degrees, it would be capable not only of detecting error but of questioning the underlying policies and goals as well as its own program. That is a second and more comprehensive inquiry; hence it might be called double loop learning. (pp. 2–3)

I shared the metaphor above with the students during the beginning of the course, and this group exemplified double-loop learning in the selection and refinement of their venture. Team Epsilon showed their understanding of the context of a venture and how that can change the very nature of a proposed solution as it was for them, when they shifted the problem they focused on. Furthermore, their reaction to changing circumstance can be interpreted as the team displaying Schön’s ( 1983 ) concept of “reflection-in-action” (p. 79). The team struggled with their concept and made changes that ebbed and flowed with the challenges they faced, which in Schön’s definition would be part of the designer’s reflective “conversation with the situation.” Their use of double-loop learning in regard to building on lessons learned and changing approaches based on feedback led them to their new venture and guided how they continued to iterate and improve that new venture. Furthermore, they expertly displayed problem setting and understanding the context of a venture and how that can change the very nature of a proposed solution as it was for them, when they shifted their problem. The final project from this team was well thought out, fit to context and was an exemplary use of the hybrid model.

Zeta team’s use of the hybrid design thinking method

The Zeta team faced very different challenges in creating their venture. The team members, who came from diverse backgrounds and had varying interests and skillsets, came up with a plethora of ideas and had a difficult time choosing one idea to move forward with. The ideation and brainstorming process was not decisive or iterative, and the students expressed their frustration as the process rolled on without a clear venture in sight. The team worried that they had fallen behind and would not have enough time to complete all aspects of the project. With design thinking coaching by the researcher, the team was encouraged to refocus their efforts to think about any problem, not necessarily related to environmental sustainability, and see how they could collectively address it. Once they had decided on a problem, they could then begin introducing aspects related to reducing waste streams and circular economy in an organic way that would connect the problem they chose to the bigger, wicked problem of environmental sustainability.

The team used needfinding to find the requirements of the problem and then utilized framing and reframing to make their venture work in that context. This venture’s process exemplifies frame innovation, coined by Dorst ( 2015 ), which he describes as a “key entrepreneurial activity” (p. 149). The team shifted frames, from seeing their venture as a means to solve an aspect of environmental sustainability, to solving a real-world problem that can be connected to environmental sustainability. The Zeta team went through further consultation and began discussing one team member’s proposed problem based on her experience working with the United Nations (UN) on disaster recovery in Latin America. She described the problem of people needing quick housing when a disaster strikes; the logistic challenges of getting temporary, single use housing into the disaster area; and the waste the homes leave once they are no longer used. This discussion led the group to connect this issue to the “living skin” fungi material to create temporary housing that could be lighter weight, biodegradable, and reusable. This idea connects the problem posed within the problem of environmental sustainability, which was their task. Furthermore, this shift exemplifies an understanding of systems thinking and interconnectedness of social and ecological systems. Once the initial concept was developed, they began to refine the idea using team members’ expertise working in international development and aid as well as environmental sustainability. They then turned to the questions of how to make this into a venture and who would be their target audience. This process led them to brainstorm how they could balance the needs of potential clients (disaster response organizations), potential users (disaster victims), and the natural environment (ecological footprint). The team conducted surveys and found that potential clients would be interested in cost and scale of the potential solution, while potential users would be most interested in comfort and durability. Those considerations were then balanced with creating the minimalist ecological footprint and having a viable business model so the venture would thrive. They made two crucial decisions at this juncture: first, they decided not to manufacture the material but to source it from a third party, and second, they decided to structure their venture as a non-profit focused on the UN and disaster recovery agencies.

Using the design thinking concepts of rapid prototyping and reflection they were able to quickly figure out which ideas were working and abandon those that were not, which ultimately led to a venture they described as “living houses.” This iterative process they embodied shows the power of using design thinking for concept refinement. The team’s final venture concept was a not-for-profit organization that sourced biodegradable and reusable materials to create light-weight, temporary housing to be sold to NGOs, governments, and public international institutions for disaster victims around the globe. Their plan included next steps for further testing and iteration to improve the product and business model. In both cases, the Epsilon and Zeta teams used the hybrid design thinking model to problem set and problem solve as they set up and executed their ventures. This clearly helps address the central research question of the study by showing the utility of design thinking as tool for addressing wicked problems both in the internal venture creation process and the problem the venture sought to address, environmental sustainability.

Connecting team’s use of design thinking hybrid method to interview data

While these team examples provide evidence to support the positive impact of design thinking on problem setting and solving for wicked problems, the most interesting results came from the Phase 3 interviews that took place 1 year after completion of the course. During these interviews the participants were tasked with using the hybrid design thinking model in a theoretical applied scenario. Through these participant interviews, I was able to explore which features of design thinking they had internalized and how they might apply those to a real world problem. As explained in the following discussion, the participants’ ability to use design thinking concepts implicitly and explicitly over a year later shows that the concepts were adopted as a modus operandi, at least in part. As shown in the matrix in Fig.  4 , the participants all showed a high ability to apply the competencies regardless of their ability to define them as. In addition, the participants who did not recall the definitions were able apply the competencies to a higher level of specificity and knowledge than two out of the three interviewees that could.

Matrix showing interviewees’ ability to define ( x -axis) and apply ( y -axis) on key design thinking competencie s

In the scenario with the interview, participants were tasked with describing the steps they would take to tackle the problem of declining market share of the iPhone. Without being specifically prompted, all interviewees included some form of waste reduction and environmental sustainability into their action plan in the scenario. Some causation for the inclusion of these environmental themes could be the students’ backgrounds, their association with the course’s focus on this particular wicked problem, and/or a general growing awareness of the global climate crisis. That said, their ability to connect a problem to a deeper, wicked problem demonstrates their use of the competencies of system thinking and problem setting from the hybrid design thinking model. They were able to place a practical task within a wider context and connect it with wicked problems involved, such as climate change and electronic waste.

Much like in the case of the Zeta team described above, any seemingly unrelated problem can be used as a gateway to begin discerning the mechanics needed to address a specific, wicked problem, which will lead to creating experimental solutions that can be further tested. Furthermore, the participants were able to identify, in name or description, the three core elements of the hybrid design thinking model—inspiration, ideation, and implementation—and delineate corresponding activities for each while also explicitly and implicitly describing design thinking’s approach to solving wicked problems. The participants’ perception of and demonstrated application of design thinking elements in their problem solving procedure in the interview sheds light on the effectiveness of design thinking as a problem setting and solving tool. This suggests that the participants embraced design thinking, specifically the three-pronged hybrid model that melds design methodologies and behavioral science, as a useful process for problem solving. More important than the interviewees identification of the steps of the model, was their application of problem setting and problem solving strategies that follow the three main elements of design thinking. Participants were able to show the use of brainstorming (inspiration), prototyping (ideation), and iteration (implementation) in various ways and interchangeably. This nimble and engrained use of the concept shows its effectiveness as a problem setting and problem solving tool as well as its impact on users.

Connecting findings to the existing literature

This study was informed by a literature review which examined the history, theories, and application of design thinking in addressing wicked problems. In this study, design thinking is considered a “third discipline” or independent area of study that applies behavioral science and design methodologies to a proposed hybrid model. This hybrid design thinking model strengthens typical design methodologies by including (1) systems thinking, taking into account interconnectedness of ecological and social systems; (2) organizational learning, using double-loop learning, reflective practice, and iterative prototyping; and (3) elements of action research, such as collaborative and cyclical feedback with designer and client. This integrated process is particularly pertinent when working on problems beyond traditional design, for it lends a structural framework to behavioral science research using the three phases of ideation, prototyping, and implementation. In the hybrid design thinking model, behavioral and organizational considerations are not merely optional, but rather an essential element that works in congress with design methodologies.

As outlined above, the findings of this study are in line with the literature and research that indicate that design thinking is a potent tool for addressing wicked problems. By their nature, wicked problems are intractable and complex, so when testing ways to solve them effectively the method must be able to adapt with that nature. Specifically, this research suggests that design thinking represents an innovative process uniquely equipped to address wicked problems through its use of “problem setting.” That is, the effective use of needfinding—looking for solutions for relevant stakeholders—and double-loop learning—applying iterative knowledge and testing assumptions while doing. Although the participants in this study represent a very small treatment group in a specific educational setting focused on tackling environmental wicked problems, there is potential to test this experiment more broadly in educational settings focused on a variety of wicked problems.

Implications for future research

There are four overarching implications that result from this study that academic researchers and practitioners should take into consideration when exploring how to use design thinking as an effective method to address wicked problems. First, future research should conduct experiments using design thinking to address wicked problems that occur within other thematic areas, such as gender inequality, wealth distribution, employment with new technologies, and religious tensions, among others. Second, future research should test a variety of team compositions and study settings beyond that of a university. For example, team members could be part of a research institution, corporation, government, or NGO, and studies could be conducted within those organizations or across disciplines. Third, future research should explore what other aspects of design thinking are effective and learn why they are or are not successful in tackling wicked problems. Fourth, future research should test the hybrid design thinking model’s effectiveness using other forms of design thinking as a control. Finally, beyond academia there are implications of this study for professional practice. Gleanings from this study and use of the hybrid model in the field can occur immediately if used as an adaptable and editable tool for problem solving. This can be used in NGO’s, governments, universities and companies working on wicked problems in their work.

Limitations

This was a qualitative methods study that included a participatory design exercise focused on students enrolled in an entrepreneurship and circular economy course, where they were tasked to use design thinking as a method for creating innovative solutions to the wicked problem of environmental sustainability. While designed to examine how effective design thinking is for setting and solving wicked problems for teams, there is a clear limitation of its application on settings outside education, such as in business and practices outside of academia. Although the course was hands-on, involved the creation of a nonprofit or for-profit business, and was team-based, it still took place in an educational setting rather than in the open marketplace. In addition, this study unfolded in a European context and specifically within the Netherlands, which limits its scope further. As stated earlier, there are wider implications for this data beyond being held in an academic setting that influence the results and potential uses of design thinking. As stated above, future studies should be conducted with teams outside of academia who are tackling different wicked problems other than environmental sustainability. Different results could occur in different settings and problems and future research can explore those possibilities.

Beyond the components of the research, this study had limitations with time, as it had to be carried out during a specific semester and was dependent on student availability. In addition, due to university considerations, including the time needed for proposal review and IRB approvals, there were delays in conducting the interviews which were originally set for May 2018, but were carried out in December 2018 and January 2019. However, this allowed for a shift in focus of looking at how the knowledge and practice of design thinking remained implicitly and explicitly in the interviewees’ problem solving practices. A final limitation is that this study was a doctoral dissertation, which means it had a limited budget and a specific time period in which it was required to be completed.

Final thoughts

Analysis of designers’ thinking and doing has been explored for over a half century, and design thinking, in particular, has evolved over the last three decades from a process only used by designers to more expansive use. Along with the expanded use of design thinking is the rightful criticism, skepticism, and curiosity with the approach, which can offer an opportunity for further refinement and transdisciplinary use. This evolution has expanded design thinking from traditionally creative fields to help create products to practical, ergonomic and aesthetic standards to being used by governments, social policy researchers, non-governmental organizations, and many more to solve societal problems and the most difficult among them, wicked problems. The hybrid design thinking model strengthens design methodologies with systems thinking, organizational learning, and action research, which can help deepen and inform the design methods when working on problems beyond traditional design. IDEO’s popularized design thinking process with the three elements of inspiration, ideation, and implementation provides a structure that can be used as a basis to add insights and tactics from social sciences—namely, systems thinking, organizational learning, and action research—and designer’s methods more broadly. Systems thinking offers an opportunity for teams to zoom out and have a macro view of the dynamic, interconnected elements of the wicked problem they seek to address through iterative solutions and reflection. Organizational learning offers a posture of learning which can strengthen the iteration, testing, and reflection processes in design thinking. Finally, action research informed practice with design thinking enables teams to be active participants, researchers, and designers in finding possible solutions to wicked problems. Design thinking when applied to solving problems in an entrepreneurial education setting will add to the effectiveness and innovative nature of the solutions created. Through creative brainstorming, experimentation and reflection being integrated into the creation of entrepreneurial solutions to wicked problems there is great potential ramifications beyond educational settings, such as industry, government, and civil society.

Availability of data and materials

The data and materials used in the research are available through the ProQuest dissertation database as part of graduation requirements for the PhD at Fielding Graduate University.

Abbreviations

Design thinking in action

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Acknowledgements

Thank you to Wageningen University & Research and Fielding Graduate University for the opportunity to conduct this research in an entrepreneurial classroom setting. Ethical Approval through institutional review board (IRB) is detailed in Appendix B . This work was completed as part of doctoral research of Rahmin Bender (-Salazar) conducted for the Fielding Graduate University and at Wageningen University & Research and published with ProQuest as part of graduation requirements.

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Appendix A: Interview Protocol—November 2018

[To open the conversation a bit of small talk and catching up with the former student, what they have been up to and what do they have planned next and this lines up to the informal questions below (in no particular order).]

Welcome and thank you for this time and to explore some of these concepts with you and get your perspective. Now that you have completed the Design Thinking course, I would like to explore with you whether, in your future career, you would consider design thinking as a way for teams to tackle difficult problems, and any ideas you may have on the subject. This is not designed in any way to test your knowledge about design thinking, or to reflect on how you did in class. I would simply like to understand whether, with what you’ve learned, you feel that design thinking is a good way to tackle tough problems, and how you would go about doing that.

Questions to warm up and understand context—5 ~ min

What is your major/main subject of study?

How do you want to use your education and what do you want to do as your vocation?

Design thinking and problem solving—40 min

[The purpose of the first question is to begin to brush on problem setting and begging the design thinking process, the parameters and elements. The goal is to solicit data from participants through storytelling and their thoughts on the topic.]

Can you tell me a story about your experience with design thinking in the class that you thought was memorable?

Are there other examples of things that struck you about design thinking?

What is it about the design thinking approach that you like the most?

Is there anything that you don’t like, or would do differently?

Let’s do some role playing. Let’s say, tomorrow you get hired by Apple to be the head of their new development team. They have a serious problem: the iPhone has reached a saturation point. You are tasked to come up with an entirely new set of functions that will totally reinvent the iPhone. How would you go about doing that, if you were using the design thinking approach? If you can, break it down using the three-phase hybrid model we discussed: Ideation-Prototyping-Implementation.

Is there anything about design thinking you feel you need to know more about, before you could confidently begin to use it?

Wrap up—10–15 min

So in sum, do you think design thinking a good method to produce disruptive innovation, or would you use other methods?

Does design thinking need to be adapted to the fast pace of disruptive change today?

Appendix B: Ethical Approval for Research—April 2018

1) IRB Approval Information

Name: Rahmin Bender.

IRB#: 17–1107

Title: Applying Design Thinking and Practice to team projects seeking to create regenerative and sustainable products to address the wicked problem of sustainable garments

Faculty: Fredrick Steier.

Type: Title Change and General Revisions.

2) Study Summary

The dissertation project seeks to explore through participatory action research, how the application of design methods to address wicked problems represents a disruptive innovation in the process of solution creation and if so or not, to what extent. The disruptive innovation is framed within the context of the Netherlands, the public University education system and the field of sustainable fashion and garment production. The specific context of this study will be at Wageningen University and Research in the Netherlands working with student teams creating business ideas, using design thinking and aligned methods, with the renewable materials in garment production. The forty Masters students in a circular economy course will be split into eight teams that will work with designers using these materials to create business and product concepts using design thinking processes facilitated by me.

3) Revision Checklist

I. Change title to: Applying design thinking to entrepreneurial learning spaces purposed with addressing wicked problems.

Title changed to emphasize more on the application of design thinking on the learn space and how it addresses the wicked problem, rather than focusing more and more on the

II. Change question 2 element (c) from “(c) how design process impacts team dynamics of product creation team” to (c) how design process impacts the co-creation of the entrepreneurial learning space.

Question changed to focus additionally on how using the design process not only impacts the outputs of the course but the course itself.

III. Change question 3’s following elements.

Change this bullet: “World Café held after the course to accumulate data and feedback from participants and put into context with the notes.”

New Text: Changed to Design Charrette held after the course to accumulate data, feedback and put notes into context through a participatory designing of future iterations of the course.

Change this bullet: “Depending on IRB is performed data collection will be focused on the World Café portion that will be held in January post course and the course and work will be looked at historically.”

New text: IRB includes data from the course that ended in the end of 2017 as well as data from the participatory design workshop titled a design charrette occurring in 25 April 2017.

Add the following bullet

Design-based Research informed by action research and design thinking will serve as the research method for analyzing the historic data from the course and data collected in the design charrette to address the research questions posed.

The above changes are made to reflect a change from a World Café method to a more intimate design charrette. This change was made because of difficulty getting a large enough participation for a World Café to work, ideally 20 or more people. The design charrette will use the same research element but be in a smaller setting, which will allow for more interaction. Finally, the addition of design-based research to emphasize the element of the entrepreneurial learning space and how that was actively formed and influenced by the use of design methods.

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Bender-Salazar, R. Design thinking as an effective method for problem-setting and needfinding for entrepreneurial teams addressing wicked problems. J Innov Entrep 12 , 24 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13731-023-00291-2

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Design Thinking in Education: Perspectives, Opportunities and Challenges

The article discusses design thinking as a process and mindset for collaboratively finding solutions for wicked problems in a variety of educational settings. Through a systematic literature review the article organizes case studies, reports, theoretical reflections, and other scholarly work to enhance our understanding of the purposes, contexts, benefits, limitations, affordances, constraints, effects and outcomes of design thinking in education. Specifically, the review pursues four questions: (1) What are the characteristics of design thinking that make it particularly fruitful for education? (2) How is design thinking applied in different educational settings? (3) What tools, techniques and methods are characteristic for design thinking? (4) What are the limitations or negative effects of design thinking? The goal of the article is to describe the current knowledge base to gain an improved understanding of the role of design thinking in education, to enhance research communication and discussion of best practice approaches and to chart immediate avenues for research and practice.

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Research Article

Design thinking teaching and learning in higher education: Experiences across four universities

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Validation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Division of Practice Advancement and Clinical Education, Center for Innovative Pharmacy Education and Research, UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, United States of America

Roles Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliations Department of Health Behavior, UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, United States of America, Office of the Vice Chancellor for Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Economic Development, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, United States of America

Roles Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Supervision, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Center for Design Thinking, Elon University, Elon, NC, United States of America

Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Department of Art, Elon University, Elon, NC, United States of America

Roles Formal analysis, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Office of the Vice Chancellor for Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Economic Development, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, United States of America

Roles Conceptualization, Methodology, Project administration, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Social Science Research Institute and Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative, Duke University, Durham, NC, United States of America

Roles Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Department of Graphic Design and Industrial Design, College of Design, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, United States of America

• Jacqueline E. McLaughlin, 
• Elizabeth Chen, 
• Danielle Lake, 
• Wen Guo, 
• Emily Rose Skywark, 
• Aria Chernik, 

• Published: March 24, 2022
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265902
• Peer Review
• Reader Comments

A growing body of literature highlights the increasing demand on college graduates to possess the problem finding, problem framing, and problem-solving skills necessary to address complex real-world challenges. Design thinking (DT) is an iterative, human-centered approach to problem solving that synthesizes what is desirable, equitable, technologically feasible, and sustainable. As universities expand efforts to train students with DT mindsets and skills, we must assess faculty and student DT practices and outcomes to better understand DT course experiences. Understanding how DT is taught and experienced within higher education can help schools promote student learning and align their training programs with professional, personal, and civic needs. In this study, surveys were completed by 19 faculty and 196 students from 23 courses at four universities. DT teaching and learning was characterized by three DT practices and five outcomes. Statistically significant differences were found by discipline of study and student type (i.e., graduate vs undergraduate), but not by gender or race/ethnicity. These results can be used to inform the development of classroom-based DT teaching and learning strategies across higher education institutions and disciplines.

Citation: McLaughlin JE, Chen E, Lake D, Guo W, Skywark ER, Chernik A, et al. (2022) Design thinking teaching and learning in higher education: Experiences across four universities. PLoS ONE 17(3): e0265902. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265902

Editor: Alessandro Margherita, University of Salento, ITALY

Received: October 5, 2021; Accepted: March 10, 2022; Published: March 24, 2022

Copyright: © 2022 McLaughlin et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: All data files are available from the Open-ICPSR database ( https://doi.org/10.3886/E151681V1 ).

Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

Universities have faced considerable scrutiny in recent years for their apparent failure to adequately equip students with the complex reasoning and problem solving skills thought to be at the core of higher education [ 1 – 3 ]. A growing body of literature highlights the demand on college graduates to simultaneously master the disciplinary knowledge and mindsets necessary to address complex real-world problems [ 4 – 7 ]. These demands, coupled with ongoing concerns about the quality of higher education, have drawn attention to the need to rethink our focus within higher education [ 8 – 11 ].

Design thinking (DT) is an iterative, creative approach to problem finding, problem framing, and problem solving that synthesizes what is desirable to real stakeholders, equitable, technologically feasible and sustainable [ 12 , 13 ]. Most models of design thinking move through (1) inspiration, empathy and problem definition, (2) ideation, (3) prototyping and testing and (4) implementation stages [ 14 ]. By beginning with the goals and needs of stakeholders and engaging in short iteration cycles, DT supports collaborative solutions that roll out with lasting impact [ 12 , 15 ]. Professional design consultancies often use this method to design innovative products or services. Thus, DT is a tool frequently taught in business, engineering and design schools.

A growing number of disciplines are utilizing and teaching DT to solve complex problems, including public health, healthcare, and the liberal arts [ 12 , 16 – 18 ]. The success of innovations developed with the DT process has led to the uptake of DT to solve various challenges, including customer experience and strategic planning, and to support various sectors, including government agencies, non-profits, educational institutions, and community organizations [ 15 ]. Power dynamics can be challenged at the intersection of design for social innovation; this form of participatory design can help students imagine new ways of thinking to solve complex problems [ 19 ]. The human-centered, real-world solutions generated from the DT process have the potential to provide more systemic solutions to difficult social problems, like climate change, poverty, housing instability, and health promotion.

As DT is adopted by a broader audience, there is an onus on educators to equip students across university disciplines with tools and mindsets valuable for addressing these complex, real-world problems. This includes, but is not limited to “situatedness”, self-reflection, empathetic listening, critical observation and creative collaboration [ 20 – 23 ]. DT pedagogy should (1) frame both the situation and the student’s place within the situation; 2) allow for iterative exploration across space and time alongside diverse stakeholders 3) require the generation of divergent possibilities 4) the prototyping and actionable testing of these possibilities and (5) develop sustainable commitments to cultivated change [ 21 ].

Within higher education, we see new centers, programs, and courses being established outside common DT fields (i.e., business, engineering, design) with a focus on teaching DT mindsets and skills, such as Tulane University’s Phyllis M. Taylor Center for Social Innovation, University of Illinois’ Seibel Center for Design, and Design Thinking and Elon University’s Center for Design Thinking. As universities expand efforts to train students with DT mindsets and skills, we must assess faculty and student DT practices and outcomes to better understand DT course experiences. In one single institution study, for example, researchers found that DT requires time and trust which can be constrained by the imposed deadlines of semester-based projects [ 21 ]. In a single course study, students indicated that their “whirlwind” course promoted almost “exponential” growth [ 22 ]. While survey instruments that measure DT practices and outcomes have been validated across diverse workplace settings [ 24 ], the assessment of DT practices and outcomes across higher education is still new.

DT pedagogy in higher education is incompletely understood, particularly in fields beyond traditional design disciplines (i.e., de-disciplined design). We expanded a single institution study of faculty by Lake and Colleagues [ 21 ] in an effort to assess DT teaching and learning (DT-TL) experiences of undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty at four universities within a southeastern state of the United States. Overall, we set out to answer the following research question: how do faculty and students experience design thinking within higher education courses? To answer this question, we explored the following subquestions:

• What kinds of DT practices are experienced within higher education courses? In what ways do higher education DT practices align with and differ from other industries?
• What kinds of outcomes are experienced within higher education courses? In what ways do outcomes of DT in higher education align with and differ from other industries?
• Is DT a valid construct within higher education teaching and learning?
• What differences exist between groups, such as discipline (business, design & engineering, other), and student type (undergraduate, graduate)?

To answer these research questions, we utilized a mixed methods design that combined faculty and student surveys with semi-structured interviews. This manuscript focuses on the survey data only. Additional qualitative and mixed methods findings are detailed elsewhere [ 25 ].

Survey development

The survey used in this study was adapted from Liedtka and Bahr, who studied DT practices and outcomes among employees of for-profit, non-profit, and government sectors [ 24 ]. Liedtka and Bahr survey items were adapted to align with the context of higher education and additional items were included based on research team experiences. The final survey included 11 items about DT practices, 42 items about outcomes from DT, 11 demographic items (e.g., What is your gender identity ?), and 11 course descriptor items (e.g., Was the term "design thinking" explicitly referenced in the course ?). All DT practices and outcomes items were prompted by the following stem: Please note how often , as a direct result of this specific course , you observed the following [practices/outcomes] and measured on a scale from 1-Never to 5-Almost Always. The research team reviewed the survey for face validity prior to data collection.

Data collection

Students and faculty at four universities in the southeastern United States were recruited for the study during the 2020–2021 academic year. Purposive sampling was used to identify and recruit participants based on their experience with the research focus [ 26 ]. In August 2020, research team members recruited faculty at their home institutions who they knew taught design thinking courses. The email recruitment invited faculty to fill out an initial interest survey about their course, including: course number and title; number of students enrolled in their course; whether their course was open to undergraduate students, graduate students, or both; and number of credit hours associated with the course. The survey also asked faculty for informed consent, contact information, and whether they were interested in participating in an optional semi-structured interview at the end of the semester. Faculty who agreed to participate were also expected to recruit students from their DT course to the study.

Toward the end of the Fall 2020 semester, research team members emailed the faculty survey to consented faculty from their home institutions. Faculty participants were also asked to forward study invitations to students enrolled in their DT courses. The email invitations drafted by our research team included information about the study and a link to the student survey. Students interested in participating in the study provided informed consent in the online survey and were also asked whether they wanted to schedule an optional follow-on interview. Faculty participants received three email reminders regarding study invitations to their students before the end of the Fall 2020 semester.

Data analysis

Survey data were first analyzed using descriptive statistics, with continuous variables reported as mean ± standard deviation (SD) and categorical variables reported as frequency (percent). An exploratory factor analysis was conducted to identify DT teaching and learning (DT-TL) constructs using principal components analysis with varimax rotation and Kaiser rule (ie, eigenvalues < 1.0) for student survey items also included in the Liedka and Bahr study [ 24 ]. Bivariate correlations were calculated using Pearson rho (r p ) and reliabilities were calculated using Cronbach α. Group comparisons were examined using independent t-tests and one-way ANOVA with Bonferroni post hoc analysis. Parametric statistics were considered appropriate due to normality of data and sufficient sample size. Statistical significance was established at α<0.05. All data analysis was performed in SPSS for Windows, v26 (IBM, Armonk, NY).

Ethical considerations, consent

This project was submitted to the UNC Institutional Review Board (#20–2316), Elon University Institutional Review Board (#21–031), Duke Campus Institutional Review Board (#2021–0168), and North Carolina State University (#23502). The submission was approved or determined to be exempt from further review by each review board according to 45 CFR 46.104. Written consent was obtained electronically from all participants at the start of the survey.

Surveys were completed by 19 faculty and 196 students from 23 courses at four universities. The response rate for faculty was 84.2%. Based on the number of students enrolled in each course, our estimated response rate of students was 20.8%. As seen in Table 1 , student participants were predominately white (n = 132, 63.4%), female (n = 126, 64.2%), and majoring in Interdisciplinary Humanities/Social Sciences (n = 105, 53.6%). Eighty-seven percent (n = 170) of students were undergraduate students. Similarly, faculty participants were predominately white (n = 14, 73.7%), female (n = 11, 57.9%), and from Interdisciplinary Humanities/Social Sciences (n = 11, 57.9%).

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265902.t001

When asked about the course, most students (n = 149, 76.0%) and faculty (n = 14, 73.7%) indicated that DT was explicitly taught in the course and that they utilized a real-world project (n = 160 (81.6%) students and 13 (68.4%) faculty). On average, students reported spending 69.69% ± 21.65% of their time working in teams. Most students indicated having none or limited DT expertise prior to the course (n = 146, 74.4%) and moderate or extensive expertise after the course (n = 152, 77.5%). Similarly, the number of faculty reporting none (n = 0, 0%) or limited DT expertise (n = 7, 36.8%) prior to the course dropped to 2 (10.5%) after the course .

Table 2 provides item-level responses for DT practices in the current study and two related DT studies using the same survey items. On a five-point scale from 1-Never to 5-Almost Always, student and faculty participants reported that they used all 11 of the DT practices with moderate to high frequency in the course. Faculty indicated that they most commonly followed a structured process (4.16 ± 0.69), created prototypes of ideas (4.11 ± 0.66), and emphasized active listening among team to find shared meaning (4.11 ± 0.88). Similarly, students most commonly emphasized active listening among team to find shared meanting (4.38 ± 0.77), followed a structured process (4.16 ± 0.75), and generated a diverse set of ideas (4.16 ± 0.85). Faculty and students executed real world experiments least frequently (3.16 ± 1.26 and 2.96 ± 1.34, respectively).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265902.t002

As seen in Table 3 , factor analyses indicated that DT-TL practices can be broadly characterized by three constructs accounting for 59.03% of the variance: Discovery and Ideation (4.04 ± 0.70, 21.67% of variance); Team Formation and Functioning (4.21 ±0.53, 16.02% of variance); and Prototyping and Experimentation (3.44 ±0.94, 21.34% of variance). Survey items loaded into the same three factors as Liedtka and Bahr [ 24 ], with the exception of “Followed a Structured Process,” which loaded to Discovery and Ideation in Liedkta and Bahr (2019) instead of on Team Formation and Functioning in our study. Students who reported that DT was explicitly taught in their course more frequently engaged in Discovery and Ideation than those who indicated DT was not explicitly taught (4.16±0.65 vs 3.42±0.72, p<0.001). Students from Business and Design & Engineering disciplines also more frequently engaged in Discovery and Ideation than those from Interdisciplinary Humanities/Social Sciences (4.21±0.53 vs 3.85±0.69, p = .04; 4.26±0.74 vs 3.85±0.69, p = 0.004 respectively). Undergraduate students reported Prototyping and Experimentation more frequently than graduate students (3.49±0.88 vs 3.07±1.24, p = 0.04). There were no differences in DT practices found by race/ethnicity, or gender.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265902.t003

Table 4 provides factors loadings for outcomes of DT in higher education courses, which are broadly characterized by five constructs accounting for 63.00% of the variance: Implementation Support (4.00 ± 0.70, 18.51%), Psychological Benefits and Motivation (4.15 ± 0.64, 14.13%), Relationships and Trust (3.76 ±0.82, 12.74%), Quality of Solutions Generated (4.21 ± 1.75, 8.98%), and Individual Adaptation and Flexibility (4.13 ± 0.66, 8.64%). Students who reported that DT was explicitly taught more frequently experienced Psychological Benefits and Motivation than those who indicated DT was not explicitly taught in their course (4.21±0.62 vs 3.85±0.87, p = 0.008). There were no differences in outcomes of DT found by race/ethnicity, gender, or student type (ie, undergraduate vs graduate).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265902.t004

As seen in Table 5 , four of the five outcomes factors contained similar items and items that differed. Factor 3, for example, emphasized Relationships in both studies and included the survey item Built new relationships locally that continued after the initial project was completed . However, in the current study, other items in that factor addressed Trust (e.g., Built trust among team members) while other items in the Liedtka and Bahr study addressed Resources (e.g., Expanded access to new resources for individuals and teams .)

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265902.t005

All correlations between the three DT practice and five outcome constructs were statistically significant, ranging from positive, moderate relationships (r p = 0.33) to positive, very strong relationships (r p = 0.76) ( Table 6 ). Cronbach alpha exceeded .6 for seven of the eight DT constructs (0.53 ≤ α ≤ 0.89), suggesting that the items used to create each construct demonstrated acceptable internal consistency.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265902.t006

This study explored faculty and student experiences with DT in courses from various disciplines within four universities. Given the increasing uptake of DT in higher education and across professional fields, this study is timely and critical for understanding the types of DT practices and outcomes experienced, and ways in which DT in these settings might vary among different industries and stakeholders. This work extends research conducted in workplace settings [ 24 ] and compliments studies exploring conceptual frameworks and uses of DT in education [ 27 , 28 ]. Luka, for example, integrated multiple DT models to design an international English course that engaged learners in a four-phased learning cycle of experiencing, reflecting, thinking and acting [ 27 ] while Wrigley and Straker described the Educational Design Ladder, which illustrates the organization of a multidisciplinary DT program [ 28 ].

DT-TL constructs

The results of this study suggest that DT-TL is a valid construct in its own right within the context of higher education. Specifically, the factor analysis revealed 8 distinct factors with high factor loads and the majority of variance accounted for by the analysis, providing support for content specificity. While the 3 DT-TL practice constructs and 5 outcomes constructs are aligned with those described in other contexts [ 24 ], they also embody items differently, which may be attributable to the different processes and contexts associated with student learning in higher education environments. As noted below, the experiences of students and faculty in DT-TL–as indicated by item ratings and construct scores–are likely influenced by interactions with others, constraints of higher education systems (e.g., semester timelines), and disciplinary differences in DT-TL approaches (e.g., business vs humanities). Additional research is needed to understand how and why DT is experienced differently by various stakeholders, and which organizational aspects of these contexts might mediate or support relevant outcomes.

DT-TL practices

Although participants indicated frequently utilizing all DT practices, some were used more than others. Namely, participants indicated engaging in Team Formation and Functioning most frequently, which aligns with previous studies [ 21 , 24 ] and likely reflects DT’s commitment to collaborative project-based problem-solving. In contrast, participants engaged in Protyping and Experimentation least frequently, which also aligns with previous studies in higher education [ 21 ]. We speculate that a lack of prototyping and experimentation could be a byproduct of dominant approaches to classroom learning that deemphasize the need for experiential and experimental practices and the constraints of a semester-long course (i.e., limited time available to iterate through the full DT process). While there are many student benefits to experiential learning [ 29 ], applied learning [ 30 ], process-based learning [ 31 ], and service-learning [ 32 ], they are time-consuming and resource intensive to execute and come with their own limitations and challenges [ 32 ]. We recommend faculty consider generating lower-stakes, quicker-paced student learning opportunities to prototype and test in addition to offering consecutive semester-long courses to ensure students are provided opportunities to develop these skills.

Compared to research in workplace settings [ 24 ], our faculty and students reported a greater frequency of the following front-end practices: followed a structured process , emphasized active listening among team to find shared meaning , and focused problem definition on the user’s perspective rather than the organization’s . On the other hand, some practices associated with the later phase of the DT process were reported at lower frequency by faculty and students in our study compared to participants in the Liedtka and Bahr [ 24 ] study, including: moved multiple ideas into prototyping , got feedback form users and other stakeholders on prototype , and executed real world experiments .

Outcomes of DT-TL

Recent research suggests that DT can empower students to design desirable, feasible, transdisciplinary solutions that promote practical and sustainable outcomes [ 22 , 33 ]. Our results align with Lake and colleagues [ 22 ], who also found that the Quality of Solutions Generated was the most frequently experienced outcome, highlighting the process of engaging students in the DT process as a means for solving complex problems. Not surprisingly, Quality as an outcome had a moderately strong, positive relationship with the practice of Team Formation and Functioning , highlighting the potential benefits of well-designed, high-structured teamwork within courses.

In addition, literature highlights potential cognitive and behavioral benefits of DT, showing positive cognitive and behavioral changes for learning and decision-making [ 28 , 34 ]. Our results align with this literature, suggesting that participants frequently experienced Psychological Benefits and Motivation (e.g., kept people motivated to work on a project to achieve impact ). These findings are crucial for educators seeking evidence that DT teaching practices provide students with skills and mindsets for more inclusively and resiliently addressing complex, real world challenges. Both benefits highlight the importance of establishing relevance between student learning and real-world situations through DT pedagogies.

We posit that our outcomes of DT-TL were similar and different from those of Liedtka and Bahr [ 24 ] due to our different study populations and contexts. We adapted the survey instrument for faculty and students in higher education institutions involved in semester-long classes whereas Liedtka and Bahr [ 24 ] designed it for employees of for-profit, non-profit, and government entities. In our sample, the items on trust ( built trust among team members , built trust between problem-solving teams and other stakeholders ) loaded alongside other relationship items whereas, in Liedtka and Bahr [ 24 ], those items loaded onto its own factor. In academic settings, we often talk about relationship-building and trust together, especially as we discuss community engagement, so this makes sense. In community-based participatory research in particular, relationship-building and trust-building go hand-in-hand [ 35 , 36 ].

We also found that survey items kept people motivated to work on a project to achieve impact , increased a sense of ownership and acceptance of a solution , and increased appreciation for use of data to help drive decisions loaded with the factor on psychological benefits rather than the improved implementation and adaptation factor from Liedtka and Bahr [ 24 ]. These three items mark shifts in individual mindsets so this grouping makes sense. Relatedly, the new factor we proposed is termed “Individual Adaptation and Flexibility” and centers around growth mindset and a willingness to learn and change.

DT-TL group differences

Our findings generally indicate that DT-TL practices and valued outcomes are prevalent across disciplines, providing early insights into the potential merits of DT-TL as an interdisciplinary process that is valued across institutions. Several group comparisons warrant discussion and further research, such as undergraduate students experiencing Prototyping and Experimentation more frequently than graduate students. Although graduate degree programs typically immerse graduate students in research, we posit that the structure and processes within graduate programs–which tend to include close oversight from an expert faculty member in a focused area of study–may limit the creativity and brainstorming opportunities afforded to undergraduates. Alternatively, if graduate students experience Prototyping and Experimentation frequently in their degree program, they may perceive this practice as less frequent in DT coursework compared to undergraduate students who are not engaged in similar research programs. As it relates to race and ethnicity, lack of differences should be interpreted with caution since data were collected from predominantly white institutions and the sample sizes for subgroups were relatively small. However, this finding should be explored further given legitimate concerns that DT practices can further privilege those with privileged identities [ 37 , 38 ].

Future directions

This study marks an important step in understanding DT across institutions and disciplines within higher education and across educational and professional divides. Our findings, coupled with those from K-12 education–where DT is lauded as an integral cognitive process involving creation, collaborative sense-making, reasoning with evidence, experimentation, and evaluation [ 39 – 41 ]–pose several intriguing opportunities for next steps.

Taken together, K-12, higher education, postgraduate, and professional studies contribute to the growing body of research that demonstrates clear DT benefits for students throughout their educational careers and beyond. As education faces ongoing scrutiny about its relevance and value, educators must adopt strategies that enable students to address increasingly complex real-world challenges. In Doctors as Makers , for example, Baruch implores medical curricula to foster creative and critical thinkers that can work through not-knowing, seek compassionate solutions, and explore questions differently within an environment supportive of iterative development [ 42 ]. Understanding the ways in which DT compliments traditional problem-solving frameworks, such as the scientific method and clinical decision making, could be an important step toward optimizing how DT-TL is integrated into our curricula [ 16 ].

With its emphasis on situated and relational problem-solving frameworks, DT-TL also aligns with “problem-posing” pedagogical theory and praxis that is core to various academic disciplines, such as innovation and entrepreneurship. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed , Freire described problem-posing education as a shift from a content-centric, hierarchical educational model to a contextually responsive, co-creative one [ 43 ]. Specifically, DT-TL maps seamlessly onto many of the problem-posing processes taught in innovation and entrepreneurship education, particularly to the discovery process (e.g., problem identification through understanding stakeholder needs ) and the development process (e.g., iterative testing and evaluation of prototypes ). Similarly, other pedagogical models, such as community-based, project-based, and problem-based-learning include components that align closely with DT. Since institutions who make DT a central strategic focus are more likely to bolster and sustain a competitive advantage [ 44 ], more research is needed in higher education to understand the potential prevalence and relationship of DT-TL to pedagogical praxis and other pedagogical models (e.g., problem-based learning) across various disciplines.

Moving forward, we encourage DT-TL educators to extend our work by collecting similar data, developing improved quantitative measures, and implementing longitudinal studies with faculty, students, and project partners. Larger, more representative samples will promote generalizability and enable analyses and sub-analyses examining additional institution- (e.g., university size, Carnegie Classification, institutional control) and faculty-level (e.g., number of years teaching DT, discipline of home department or school, rank or track) factors. Moreover, it would be helpful to know how often students experience DT prior to taking these courses, shortly after taking these courses, and several months or years after taking the courses. This could allow us to better establish causality and attribute changes to the specific courses. Additional research should also be conducted to understand DT-TL outcomes for co-curricular opportunities, such as student organizations and internships to determine what other opportunities in higher education settings can yield similar or better outcomes.

Limitations

With regards to study limitations, we encountered standard challenges with response rates, missing data, and non-response. We recruited faculty and students from four predominantly White higher education institutions in the same state and had a small sample size of faculty at each institution. Data also reflect student and faculty perception at the end of a course–not the long-term outcomes/value of these practices for them or for their project collaborators. That being said, our results are not meant to be generalizable to all DT courses in across higher education settings. Rather, they provide an important first glimpse into DT-TL practices across multiple universities and disciplines.

College students must be equipped with the critical, creative, and collaborative skills needed to address society’s increasingly complex and difficult challenges. As this study further verified, DT helps to generate trust across collaborators, fosters the motivation needed to sustain problem-solving efforts, and increases the quality of solutions generated. This study demonstrated the validity of DT across disciplines and universities, the ways in which DT practices and outcomes are experienced in higher education, and a number of important differences between DT practices within higher education and other sectors. Extending this work to include additional universities and research methodologies is critical for providing insight into enhancing the value of DT pedagogies.

Supporting information

S1 table. outcomes of design thinking coursework..

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265902.s001

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the faculty and students who participated in the study.

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What is design thinking?

Design and conquer: in years past, the word “design” might have conjured images of expensive handbags or glossy coffee table books. Now, your mind might go straight to business. Design and design thinking are buzzing in the business community more than ever. Until now, design has focused largely on how something looks; these days, it’s a dynamic idea used to describe how organizations can adjust their problem-solving approaches to respond to rapidly changing environments—and create maximum impact and shareholder value. Design is a journey and a destination. Design thinking is a core way of starting the journey and arriving at the right destination at the right time.

Simply put, “design thinking is a methodology that we use to solve complex problems , and it’s a way of using systemic reasoning and intuition to explore ideal future states,” says McKinsey partner Jennifer Kilian. Design thinking, she continues, is “the single biggest competitive advantage that you can have, if your customers are loyal to you—because if you solve for their needs first, you’ll always win.”

Get to know and directly engage with senior McKinsey experts on design thinking

Tjark Freundt is a senior partner in McKinsey’s Hamburg office, Tomas Nauclér is a senior partner in the Stockholm office, Daniel Swan is a senior partner in the Stamford office, Warren Teichner is a senior partner in the New York office, Bill Wiseman is a senior partner in the Seattle office, and Kai Vollhardt is a senior partner in the Munich office.

And good design is good business. Kilian’s claim is backed up with data: McKinsey Design’s 2018 Business value of design report  found that the best design performers increase their revenues  and investor returns at nearly twice the rate of their industry competitors. What’s more, over a ten-year period, design-led companies outperformed  the S&P 500 by 219 percent.

As you may have guessed by now, design thinking goes way beyond just the way something looks. And incorporating design thinking into your business is more than just creating a design studio and hiring designers. Design thinking means fundamentally changing how you develop your products, services, and, indeed, your organization itself.

Read on for a deep dive into the theory and practice of design thinking.

Learn more about McKinsey’s Design Practice , and check out McKinsey’s latest Business value of design report here .

How do companies build a design-driven company culture?

There’s more to succeeding in business than developing a great product or service that generates a financial return. Empathy and purpose are core business needs. Design thinking means putting customers, employees, and the planet at the center of problem solving.

McKinsey’s Design Practice has learned that design-led organizations start with design-driven cultures. Here are four steps  to building success through the power of design:

Understand your audience. Design-driven companies go beyond asking what customers and employees want, to truly understanding why they want it. Frequently, design-driven companies will turn to cultural anthropologists and ethnographers to drill down into how their customers use and experience products, including what motivates them and what turns them away.

Makeup retailer Sephora provides an example. When marketing leaders actually watched  shoppers using the Sephora website, they realized customers would frequently go to YouTube to watch videos of people using products before making a purchase. Using this information, the cosmetics retailer developed its own line of demonstration videos, keeping shoppers on the site and therefore more likely to make a purchase.

• Bring design to the executive table. This leader can be a chief design officer, a chief digital officer, or a chief marketing officer. Overall, this executive should be the best advocate for the company’s customers and employees, bringing the point of view of the people, the planet, and the company’s purpose into strategic business decisions. The design lead should also build bridges between multiple functions and stakeholders, bringing various groups into the design iteration process.
• Design in real time. To understand how and why people—both customers and employees—use processes, products, or services, organizations should develop a three-pronged design-thinking model that combines design, business strategy, and technology. This approach allows business leaders to spot trends, cocreate using feedback and data, prototype, validate, and build governance models for ongoing investment.

Act quickly. Good design depends on agility. That means getting a product to users quickly, then iterating based on customer feedback. In a design-driven culture, companies aren’t afraid to release products that aren’t quite perfect. Designers know there is no end to the design process. The power of design, instead, lies in the ability to adopt and adapt as needs change. When designers are embedded within teams, they are uniquely positioned to gather and digest feedback, which can lead to unexpected revelations. Ultimately, this approach creates more impactful and profitable results than following a prescribed path.

Consider Instagram. Having launched an initial product in 2010, Instagram’s founders paid attention to what the most popular features were: image sharing, commenting, and liking. They relaunched with a stripped-down version a few months later, resulting in 100,000 downloads in less than a week and over two million users in under two months —all without any strategic promotion.

Learn more about McKinsey’s Design Practice .

What’s the relationship between user-centered design and design thinking?

Both processes are design led. And they both emphasize listening to and deeply understanding users and continually gathering and implementing feedback to develop, refine, and improve a service.

Where they are different is scale. User-centered design focuses on improving a specific product or service . Design thinking takes a broader view  as a way to creatively address complex problems—whether for a start-up, a large organization, or society as a whole.

User-centered design is great for developing a fantastic product or service. In the past, a company could coast on a superior process or product for years before competitors caught up. But now, as digitization drives more frequent and faster disruptions, users demand a dynamic mix of product and service. Emphasis has shifted firmly away  from features and functions toward purpose, lifestyle, and simplicity of use.

Introducing McKinsey Explainers : Direct answers to complex questions

McKinsey analysis has found that some industries—such as telecommunications, automotive, and consumer product companies— have already made strides toward combining product and service into a unified customer experience . Read on for concrete examples of how companies have applied design thinking to offer innovative—and lucrative—customer experiences.

Learn more about our Operations Practice .

What is the design-thinking process?

McKinsey analysis has shown that the design-thinking approach creates more value  than conventional approaches. The right design at the right price point spurs sustainability and resilience in a demonstrable way—a key driver of growth.

According to McKinsey’s Design  Practice, there are two key steps to the design-thinking process:

• Developing an understanding of behavior and needs that goes beyond what people are doing right now to what they will need in the future and how to deliver that. The best way to develop this understanding is to spend time with people.
• “Concepting,” iterating, and testing . First start with pen and paper, sketching out concepts. Then quickly put these into rough prototypes—with an emphasis on quickly. Get feedback, refine, and test again. As American chemist Linus Pauling said : “The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away.”

What is D4VG versus DTV?

For more than a decade, manufacturers have used a design-to-value (DTV) model  to design and release products that have the features needed to be competitive at a low cost. During this time, DTV efforts were groundbreaking because they were based on data rather than experience. They also reached across functions, in contrast to the typical value-engineering approach.

The principles of DTV have evolved into design for value and growth (D4VG), a new way of creating products that provide exceptional customer experiences while driving both value and growth. Done right, D4VG efforts generate products with the features, form, and functionality that turn users into loyal fans .

D4VG products can cost more to build, but they can ultimately raise margins by delivering on a clear understanding of a product’s core brand attributes, insights into people’s motivations, and design thinking.

Learn more about our Consumer Packaged Goods Practice .

What is design for sustainability?

As consumers, companies, and regulators shift toward increased sustainability, design processes are coming under even more scrutiny. The challenge is that carbon-efficient production processes tend to be more complex and can require more carbon-intensive materials. The good news is that an increased focus on design for sustainability (DFS), especially at the research and development stage , can help mitigate some of these inefficiencies and ultimately create even more sustainable products.

For example, the transition from internal-combustion engines to electric-propulsion vehicles  has highlighted emissions-intensive automobile production processes. One study found that around 20 percent of the carbon generated by a diesel vehicle comes from its production . If the vehicle ran on only renewable energy, production emissions would account for 85 percent of the total. With more sustainable design, electric-vehicle (EV) manufacturers stand to reduce the lifetime emissions of their products significantly.

To achieve design for sustainability at scale, companies can address three interrelated elements at the R&D stage:

• rethinking the way their products use resources, adapting them to changing regulations, adopting principles of circularity, and making use of customer insights
• understanding and tracking emissions and cost impact of design decisions in support of sustainability goals
• fostering the right mindsets and capabilities to integrate sustainability into every product and design decision

What is ‘skinny design’?

Skinny design is a less theoretical aspect of design thinking. It’s a method whereby consumer goods companies reassess the overall box size of products by reducing the total cubic volume of the package. According to McKinsey analysis , this can improve overall business performance in the following ways:

• Top-line growth of 4 to 5 percent through improvements in shelf and warehouse holding power. The ability to fit more stock into warehouses ultimately translates to growth.
• Bottom-line growth of more than 10 percent . Packing more product into containers and trucks creates the largest savings. Other cost reductions can come from designing packaging to minimize the labor required and facilitate automation.
• Sustainability improvements associated with reductions in carbon emissions through less diesel fuel burned per unit. Material choices can also confer improvements to the overall footprint.

Read more about skinny design and how it can help maximize the volume of consumer products that make it onto shelves.

Learn more about McKinsey’s Operations Practice .

How can a company become a top design performer?

The average person’s standard for design is higher than ever. Good design is no longer just a nice-to-have for a company. Customers now have extremely high expectations for design, whether it’s customer service, instant access to information, or clever products that are also aesthetically relevant in the current culture.

McKinsey tracked the design practices of 300 publicly listed companies  over a five-year period in multiple countries. Advanced regression analysis of more than two million pieces of financial data and more than 100,000 design actions revealed 12 actions most correlated to improved financial performance. These were then clustered into the following four themes:

• Analytical leadership . For the best financial performers, design is a top management issue , and design performance is assessed with the same rigor these companies use to approach revenue and cost. The companies with the top financial returns have combined design and business leadership through bold, design-centric visions. These include a commitment to maintain a baseline level of customer understanding among all executives. The CEO of one of the world’s largest banks, for example, spends one day a month with the bank’s clients and encourages all members of the company’s C-suite to do the same.
• Cross-functional talent . Top-performing companies make user-centric design everyone’s responsibility, not a siloed function. Companies whose designers are embedded within cross-functional teams have better overall business performance . Further, the alignment of design metrics with functional business metrics (such as financial performance, user adoption rates, and satisfaction results) is also correlated to better business performance.
• Design with people, not for people . Design flourishes best, according to our research, in environments that encourage learning, testing, and iterating with users . These practices increase the odds of creating breakthrough products and services, while at the same time reducing the risk of costly missteps.
• User experience (UX) . Top-quartile companies embrace the full user experience  by taking a broad-based view of where design can make a difference. Design approaches like mapping customer journeys can lead to more inclusive and sustainable solutions.

What are some real-world examples of how design thinking can improve efficiency and user experience?

Understanding the theory of design thinking is one thing. Seeing it work in practice is something else. Here are some examples of how elegant design created value for customers, a company, and shareholders:

• Stockholm’s international airport, Arlanda, used design thinking to address its air-traffic-control problem. The goal was to create a system that would make air traffic safer and more effective. By understanding the tasks and challenges of the air-traffic controllers, then collaboratively working on prototypes and iterating based on feedback, a working group was able to design a new departure-sequencing tool  that helped air-traffic controllers do their jobs better. The new system greatly reduced the amount of time planes spent between leaving the terminal and being in the air, which in turn helped reduce fuel consumption.
• When Tesla creates its electric vehicles , the company closely considers not only aesthetics but also the overall driving experience .
• The consumer electronics industry has a long history of dramatic evolutions lead by design thinking. Since Apple debuted the iPhone in 2007, for example, each new generation has seen additional features, new customers, and lower costs—all driven by design-led value creation .

Learn more about our Consumer Packaged Goods  and Sustainability  Practices.

For a more in-depth exploration of these topics, see McKinsey’s Agile Organizations collection. Learn more about our Design Practice —and check out design-thinking-related job opportunities if you’re interested in working at McKinsey.

Articles referenced:

• “ Skinny design: Smaller is better ,” April 26, 2022, Dave Fedewa , Daniel Swan , Warren Teichner , and Bill Wiseman
• “ Product sustainability: Back to the drawing board ,” February 7, 2022, Stephan Fuchs, Stephan Mohr , Malin Orebäck, and Jan Rys
• “ Emerging from COVID-19: Australians embrace their values ,” May 11, 2020, Lloyd Colling, Rod Farmer , Jenny Child, Dan Feldman, and Jean-Baptiste Coumau
• “ The business value of design ,” McKinsey Quarterly , October 25, 2018, Benedict Sheppard , Hugo Sarrazin, Garen Kouyoumjian, and Fabricio Dore
• “ More than a feeling: Ten design practices to deliver business value ,” December 8, 2017, Benedict Sheppard , John Edson, and Garen Kouyoumjian
• “ Creating value through sustainable design ,” July 25, 2017, Sara Andersson, David Crafoord, and Tomas Nauclér
• “ The expanding role of design in creating an end-to-end customer experience ,” June 6, 2017, Raffaele Breschi, Tjark Freundt , Malin Orebäck, and Kai Vollhardt
• “ Design for value and growth in a new world ,” April 13, 2017, Ankur Agrawal , Mark Dziersk, Dave Subburaj, and Kieran West
• “ The power of design thinking ,” March 1, 2016, Jennifer Kilian , Hugo Sarrazin, and Barr Seitz
• “ Building a design-driven culture ,” September 1, 2015, Jennifer Kilian , Hugo Sarrazin, and Hyo Yeon

Want to know more about design thinking?

Related articles.

Skinny design: Smaller is better

The business value of design

More than a feeling: Ten design practices to deliver business value

Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University

Organizations Jul 1, 2020

How to do design thinking better, experts from kellogg and ideo explain the psychology behind this creative approach to problem solving..

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Leigh Thompson

David Schonthal

Christine Rösch

Design thinking has become tremendously popular. Businesses in every industry talk about ideating and iterating, a linguistic nod to the creative process made famous by design and consulting firm IDEO.

The design-thinking approach loosely follows a four-step process that involves observing a problem, reframing it, designing solutions, and testing them—all with the end goal of improving how humans experience a product or service.

But being familiar with this process and actually putting it into practice are very different things. “Sometimes people think they’re doing design thinking, but it’s really not,” says Leigh Thompson , a professor of management and organizations at Kellogg. “When you get it right, it’s really powerful.” Rather than blindly following the approach, she says, it can be helpful to understand the psychology behind it. And critically, social psychology also offers insight into specific ways to get more out of each step in the process. “The science is what explains the magic,” says David Schonthal , a clinical professor of strategy at Kellogg and director of the Levy Institute for Entrepreneurial Practice. He and Thompson recently published a paper on this topic and teach a course together on using creativity as a business tool. So why does design thinking work? And how can businesses effectively apply these principles themselves? Thompson and Schonthal explain.

1. Look for the gorilla.

The first step in the design-thinking process is to observe a situation and notice what is actually happening. This sounds straightforward. But Thompson points out that we are actually really bad at observing a situation and noticing what is actually happening—despite having a lot of confidence in our own abilities. Twenty years ago, researchers Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons conducted a now-famous experiment in psychology . They showed participants a video of people playing basketball and instructed them to count how many times the players on a particular team passed the ball.

About 45 seconds into the video, a woman wearing a full-body gorilla costume walked across the screen. But a large number of participants didn’t notice this oddity at all. They were too focused on counting passes—an illustration of a phenomenon psychologists call inattentional blindness.

“Sometimes people think they’re doing design thinking, but it’s really not.” — Leigh Thompson

“People are very limited in what they’re able to perceive in their visual world when they’re focused on one thing,” Thompson explains. “Coupled with the fact that people believe themselves to be in the 99th percentile with regard to their perceptive abilities, that’s a dangerous combination.” So how can we get better at noticing things? As Thompson and Schonthal explain it, noticing is a cognitive strategy that can be broken down into three parts. First, observers must identify and abandon their cognitive scripts—the preexisting narratives that guide their understanding of situations. Next, they must learn inductively, making inferences based on limited information. And finally, they must find patterns in complex stimuli. This is why design thinkers must get out from behind their desks and observe a problem “in the wild,” as Schonthal puts it. Relying on people to self-report their habits is not enough. He points to an example of when a pharmaceutical company tasked IDEO with investigating its hypothesis that the packaging of its arthritis medication was too difficult for patients to open.

So the IDEO design team interviewed and—crucially—also observed patients who used the medication going about their daily routine. One elderly woman with arthritis said she had no trouble opening the packaging. But when the IDEO team asked her to actually show them how she did it, she took her pill bottle out of a drawer and put it on a meat slicer, then used the meat slicer to cut open the top of the container, because twisting the cap off herself was too painful. “One of the biggest takeaways from this example is to never take what people say they do at face value,” Schonthal says. “Actually seeing with your own eyes what is going on can immediately spark identification of unmet needs or better ways of solving a problem.”

2. Ask a question no one else is asking.

The second step in design thinking is framing and reframing. In this step, design thinkers look at a problem from multiple vantage points, trying on different lenses to determine the best approach to finding a solution. To better understand the importance of this process, Thompson and Schonthal highlight the work of economist Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize for his research on cognitive framing. Kahneman showed that people make very different decisions depending on how those decisions are framed: specifically, whether they are focused on the possibility of gaining something—what design thinkers call a “promotion frame”—or by the possibility of not losing something—a “prevention frame.” Understanding a customer’s motivations for using a product or service are important for developing something that works for the customer. Take, for example, a project IDEO conducted on diabetes management for a healthcare company. IDEO’s team found that more traditional goals like losing weight and controlling blood sugar in order to avoid health problems (which activate a prevention frame) weren’t successful in actually motivating patients to make healthy changes. But setting social and emotional goals—like gaining the ability to walk a 5K or dance with your daughter at her wedding—activated a promotion mindset and actually motivated people to change.

“Prototypes are embodied questions. It’s not building something that you hope people will fall in love with as the final product.” — David Schonthal

Armed with this knowledge and new frame, IDEO was able to help the company move beyond creating a new medical device. Rather, IDEO helped them build a customizable app that instead solved for a different challenge: How do we help people with diabetes live their best lives? “With any really well-thought-out product, chances are the designers started by asking a different question or solving a different problem than all of their competitors,” Schonthal says.

3. Approach brainstorming with rigor.

The third step is to imagine and design—what Thompson and Schonthal describe as “the heart and soul” of the design-thinking process. Which is why, even more than the other steps, it’s crucial to understand the science behind successful ideation. At its core, brainstorming is about focusing on quantity over quality, building on one another’s ideas, and encouraging the most outlandish suggestions, all while avoiding criticism. And studies show that these principles, devised in the 1950s, remain effective today. Yet people regularly violate those rules, other studies show. They suggest too few ideas or criticize individuals rather than ideas. And criticizing the person who comes up with an idea can hurt further ideation. Thankfully, science also suggests some best practices. First, consider a smaller ideation group. As the number of people on a team increases, the productivity of ideas per person decreases . That’s because when people work in groups—like the traditional brainstorming session—they’re often inhibited by social demands like being polite and waiting their turn. Or consider using the brainwriting technique . In a brainwriting session, participants spend a set amount of time writing down as many ideas as they can, before a facilitator collects them all. This allows individuals to generate lots of ideas freely and without concern for criticism. One widely cited meta-analysis shows that brainwriting groups generated about two and a half times the volume of ideas generated by brainstorming groups—and a significantly greater percentage of their ideas were judged to be of higher quality.

“Most people don’t want to believe that group brainstorming is inferior to individual ideation, at least for a finite amount of time, because we feel good in groups. Groups are stimulating. They make us feel all warm and fuzzy,” Thompson explains. “But it isn’t necessarily the best way to have a creativity and innovation meeting.”

4. Fail faster. Learn sooner.

When it comes to actually building and testing solutions—the final step in design thinking—a successful designer must understand that failure is simply an expected part of the process and will ultimately make the work better. “The idea is to fail faster and learn sooner,” Thompson says. One key to this is ensuring that your group has a growth mindset . The term refers to the belief that ability and skill come through practice, not through innate talent. With this frame, failure becomes a way to learn, not proof of incompetency. For example, one study showed that participants who were prompted to have a growth mindset accomplished a complex task better and more enjoyably than participants who were prompted to have a “fixed” mindset. One way to foster a growth mindset, Thompson and Schonthal explain, is to use “How Might We” (HMW) questions that get design thinkers to push past constraints. “Groups that adopt a HMW focus are more likely to persist and be creative than those who don’t think about possibilities,” they write. Another way to reinforce the idea that you are simply experimenting—and thus that you are open to honest feedback—is to use low-fidelity materials to create prototypes. For example, to test different ways to redesign the long-haul flight experience, IDEO used materials found around the office. For one concept, the designers literally stacked office chairs to test the idea of “bunkbeds” on a plane. Airline executives who tried to lie in the chairs quickly rejected the concept—and IDEO moved on to the next idea. “Prototypes are embodied questions,” Schonthal says. “It’s not building something that you hope people will fall in love with as the final product.” At the end of the process, designers ultimately want to create something that people do fall in love with. A successful final product often seems intuitive—as if the idea sprang fully formed from the designer’s brain. But as Schonthal and Thompson’s research shows, a science-backed approach is critical to innovation. “Once you see a beautiful design, it seems obvious,” Thompson says. “But it’s really, really hard to figure out, ‘Now how does this get created to begin with?’”

J. Jay Gerber Professor of Dispute Resolution & Organizations; Professor of Management & Organizations; Director of Kellogg Team and Group Research Center; Professor of Psychology, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences (Courtesy)

Clinical Professor of Strategy; Director of Entrepreneurship Programs at Kellogg; Faculty Director of the Zell Fellows Program; Director of the Levy Institute for Entrepreneurial Practice

About the Writer Jennifer Fisher is a freelance writer based in Chicago.

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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 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 .

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

Stage 5 in the Design Thinking Process: Test

What Are Wicked Problems and How Might We Solve Them?

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Design Thinking 101

July 31, 2016 2016-07-31

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In This Article:

Definition of design thinking, why — the advantage, flexibility — adapt to fit your needs, scalability — think bigger, history of design thinking.

Design thinking is an ideology supported by an accompanying process . A complete definition requires an understanding of both.

Definition: The design thinking ideology asserts that a hands-on, user-centric approach to problem solving can lead to innovation, and innovation can lead to differentiation and a competitive advantage. This hands-on, user-centric approach is defined by the design thinking process and comprises 6 distinct phases, as defined and illustrated below.

The design-thinking framework follows an overall flow of 1) understand, 2) explore, and 3) materialize. Within these larger buckets fall the 6 phases: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test, and implement.

Conduct research in order to develop knowledge about what your users do, say, think, and feel .

Imagine your goal is to improve an onboarding experience for new users. In this phase, you talk to a range of actual users.  Directly observe what they do, how they think, and what they want, asking yourself things like ‘what motivates or discourages users?’ or ‘where do they experience frustration?’ The goal is to gather enough observations that you can truly begin to empathize with your users and their perspectives.

Combine all your research and observe where your users’ problems exist. While pinpointing your users’ needs , begin to highlight opportunities for innovation.

Consider the onboarding example again. In the define phase, use the data gathered in the empathize phase to glean insights. Organize all your observations and draw parallels across your users’ current experiences. Is there a common pain point across many different users? Identify unmet user needs.

Brainstorm a range of crazy, creative ideas that address the unmet user needs identified in the define phase. Give yourself and your team total freedom; no idea is too farfetched and quantity supersedes quality.

At this phase, bring your team members together and sketch out many different ideas. Then, have them share ideas with one another, mixing and remixing, building on others' ideas.

Build real, tactile representations for a subset of your ideas. The goal of this phase is to understand what components of your ideas work, and which do not. In this phase you begin to weigh the impact vs. feasibility of your ideas through feedback on your prototypes.

Make your ideas tactile. If it is a new landing page, draw out a wireframe and get feedback internally.  Change it based on feedback, then prototype it again in quick and dirty code. Then, share it with another group of people.

Return to your users for feedback. Ask yourself ‘Does this solution meet users’ needs?’ and ‘Has it improved how they feel, think, or do their tasks?’

Put your prototype in front of real customers and verify that it achieves your goals. Has the users’ perspective during onboarding improved? Does the new landing page increase time or money spent on your site? As you are executing your vision, continue to test along the way.

Put the vision into effect. Ensure that your solution is materialized and touches the lives of your end users.

This is the most important part of design thinking, but it is the one most often forgotten. As Don Norman preaches, “we need more design doing.” Design thinking does not free you from the actual design doing. It’s not magic.

“There’s no such thing as a creative type. As if creativity is a verb, a very time-consuming verb. It’s about taking an idea in your head, and transforming that idea into something real. And that’s always going to be a long and difficult process. If you’re doing it right, it’s going to feel like work.”  - Milton Glaser

As impactful as design thinking can be for an organization, it only leads to true innovation if the vision is executed. The success of design thinking lies in its ability to transform an aspect of the end user’s life. This sixth step — implement — is crucial.

Why should we introduce a new way to think about product development? There are numerous reasons to engage in design thinking, enough to merit a standalone article, but in summary, design thinking achieves all these advantages at the same time.

Design thinking:

• Is a user-centered process that starts with user data, creates design artifacts that address real and not imaginary user needs, and then tests those artifacts with real users
• Leverages collective expertise and establishes a shared language, as well as buy-in amongst your team
• Encourages innovation by exploring multiple avenues for the same problem

Jakob Nielsen says “ a wonderful interface solving the wrong problem will fail ." Design thinking unfetters creative energies and focuses them on the right problem. 

The above process will feel abstruse at first. Don’t think of it as if it were a prescribed step-by-step recipe for success. Instead, use it as scaffolding to support you when and where you need it. Be a master chef, not a line cook: take the recipe as a framework, then tweak as needed.

Each phase is meant to be iterative and cyclical as opposed to a strictly linear process, as depicted below. It is common to return to the two understanding phases, empathize and define, after an initial prototype is built and tested. This is because it is not until wireframes are prototyped and your ideas come to life that you are able to get a true representation of your design. For the first time, you can accurately assess if your solution really works. At this point, looping back to your user research is immensely helpful. What else do you need to know about the user in order to make decisions or to prioritize development order? What new use cases have arisen from the prototype that you didn’t previously research?

You can also repeat phases. It’s often necessary to do an exercise within a phase multiple times in order to arrive at the outcome needed to move forward. For example, in the define phase, different team members will have different backgrounds and expertise, and thus different approaches to problem identification. It’s common to spend an extended amount of time in the define phase, aligning a team to the same focus. Repetition is necessary if there are obstacles in establishing buy-in. The outcome of each phase should be sound enough to serve as a guiding principle throughout the rest of the process and to ensure that you never stray too far from your focus.

The packaged and accessible nature of design thinking makes it scalable. Organizations previously unable to shift their way of thinking now have a guide that can be comprehended regardless of expertise, mitigating the range of design talent while increasing the probability of success. This doesn’t just apply to traditional “designery” topics such as product design, but to a variety of societal, environmental, and economical issues. Design thinking is simple enough to be practiced at a range of scopes; even tough, undefined problems that might otherwise be overwhelming. While it can be applied over time to improve small functions like search, it can also be applied to design disruptive and transformative solutions, such as restructuring the career ladder for teachers in order to retain more talent. 

It is a common misconception that design thinking is new. Design has been practiced for ages : monuments, bridges, automobiles, subway systems are all end-products of design processes. Throughout history, good designers have applied a human-centric creative process to build meaningful and effective solutions.

In the early 1900's husband and wife designers Charles and Ray Eames practiced “learning by doing,” exploring a range of needs and constraints before designing their Eames chairs, which continue to be in production even now, seventy years later. 1960's dressmaker Jean Muir was well known for her “common sense” approach to clothing design, placing as much emphasis on how her clothes felt to wear as they looked to others. These designers were innovators of their time. Their approaches can be viewed as early examples of design thinking — as they each developed a deep understanding of their users’ lives and unmet needs. Milton Glaser, the designer behind the famous I ♥ NY logo, describes this notion well: “We’re always looking, but we never really see…it’s the act of attention that allows you to really grasp something, to become fully conscious of it.”

Despite these (and other) early examples of human-centric products, design has historically been an afterthought in the business world, applied only to touch up a product’s aesthetics. This topical design application has resulted in corporations creating solutions which fail to meet their customers’ real needs. Consequently, some of these companies moved their designers from the end of the product-development process, where their contribution is limited, to the beginning. Their human-centric design approach proved to be a differentiator: those companies that used it have reaped the financial benefits of creating products shaped by human needs.

In order for this approach to be adopted across large organizations, it needed to be standardized. Cue design thinking, a formalized framework of applying the creative design process to traditional business problems.

The specific term "design thinking" was coined in the 1990's by David Kelley and Tim Brown of IDEO, with Roger Martin, and encapsulated methods and ideas that have been brewing for years into a single unified concept.

We live in an era of experiences , be they services or products, and we’ve come to have high expectations for these experiences. They are becoming more complex in nature as information and technology continues to evolve. With each evolution comes a new set of unmet needs. While design thinking is simply an approach to problem solving, it increases the probability of success and breakthrough innovation.

Learn more about design thinking in the full-day course Generating Big Ideas with Design Thinking .

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Peer Reviewed

Design thinking in health care, myra altman.

1 Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri

2 VA Palo Alto Health Care System, Menlo Park, California

3 Stanford University, Stanford, California

Terry T.K. Huang

4 Center for Systems and Community Design, Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy, City University of New York, New York, New York

Jessica Y. Breland

Introduction.

Applying Design Thinking to health care could enhance innovation, efficiency, and effectiveness by increasing focus on patient and provider needs. The objective of this review is to determine how Design Thinking has been used in health care and whether it is effective.

We searched online databases (PubMed, Medline, Web of Science, CINAHL, and PyscINFO) for articles published through March 31, 2017, using the terms “health,” “health care,” or “healthcare”; and “Design Thinking,” “design science,” “design approach,” “user centered design,” or “human centered design.” Studies were included if they were written in English, were published in a peer-reviewed journal, provided outcome data on a health-related intervention, and used Design Thinking in intervention development, implementation, or both. Data were collected on target users, health conditions, intervention, Design Thinking approach, study design or sample, and health outcomes. Studies were categorized as being successful (all outcomes improved), having mixed success (at least one outcome improved), or being not successful (no outcomes improved).

Twenty-four studies using Design Thinking were included across 19 physical health conditions, 2 mental health conditions, and 3 systems processes. Twelve were successful, 11 reported mixed success, and one was not successful. All 4 studies comparing Design Thinking interventions to traditional interventions showed greater satisfaction, usability, and effectiveness.

Design Thinking is being used in varied health care settings and conditions, although application varies. Design Thinking may result in usable, acceptable, and effective interventions, although there are methodological and quality limitations. More research is needed, including studies to isolate critical components of Design Thinking and compare Design Thinking–based interventions with traditionally developed interventions.

Health care systems require continuous innovation to meet the needs of patients and providers ( 1 , 2 ). However, these stakeholders are not always considered when new interventions or system processes are designed, which results in products that remain unused because they do not account for human context, need, or fallibility ( 3 , 4 ). This approach also likely contributes to the decades-long gaps between intervention development and implementation ( 5 ). Design Thinking offers a way to close that gap by helping investigators incorporate user needs and feedback throughout the development process.

Design Thinking is an approach that prioritizes developing empathy for users, working in collaborative multidisciplinary teams, and using “action-oriented rapid prototyping” of solutions ( 2 , 6 ). It is an iterative process, with innovation emerging only after cycling through several rounds of ideation, prototyping, and testing, which distinguishes it from the traditional linear and often top-down approach to health intervention design ( Figure 1 ) ( 1 , 2 , 4 ). Design Thinking has been used across sectors to solve complex problems, including the redesign of an elementary school curriculum to enhance student engagement ( 7 ), and in domains such as aviation ( 8 ) that, like health care, have high levels of risk. Design Thinking is similar to both “user-centered design” and “human-centered design,” which are both referred to as “Design Thinking” in this article.

Design Thinking process, stages of design thinking and examples of exercises used and questions asked in each stage, systematic review on Design Thinking in health care, search results through March 31, 2017.

There is much enthusiasm for the use of Design Thinking in health care, from intervention development to large-scale organizational and systems changes ( 9 ). However, health care settings present different challenges than do other domains, so it is important to consider these challenges in assessing whether Design Thinking provides added benefit over traditional approaches. With this in mind, the purpose of this review was to answer the questions, “How has Design Thinking been used to design interventions in health care settings, and have these interventions been effective?”

Data sources

Studies published through March 31, 2017, were identified through searches of online databases (PubMed, Medline, Web of Science, CINAHL, and PyscINFO) using the following search terms: “health,” “health care,” or “healthcare”; and “Design Thinking,” “design science,” “design approach,” “user centered design,” or “human centered design.” Additional articles were included if they were referenced as original research articles in existing articles. To provide an overview of the range of uses of the Design Thinking approach, we did not limit our review to specific populations or conditions and included articles addressing multiple health promotion and disease prevention topics. Given the search terms, the likely target populations for inclusion were patients and health care professionals and the settings in which they work or seek care.

Study selection

We reviewed selected articles using PRISMA guidelines ( 10 , 11 ) and entered citations into a reference manager, which removed duplicates. To be eligible for inclusion, studies had to be written in English, be published in a peer-reviewed journal, provide outcome data on a health-related intervention, and use Design Thinking in intervention development, implementation or both.

There are multiple definitions of Design Thinking, so we focused on the key principles common to most descriptions of the approach; thus, the list of Design Thinking approaches is not exhaustive. Studies were considered to use Design Thinking if they 1) described user/needs assessment, 2) involved iterative prototyping/testing of the intervention with user feedback, and 3) tested the intervention with target users ( 2 , 4 ). The user/needs assessment could include contextual observation of users in the setting in which they would interact with the innovation, interviews, narrative accounts, and documentation from users, gathering extreme user/outlier stories or a review of existing literature and work ( 2 , 6 ). Prototyping included activities such as creating a series of low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes of the potential innovation and refining it multiple times through iterative cycles of feedback from end users, stakeholders, and experts. Testing the intervention with target users included implementing and testing the innovation while continuing to refine it on the basis of user feedback and data ( 1 , 2 , 4 ). Design Thinking is also similar to other techniques, such as plan-do-study-act cycles and formative evaluations. We considered the emphasis on empathizing with the user and the use of low-fidelity prototyping to be key distinguishing features of Design Thinking, so only articles that explicitly indicate their use of these approaches were included. Initial screening was completed for all selected abstracts, and a second round of screening was completed on eligible full-text articles.

Data abstraction

Data were collected on target users, health conditions, objective of the intervention, details on the Design Thinking process, study design and sample, and reported health outcomes. If information was not reported in the article, we contacted the study authors. Studies were also evaluated to determine whether the intervention improved all targeted outcomes (successful), at least one targeted outcome (mixed success), or no targeted outcomes (not successful). Data quality was assessed using the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute Study Quality Assessment Tools ( 12 ).

Study extraction

Figure 2 presents study flow based on the PRISMA study guidelines ( 10 , 11 ). After the initial search, the authors separately screened all abstracts based on the eligibility criteria. One author reviewed all full-text articles (N = 297), and a second author reviewed roughly 15% as a reliability check. Agreement on inclusion/exclusion was more than 80%. Any abstracts or articles for which there was disagreement or uncertainty were reviewed by 2 authors and discussed until consensus was reached. A total of 26 papers representing 24 interventions were included in the analysis. Two authors reviewed all included studies.

PRISMA 2009 flow diagram, systematic review on Design Thinking in health care, search results through March 31, 2017.

Study characteristics

A summary of all included studies is provided in ( Table 1 ). Eleven studies were successful ( 13 – 25 ), 12 reported mixed success ( 26 – 37 ), and one reported no success ( 38 ) ( Table 1 and Table 2 ). Sample sizes of included studies ranged from 12 to 291, but most studies were small; 14 studies had fewer than 40 participants. Eleven (45.8%) used a control group ( 15 , 17 , 18 , 24 , 26 – 29 , 31 , 33 , 35 , 38 , 42 ), and 4 (16.6%) compared a design-thinking intervention to an intervention designed using traditional methods ( 17 , 18 , 24 , 26 , 35 ). Two of the studies included were “good” quality, 13 were “fair” quality, and 9 were “poor” quality. All studies used Design Thinking methodology in intervention development, and 3 also used it for implementation ( 16 , 20 , 25 , 43 )

Abbreviation: DNR, did not report; NA, not applicable; RCT, randomized control trial.

a If 2 studies are cited, the earlier article is the intervention development methodology and the later article is the evaluation study.

Abbreviations: App, application; CI, confidence interval; COPD, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease; GvHD, graft vs host disease; HBA1c, hemoglobin A1c; HCAHPS, Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems; HRQOL, health-related quality of life; IGID, integrated graphical information display; IUD, intrauterine device; NKE, nurse knowledge exchange plus; PTSD, posttraumatic stress disorder; SD, standard deviation.

a All results significant at P < .05.

The 24 included interventions targeted a range of conditions, including 19 related to physical health (17 unique conditions), 2 related to mental health, and 3 related to systems processes. Approximately two-thirds of the interventions were mobile telephone–based or tablet-based.

Summary of findings by target user

Patient-facing interventions (n = 11). Five interventions were successful: 4 with a pre/post design ( 13 , 19 , 22 , 23 , 44 ) and 1 pilot randomized control trial (RCT) ( 15 ). Five reported mixed success, including one pre/post design ( 31 ), one pilot RCT ( 29 ), one RCT ( 28 ), one cohort study ( 47 ), and one unblinded, randomized crossover design ( 33 ). One, a pilot RCT, was not successful ( 46 ).

Provider-facing interventions (n = 9). Six were successful, including 3 studies using a pre/post design ( 16 , 20 , 25 ), one field experiment ( 14 ), one using a quasi-experimental crossover design ( 24 ), and one cross-sectional study ( 21 ). Three had mixed success, including 2 studies with an experimental crossover design ( 17 , 18 , 26 ) and one with primarily a pre/post design, one portion of which was a randomized crossover design ( 35 ).

Patient-facing and provider-facing interventions (n = 2). Both reported mixed success and were pre/post designs ( 30 , 34 , 45 ).

Caregiver-facing or family-facing interventions (n = 2). Both reported mixed success, one in a pilot RCT ( 27 , 39 ) and one using a pre/post design ( 32 ).

Summary of Randomized-Controlled Trials (K = 5). Of the RCTs and pilot RCTs reviewed, one demonstrated success on all outcomes ( 15 , 40 ), 3 showed mixed success ( 27 – 29 , 39 , 41 ), and one reported no enduring significant results ( 38 , 46 ).

Summary of studies directly testing Design Thinking methodology

Four studies directly compared interventions created with Design Thinking to interventions created with traditional methods. In one study with a within-sample experimental crossover design ( 26 ), a Design Thinking–based graphical information display to improve nurses’ ability to detect changes in patients’ physiological states in an intensive care unit (ICU) was compared with a conventional display in commercial, electronic ICU charting systems. The Design Thinking intervention resulted in improved detection of changes in patient states and greater ease of use, usefulness, satisfaction, and support of understanding, but no differences in workload for nurses ( 26 ). Another study using an experimental crossover design compared 2 computer interfaces designed to display drug interaction alerts, one developed using Design Thinking and one using traditional software ( 17 , 18 ). Whereas the design of the traditional software was not described, the traditional display included only basic text information. In this study, users (ICU nurses) were more efficient and effective, and reported higher satisfaction with the Design Thinking interface. Another study using a quasi-experimental crossover design used Design Thinking to develop an application to guide clinicians in detecting and scoring the severity of graft versus host disease (GvHD) ( 24 ). When compared with paper-based NIH guidelines, users of the application (app) signficantly improved diagnostic and scoring accuracy. A final study compared a Design Thinking–based app that provided nurses with information about antibiotic use with regular information sources (which were not described) ( 35 ). In the randomized portion of this study, nurses using the app found information on antibiotic use more quickly; however, the app did not enhance their ability to improve antibiotic-related behaviors. (Only 7 participants were included in the randomized portion of the study.) Whereas the development of the control intervention was not fully described in these papers, based on the limited descriptions given, it is likely that it did not include key elements of Design Thinking such as user feedback and prototyping.

The 24 interventions summarized in this review provide an overview of the breadth of Design Thinking's applicability in health care and demonstrate that it is feasible and applicable to multiple health care domains. It has been applied across a range of diverse patient populations and conditions, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease ( 28 , 34 ), diabetes ( 34 , 47 ), caregiver stress ( 27 ), and posttraumatic stress disorder ( 22 ). It also has been applied to systems process changes, such as nursing handoffs ( 16 ) and drug–drug interaction alerts ( 17 , 18 ). Results also demonstrate that, although it is often applied to electronic interventions, Design Thinking is feasible for use in other modalities (eg, on paper, in person).

Initial results of the interventions included in this review are promising; all but one demonstrated positive effects on at least one identified outcome, and half showed positive effects on all measured outcomes. In addition, in the studies that directly compared the Design Thinking intervention with a traditional intervention, the Design Thinking intervention generally demonstrated improved outcomes and higher usability and satisfaction.

However, none of these studies were RCTs with large sample sizes. Design Thinking interventions have been tested primarily in pre/post designs or pilot RCTs with small samples. Furthermore, most studies included were poor or fair quality, with only 2 being considered good quality. Importantly, the criteria used to assess quality were based on traditional research approaches, and many of the features of poor-quality studies were included by design; some had small sample sizes to generate insights and to test assumptions rapidly, and some were pilot studies. This feature of Design Thinking also may account for the limited use of large RCTs; however, this poses a challenge when evaluating the effectiveness of the approach. More work in this area using more rigorous methods and larger samples is critical to fully understanding the benefits of Design Thinking. Although many studies that used Design Thinking were excluded from our review because they did not include sufficient outcome data (n = 131), full-scale trials of many of these interventions are under way, results of which will provide more evidence about the effectiveness of this approach in health care. In addition, no studies measured Design Thinking directly to explain how or what components of Design Thinking lead to improved usability and effectiveness, limiting the field’s ability to disseminate the most effective components and refine the Design Thinking approach for health care.

Design Thinking methods varied among the studies reviewed. For example, only 6 studies conducted contextual observations of users during the needs assessment phase, no studies reported a brainstorming stage, 10 studies did not use low-fidelity prototypes, and some reported a small number of iterations (eg, one mixed-success trial had 4 intervention iterations, but only 2 iterations were evaluated with target users [ 27 ]). Using more thorough and structured Design Thinking methodology may have resulted in more consistent and enhanced outcomes. At the same time, Design Thinking is meant to be flexibly applied. Future work should balance that flexibility with the potential benefits of a more systematic approach.

Our results suggest that one area where Design Thinking could be especially useful is in designing interventions for underserved populations whose needs may be overlooked by other approaches. For example, the study of a mobile health tool for detecting and managing cardiovascular disease in rural India required significant feedback from the end users — minimally trained health workers — to ensure that the intervention was suited to their level of technological familiarity as well as the inconsistent technical infrastructure (eg, creating a one-touch navigation system) ( 21 ). Using Design Thinking allowed the multidisciplinary team to question assumptions and biases and develop an intervention that was successful, acceptable, and feasible to the actual users, an outcome that may not have been possible using traditional methods ( 21 ). Another study evaluated the impact of an education tool to enhance long-acting contraceptive use in a clinic serving mostly African American patients who were included early in the usability testing process to ensure the tool met their needs. Several changes were made as a result, such as including more peer testimonials, which likely increased the tool’s impact and relevance ( 29 ). In this way, Design Thinking could also pair well with other approaches that prioritize the inclusion of users in service of reducing health disparities, such as community-based participatory research ( 48 ).

Tensions when using Design Thinking in health care

In their text and through our analysis, the studies included in this review show several challenges to consider when applying Design Thinking to health care. First, there is the possibility of tension between what users want and what providers and researchers believe to be beneficial based on research and expertise ( 49 ). Whereas in industry, where an innovation designer may prioritize customers’ preferences to maximize profits, in health care a balance must be struck between creating interventions that are effective and sufficiently palatable and feasible so that they will be used by providers and patients.

Second, tension may exist between the needs assessment, a fundamental step of Design Thinking, and existing literature and evidence base for some conditions. That is, given the evidence, intervention developers may not be willing or see it necessary to conduct their own needs assessment using observation or interview strategies or to brainstorm creative solutions. Indeed, 7 of the studies included in this review reported literature reviews, and possibly expert consultation, as their only needs assessment steps, and none reported brainstorming. One way to overcome this tension is to view evidence as a set of design constraints in which needs assessment, brainstorming, ideation, and prototyping should occur.

A third possible tension relates to balancing the Design Thinking approach of understanding the narrative of outliers with traditional health research methods that prioritize statistics on large samples to produce generalizable results. Conclusions drawn from small user samples should be tested in broader populations to ensure their applicability. Mixed-methods approaches that use both strategies may reduce this tension. For example, a research team that uses a qualitative Design Thinking approach early in the research process (eg, user observations, focus groups, and usability tests with small groups of target users) may be able to generate insights into the key needs of the target population. This approach may also find ways to address these needs, and subsequent quantitative testing of the developed interventions in broader samples will allow the group to evaluate whether their assumptions generalize to the broader population, and the intervention will be more effective as a result.

Fourth, there is inherent tension between a central philosophy of the prototyping process in Design Thinking — to rapidly move through low-fidelity then high-fidelity iterations to fail early and often to more quickly reach a better design ( 50 ) — and the risk of serious negative outcomes due to health care failures (eg, death). Many of the studies did not use low-fidelity prototyping or multiple rapid iterations, perhaps because of this tension. However, although there may be some reluctance to experiment with low-fidelity prototypes in health care where morbidity and mortality are at stake, there are low-stakes approaches to low-fidelity prototyping that may minimize risk and improve the pace of innovation (eg, storyboards to illustrate a new clinic process).

Intervention development and implementation: case example

Considering the role of Design Thinking is important, not only in efficacious intervention development but also in effective implementation into practice ( 5 ). Only 3 of the included interventions addressed implementation, but this limited implementation provides insights. For example, in designing a new process for facilitating nurse handoffs between shifts, Lin and colleagues conducted an extensive 6-month intervention development design process that was user-focused and empathic and had rapid iteration in pilot sites ( 43 ). However, despite this strong preliminary work, the intervention was not readily accepted when implemented in other clinics. As a participant stated:

After the concepts had been co-developed and field tested with our pilot units . . . we assumed the units were “bought in” to the idea of the change. . . . Surprisingly, our approach to the training resulted in criticism and created skepticism [at other clinics]. . . . They attributed this to “not made here” sentiments from those units not involved in the original design.

To overcome this tension, the team involved additional stakeholders to develop a more user-centered process for the implementation of their Design Thinking innovation, after which they successfully implemented the innovation across 125 nursing units in 14 hospitals over 2 years ( 16 ). This study highlights the importance of understanding the context of the setting and users, both when developing and implementing an intervention using a Design Thinking approach. It should also be noted that this process required significant time and energy from stakeholders. One stakeholder commented, “Don’t get me wrong. What we did was fantastic. But it took a lot out of us” ( 43 ). This study highlights the importance of staying true to the user-centered nature of Design Thinking throughout the process — from development to implementation — to maximize implementation success. It also highlights the challenges in using this approach. Teams using Design Thinking should be prepared for a more intensive process than traditional, less iterative and user-centered methods.

Limitations

Given the varied outcomes included in the review and the inconsistent reporting of qualitative outcomes it was difficult to make comparisons across studies. The range of study types and limited number of large scale RCTs testing intervention effects also made it difficult to draw definitive conclusions about effectiveness. At the same time, given that there was only one study with a null result, there was likely publication bias, which may have led to overestimation of the effectiveness of Design Thinking. It is also possible that investigators used methods but did not report them (eg, prototyping). In addition, we did not assess the use of Design Thinking in other health care areas where it may be beneficial, such as the design of physical spaces. Finally, Design Thinking–based health care innovations that were developed and implemented outside research contexts may exist and are thus not reported in the literature.

Conclusions

Design Thinking is being used in varied health care settings and health conditions, and more studies are forthcoming. This review suggests that Design Thinking may result in more usable, acceptable, and effective interventions compared with traditional expert-driven methods. However, there is inconsistent use of the methodology and significant limitations inherent in the studies, which limits our ability to draw conclusions about this approach. Future studies may benefit from focusing on comparing interventions developed using Design Thinking methods with traditionally developed interventions, including those with RCT designs, and identifying the most useful components of Design Thinking methods.

Overall, Design Thinking is a promising approach to intervention development, implementation, and dissemination that may increase the acceptability and effectiveness of health care interventions by actively engaging patients and providers in the design process and rapidly iterating innovation prototypes to maximize success.

Acknowledgments

The research was supported by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Veterans Health Administration, Health Services Research and Development Service (HSR&D). Dr Breland is a VA HSR&D Career Development awardee at the VA Palo Alto (15-257). The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of Veterans Affairs. There is no copyrighted material used in this article, and no copyrighted surveys, instruments, or tools were used in this article.

The authors thank Ms Elon Hailu for her help editing the manuscript. At the time of the research, Dr Altman was affiliated with the Department of Psychology, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri, and the VA Palo Alto Health Care System, Menlo Park, California.

The opinions expressed by authors contributing to this journal do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Public Health Service, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or the authors' affiliated institutions.

Suggested citation for this article: Altman M, Huang TT, Breland JY. Design Thinking in Health Care. Prev Chronic Dis 2018;15:180128. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5888/pcd15.180128 .

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An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.

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When Kyle Cornforth first walked into IDEO’s San Francisco offices in 2011, she felt she had entered a whole new world. At the time, Cornforth was a director at the Edible Schoolyard Project , a nonprofit that uses gardening and cooking in schools to teach and to provide nutritious food. She was there to meet with IDEO.org, a new social-impact spinoff of the design consulting firm, which was exploring how to reimagine school lunch, a mission that the Edible Schoolyard Project has been working toward since 2004. But Cornforth was new to IDEO’s way of working: a six-step methodology for innovation called design thinking, which had emerged in the 1990s but had started reaching the height of its popularity in the tech, business, and social-impact sectors. 

Key to design thinking’s spread was its replicable aesthetic, represented by the Post-it note: a humble square that anyone can use in infinite ways. Not too precious, not too permanent, the ubiquitous Post-it promises a fast-moving, cooperative, egalitarian process for getting things done. When Cornforth arrived at IDEO for a workshop, “it was Post-its everywhere, prototypes everywhere,” she says. “What I really liked was that they offered a framework for collaboration and creation.” 

But when she looked at the ideas themselves, Cornforth had questions: “I was like, ‘You didn’t talk to anyone who works in a school, did you?’ They were not contextualized in the problem at all.” The deep expertise in the communities of educators and administrators she worked with, Cornforth saw, was in tension with the disruptive, startup-flavored creativity of the design thinking process at consultancies like IDEO.org. “I felt like a stick in the mud to them,” she recalls. “And I felt they were out of touch with reality.” 

That tension would resurface a couple of years later, in 2013, when IDEO was hired by the San Francisco Unified School District to redesign the school cafeteria, with funding from Twitter cofounder Ev Williams’s family foundation. Ten years on, the SFUSD program has had a big impact—but that may have as much to do with the slow and integrated work inside the district as with that first push of design-focused energy from outside.

Founded in the 1990s, IDEO was instrumental in evangelizing the design thinking process throughout the ’00s and ’10s, alongside Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design or “d.school” (which IDEO’s founder David Kelley also cofounded). While the methodology’s focus on collaboration and research can be traced back to human-­factors engineering, a movement popular decades earlier, design thinking took hold of the collective imagination during the Obama years, a time when American culture was riding high on the potential of a bunch of smart people in a hope-filled room to bend history’s arc toward progress. Its influence stretched across health-care giants in the American heartland, government agencies in DC, big tech companies in Silicon Valley, and beyond. City governments brought in design thinking agencies to solve their economic woes and take on challenges ranging from transportation to housing. Institutions like MIT and Harvard and boot camps like General Assembly stood up courses and degree programs, suggesting that teaching design thinking could be as lucrative as selling it to corporations and foundations.  

Design thinking also broadened the very idea of “design,” elevating the designer to a kind of spiritual medium who didn’t just construct spaces, physical products, or experiences on screen but was uniquely able to reinvent systems to better meet the desires of the people within them. It gave designers permission to take on any big, knotty problem by applying their own empathy to users’ pain points—the first step in that six-step innovation process filled with Post-its.

We are all creatives, design thinking promised, and we can solve any problem if we empathize hard enough.

The next steps were to reframe the problem (“How might we …?”), brainstorm potential solutions, prototype options, test those options with end users, and—finally—implement. Design thinking agencies usually didn’t take on this last step themselves; consultants often delivered a set of “recommendations” to the organizations that hired them.  

At the same time, consultancies like IDEO, Frog, Smart Design, and others were also promoting the idea that anyone (including the executives paying their fees) could be a designer by just following the process. Perhaps design had become “too important to leave to designers,” as IDEO’s then CEO, Tim Brown, wrote in his 2009 book Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation . Brown even touted as a selling point his firm’s utter absence of expertise in any particular industry: “We come with what we call a beginner’s mind,” he told the Yale School of Management . 

This was a savvy strategy for selling design thinking to the business world: instead of hiring their own team of design professionals, companies could bring on an agency temporarily to learn the methodology themselves. The approach also felt empowering to many who spent time with it. We are all creatives, design thinking promised, and we can solve any problem if we empathize hard enough.

But in recent years, for a number of reasons, the shine of design thinking has been wearing off. Critics have argued that its short-term focus on novel and naive ideas has resulted in unrealistic and ungrounded recommendations. And they have maintained that by centering designers—mainly practitioners of corporate design within agencies—it has reinforced existing inequities rather than challenging them. Years in, “innovation theater”— checking a series of boxes without implementing meaningful shifts—had become endemic in corporate settings, while a number of social-impact initiatives highlighted in case studies struggled to get beyond pilot projects. Meanwhile, the #MeToo and BLM movements, along with the political turmoil of the Trump administration, have demonstrated that many big problems are rooted in centuries of dark history, too deeply entrenched to be obliterated with a touch of design thinking’s magic wand. 

Today, innovation agencies and educational institutions still continue to sell design thinking to individuals, corporations, and organizations. In 2015 , IDEO even created its own “online school,” IDEO U, with a bank of design thinking courses . But some groups—including the d.school and IDEO itself—are working to reform both its principles and its methodologies. These new efforts seek a set of design tools capable of equitably serving diverse communities and solving diverse problems well into the future. It’s a much more daunting—and crucial—task than design thinking’s original remit. 

The magical promise of design thinking

When design thinking emerged in the ’90s and ’00s, workplaces were made up of cubicles and closed doors, and the term “user experience” had only just been coined at Apple . Despite convincing research on collaboration tracing back to the 1960s, work was still mainly a solo endeavor in many industries, including design. Design thinking injected new and collaborative energy into both design and the corporate world more broadly; it suggested that work could look and feel more hopeful and be more fun, and that design could take the lead in making it that way.

When author and startup advisor Jake Knapp was working as a designer at Microsoft in the 2000s, he visited IDEO’s offices in Palo Alto for a potential project. He was struck by how inspiring the space was: “Everything is white, and there’s sunlight coming in the windows. There’s an open floor plan. I had never seen [work] done like that.” When he started at Google a few years later, he learned how to run design thinking workshops from a colleague who had worked at IDEO, and then he began running his own workshops on the approach within Google. 

Knapp’s attraction was due in part to the “radical collaboration” that design thinking espoused. In what was a first for many, colleagues came together across disciplines at the very start of a project to discuss how to solve problems. “Facilitating the exchange of information, ideas, and research with product, engineering, and design teams more fluidly is really the unlock,” says Enrique Allen, cofounder of Designer Fund, which supports startups seeking to harness the unique business value of design in industries from health care to construction. Design thinking offered a structure for those cross-­disciplinary conversations and a way to articulate design’s value within them. “It gave [your ideas] so much more weight for people who didn’t have the language to understand creative work,” says Erica Eden , who worked as a designer at the innovation firm Smart Design.

It makes a good story to say there’s a foolproof process that will lead to results no matter who runs it.

For Angela McKee Brown , who was hired by SFUSD to help bring the work IDEO had done on improving the school cafeteria to reality, the design thinking process was a language that bureaucracy could understand. In a district that had suffered from an overall lack of infrastructure investment since the 1970s, she watched as IDEO’s recommendations ignited a new will to improvement that continues today. “The biggest role that process played for us was it told a story that showed people the value of the work,” McKee Brown says. “That allowed me to have a much easier job, because people believed.” 

The enthusiasm that surrounded design thinking did have much to offer the public sector, says Cyd Harrell , San Francisco’s chief digital services officer, who has worked as a design leader in civic technology for over a decade. Decades of budget cuts and a lack of civic investment have made it difficult for public servants to feel that change is possible. “For a lot of those often really wonderful people who’ve chosen service as a career, and who have had to go through times where things seem really bleak,” she says, “the infusion of optimism—whether it comes in the guise of some of these techniques that are a little bit shady or not—is really valuable.” And it makes a good story to say there’s a foolproof process that will lead to results no matter who runs it.

Ideas over implementation

Execution has always been the sticky wicket for design thinking. Some versions of the codified six-step process even omit that crucial final step of implementation. Its roots in the agency world, where a firm steps in on a set timeline with an established budget and leaves before or shortly after the pilot stage, dictated that the tools of design thinking would be aimed at the start of the product development process but not its conclusion—or, even more to the point, its aftermath. 

When Jake Knapp was running those design thinking workshops at Google, he saw that for all the excitement and Post-its they generated, the brainstorming sessions didn’t usually lead to built products or, really, solutions of any kind. When he followed up with teams to learn which workshop ideas had made it to production, he heard decisions happening “in the old way,” with a few lone geniuses working separately and then selling their almost fully realized ideas to top stakeholders.

Execution has always been the sticky wicket for design thinking.

In the government and social-impact sectors, though, design thinking’s focus on ideas over implementation had bigger ramifications than a lack of efficiency. 

The “biggest piece of the design problem” in civic tech, says Harrell, is not generating new ideas but figuring out how to implement and pay for them. What’s more, success sometimes can’t be evaluated until years later, so the time-­constrained workshops typical of the design thinking approach may not be appropriate. “There’s a mismatch between the short-cycle evaluations [in commercial design] and the long-cycle evaluations for policy,” she says. For longtime public servants, seeing a project through—past implementation and into iteration—is crucial for learning and improving how infrastructure functions. 

In a 2021 piece on the evolution of their practices, Brown, along with Shauna Carey and Jocelyn Wyatt of IDEO.org, cited the Diva Centres project in Lusaka, Zambia, where they worked to help teens access contraception and learn about reproductive health. Through the design thinking methodology, the team came up with the idea of creating nail salons where the teens could get guidance in a low-pressure environment. The team built three model sites, declaring the work a success; the Diva Centres project won a Core77 Service Design Award in 2016, and the case study is still posted on IDEO.org’s website . But while the process focused on generating the most exciting user experience within the nail salons, it neglected to consider the world outside their walls—a complex network of public health funding and service channels that made scaling the pilot “prohibitively expensive and complicated,” as the IDEO.org leaders later wrote. Though IDEO intended to build 10 centers by 2017, neither IDEO nor the partner organization ever reported reaching that milestone. The article does not say how much money or time went into realizing the Diva Centres pilot before it ended, so it’s not clear if the lessons learned were worth the failure. (IDEO.org declined to be interviewed for this story.)

IDEO’s 2013 work for SFUSD—the project that McKee Brown later worked on from the school system’s side—has a more complicated legacy. After five months, IDEO delivered 10 recommendations, including communal dining tables, vending machines with meals to grab on the go, community food partnerships for fresher produce, and an app and interactive web portal to give students and families more opportunities to participate in lunch choices. (The food itself was a different issue that the district was working on with its vendors .) On IDEO’s website today, the story concludes with SFUSD’s “unanimous enthusiasm” for the recommendations—a consultancy happy ending. Indeed, the project was met with a flurry of fawning press coverage . But with hindsight, it’s clear that only after IDEO left the project did the real work begin. 

At SFUSD, McKee Brown saw instances in which IDEO’s recommendations did not take into account the complexities of the district’s operations and the effort it could take to even drill a hole in a wall in accordance with asbestos abatement rules. The vending machines the team proposed, for instance, would need a stable internet connection, which many target locations didn’t have. And the app never came to fruition, McKee Brown says, as it would have required a whole new department to continually update the software and content. 

An analysis a few years after IDEO’s 2013 engagement showed that about the same number of kids or even fewer were choosing to eat school lunch, despite a continuous increase in enrollment. This may have had several reasons, including that the quality of the food itself did not significantly improve. The original goal of getting more kids to eat at school would eventually be met by an entirely different effort: California’s universal school meal program , implemented in 2022. 

Nevertheless, IDEO’s SFUSD project has had a lasting impact, thanks to the work the district itself put into transforming blue-sky ideas into real change. While few of the recommendations ended up being widely implemented in schools exactly as IDEO envisioned them, the district has been redesigning its cafeterias to make the spaces more welcoming and social for students—after sometimes decades of disrepair. Today more than 70 school cafeterias out of 114 sites in the city have been renovated. The design thinking process helped sell the value of improving school cafeterias to the decision makers. But the in-house team at SFUSD charted the way forward after many of IDEO’s initial ideas couldn’t make it past the drawing board.

Empathy over expertise

The first step of the design thinking process is for the designer to empathize with the end user through close observation of the problem. While this step involves asking questions of the individuals and communities affected, the designer’s eye frames any insights that emerge. This puts the designer’s honed sense of empathy at the center of both the problem and the solution. 

In 2018, researcher Lilly Irani, an associate professor at the University of California, San Diego, wrote a piece titled “Design Thinking: Defending Silicon Valley at the Apex of Global Labor Hierarchies” for the peer-reviewed journal Catalyst. She criticized the new framing of the designer as an empathetic “divining rod leading to new markets or domains of life ripe for intervention,” maintaining that it reinforced traditional hierarchies of labor. 

Irani argued that as an outgrowth of Silicon Valley business interests and culture, design thinking situated Western—and often white—designers at a higher level of labor, treating them as mystics who could translate the efforts and experiences of lower-level workers into capitalistic opportunity. 

Former IDEO designer George Aye has seen Irani’s concerns play out firsthand, particularly in settings with entrenched systemic problems. He and his colleagues would use the language of a “beginner’s mindset” with the clients, he says, but what he saw in practice was more an attitude that “we’re going to fumble our way through and by the time we’re done, we’re on to the next project.” In Aye’s view, these consulting engagements made tourists of commercial designers, who—however sincerely they wanted to help—made sure to “get some good pictures standing next to typically dark-skinned people with brightly colored clothes” so they could produce evidence for the consultancy. 

Today in his own studio , which works only with nonprofit organizations, Aye tries to elevate what’s already being created by a local community, advocate for its members to get the resources they need, and then “get out of the way.” If designers are not centering the people on the ground, then “it’s profit-centered design,” he says. “There’s no other way of putting it.”

McKee Brown considers one of the greatest successes of the San Francisco cafeteria redesign project to be the School Food Advisory (SFA), a district-wide program in which high schoolers continually inform and direct changes to meal programs and cafeteria updates. But the group wasn’t a result of IDEO’s recommendations; the SFA was formed to ensure that SFUSD students would continue to have a voice in the district and a chance to collaborate often on how to redesign their spaces. Nearly a decade after IDEO completed its work, the best results have been due to the expertise of the district’s own team and its generations of students, not the empathy that went into the initial short-term consulting project.

As she’s continued to work on food and education, McKee Brown has adapted the process of design thinking to her experiences and team leadership needs. At SFUSD and later at Edible Schoolyard, where she became executive director, she developed three questions she and her team should always make sure to ask: “Who have you talked to? Have you tried it out before we spend all this money? And then how are you telling the story of the work?” 

What’s next for design thinking?

Almost two decades after design thinking rose to prominence, the world still has no shortage of problems that need addressing. Design leadership and design processes themselves need to evolve beyond design thinking, and that’s an arena where designers may actually be uniquely skilled. Stanford’s d.school, which was instrumental in the growth of design thinking in the first place, is one institution pushing the conversation forward by reshaping its influential design programs. Within the physical walls of the school, the design thinking aesthetic—whiteboards, cardboard furniture, Post-its—is still evident on most surfaces, but the ideas stirring inside sound new.  

In fact, the phrase “design thinking” does not appear in any materials for the d.school’s revamped undergraduate or graduate programs—although it still shows up in electives in which any Stanford student can enroll (and a representative from the d.school claims the terms “design” and “design thinking” are used interchangeably). Instead of “empathy,” “make” and “care” are the concepts that program leaders hope will shape the design education across all offerings. 

In contrast with empathy, care demands a shift in who is centered in these processes—sometimes meaning people in generations other than our own. “How are we thinking about our ancestors? What is the legacy that this is going to leave? What are all the intended and unintended consequences?” says academic director Carissa Carter . “There are implications no matter where you work—­second-, third-order consequences of what we put out. This is where we are pulling in elements of equity and inclusion. Not just in a single course, but how we approach the design of this curriculum.” 

The d.school’s creative director, Scott Doorley , who has been with the school for over 15 years, has begun to hear the students themselves ask for fundamental shifts like these. They’re entering the programs saying, “I want to make something that not only changes things, but changes things without screwing everything else up,” Doorley says: “It’s this really great combination of excitement and humility at the same time.” The d.school has also made specific changes in curriculum and tools; an ethics course that was previously required at the end of the undergraduate degree program now appears toward the beginning, and the school is providing new frameworks to help students plan for the next-generation effects of their work beyond a project’s completion. 

For the Design Justice Network, a collective of design practitioners and educators that emerged out of the 2014 Allied Media Conference in Detroit, slowing down and embracing complexity are the keys to moving practices like design thinking toward justice. “If we truly want to think about stakeholders, if we want to have more levels of affordances when we design things, then we can’t work at the speed of industry,” says Wes Taylor, an associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and a DJN leader. 

IDEO’s practices have been evolving to better address that complexity. Tim Brown says that toward the beginning of the company’s life, its unique power was in bringing together different design disciplines to deliver new ideas. “We weren’t looking particularly to help our clients build their own capabilities back then. We were simply looking to do certain kinds of design projects,” he says. 

Now, when the questions being asked of designers are deeper and more complicated—how to make Ford a more human-centered company rather than how to build a better digital dashboard, he gives as an example—IDEO leaders have recognized that “it’s the combination of doing design and building the capabilities [of IDEO’s clients and their communities] to design at the same time where the real impact can happen.” What this means in practice is much more time on the ground, more partnerships, and sometimes more money. “It’s about recognizing that the expertise is much more in the hands of the user of the system than the designer of the system. And being a little bit less arrogant about knowing everything,” says Brown. 

IDEO has also been building new design capabilities within its own team, hiring writers and filmmakers to tell stories for their clients, which Brown has come to see as “ the key activity, not a key activity” for influencing change in societal systems. “If you had asked me 10 to 15 years ago,” he says, “I would never have guessed that we would have as many folks who come from a storytelling background within a design firm as we do today.” 

Indeed, design thinking’s greatest positive impact may always have been in the stories it’s helped tell: spreading the word about the value of collaboration in business, elevating the public profile of design as a discipline, and coaxing funding from private and public channels for expensive long-term projects. But its legacy must also account for years of letting down many of the people and places the methodology claimed it would benefit. And as long as it remains in the halls of consultancies and ivory-tower institutions, its practitioners may continue to struggle to decenter the already powerful and privileged.

As Taylor sees it, design thinking’s core problems can be traced back to its origins in the corporate world, which inextricably intertwined the methodology with capitalistic values. He believes that a justice lens can help foster collaboration and creativity in a much broader way that goes beyond our current power structures. “Let’s try to imagine and acknowledge that capitalism is not inevitable, not necessarily a foundational principle of nature,” he urges. 

That kind of radical innovation goes far beyond the original methodology of design thinking. But it may contain the seeds for the lasting change that the design industry—and the world—need now.

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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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