If you’ve heard of Design Thinking, you may know that it’s an ideology concerned with solving complex problems in a creative, user-centric way. But what does Design Thinking look like in action? What does the process actually entail?
In this guide
If you’ve heard of Design Thinking, you may know that it’s an ideology concerned with solving complex problems in a creative, user-centric way. But what does Design Thinking look like in action? What does the process actually entail?
In this guide, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about the Design Thinking process—including where it comes from, why it’s so valuable, and what it’s used for. We’ll then explore the five stages of the Design Thinking process in detail.
We’ve divided our guide into the following sections. Feel free to skip ahead using the clickable menu!
- What is the Design Thinking process?
- What is the value of the Design Thinking process?
- Where does the Design Thinking process come from?
- What are the five steps of the Design Thinking process?
- How can I become an expert in Design Thinking?
Ready to learn all about the Design Thinking process? Let’s go.
1. What is the Design Thinking process?
Before we can understand the Design Thinking process, it’s important to get to grips with the ideology behind it—that is, Design Thinking. In simple terms, Design Thinking is a methodology that aims to tackle highly complex problems. Complex problems—otherwise known as “wicked” problems— are those that are difficult to define and cannot be solved using standard methods and approaches. They are the opposite of “tame” problems, which can be solved by applying a tried-and-tested algorithm or logic. Let’s explore wicked vs. tame problems in more detail now.
Wicked vs. tame problems
Let’s imagine you’re holding a dinner party for six people. You’ve picked out a recipe for potato soup and you’ve bought all the necessary ingredients. At the last minute, one of your guests asks if they can bring three friends along; you now need enough potato soup for nine people! Fortunately, this problem is easily solved: you’ll simply multiply the quantities of each ingredient on the recipe in order to make more soup.
This is an example of a tame problem. Based on what you know about cooking, and by applying some simple math, you are quickly able to find a solution. Wicked problems, on the other hand, have no known solution or algorithm. In fact, the more you try to solve a wicked problem, the more problems you expose!
Unlike our “tame” dinner party conundrum, wicked problems don’t have a final solution. Things like climate change, poverty, and world hunger are often-cited examples of wicked problems; they need to be tackled from multiple angles, and rather than looking for a single answer, they require a response that anticipates how the problem might evolve and mutate.
Wicked problems are everywhere in business, too. Whether it’s reinventing an entire business model, trying to maintain your startup culture as the business grows, working out how to please a new customer group, or resolving conflict between different departments—none of these scenarios has a simple, tried-and-tested solution. They are complex, wicked problems that require Design Thinking!
Design Thinking fosters an outside-the-box approach, with huge emphasis on creativity, innovation, and the needs of the user. The Design Thinking process is used to apply the Design Thinking ideology to real-world, wicked problems. It offers a solution-based approach to problem-solving. Unlike problem-based thinking, which tends to fixate on obstacles and limitations, the Design Thinking process is all about outcomes. It provides a non-linear series of steps that you can follow to come up with innovative, actionable ideas. You can learn more about solution-based vs. problem-based thinking in our comprehensive guide to Design Thinking.
Now we know what kinds of wicked problems we’re up against, let’s see what the Design Thinking process looks like in action.
The Design Thinking process in action
The Design Thinking process can be applied to many different contexts—it’s not just about developing the next digital product. Nor is it limited to design teams; more and more businesses are using Design Thinking as a way to foster innovation on a companywide scale.
This list of five big organizations winning with Design Thinking explains how companies such as iBM, MassMutual, and Fidelity are “drawing on design thinking frameworks to jolt innovative ideas” and “drive bottom-line business outcomes.”
But what does the Design Thinking process actually look like in action?
One way to apply the Design Thinking process is through a Design Thinking workshop. If you have a specific problem you want to tackle, a dedicated workshop will take you through each step of the Design Thinking process—from building empathy and defining the problem, right through to prototyping and testing ideas—usually over the course of a few days or a week. As a designer, you might invite your colleagues from other departments in order to harness a diversity of ideas. Design Thinking workshops aren’t just for designers, though; all teams can use, and benefit from, this creative approach to problem-solving.
Aside from dedicated workshops, Design Thinking can also be an embedded process—an overarching framework that informs how you make decisions and devise certain strategies. Rather than going through the entire Design Thinking cycle in