Design Thinking

What comes to mind when you hear the word “design”? Graphics? Illustrations? Websites? Fashion? It is likely that your first associations are related to the arts, media, and digital spheres. Yet, design has an omnipresent influence on all aspects of our lives. The chair you may be sitting on as you are reading this is based on a design, so is the building you live in, and the peeler you use when preparing a fruit salad. We are surrounded by the brilliant, think ballpoint pen, Tupperware container, the shape of a coca cola bottle, or a suitcase with wheels, just as much as we are by the terrible. A building that is not accessible for people in a wheelchair, an ATM machine that gives you your money before it spits out your credit card, or the 2022 Mercedes Formula 1 car are all examples of bad design.

The tech CEO Martin Bouza offers a broad and vivid definition of design: “Design, when done well, should represent a solution to a fundamental problem, but it should also bring joy, show care, and improve people's lives.” Note that under this definition a non-tangible project, such as the development of a new public policy, or the restructuring of an organizational unit, also contains design elements. If design is everywhere, then it can be helpful for companies, organizations, and communities, to approach a broad range of problems with the mindset of a designer. Enter design thinking.

Design thinking is a human-centered problem-solving approach that can be applied during the development or innovation of products, services, processes, and business models. It is most effective in contexts where problems are not yet known or only vaguely defined, where the goal is to achieve radical, future-ready innovation, and where teams are interdisciplinary. By putting the user, with their needs and wishes, at the center of the development process, better products and services can be designed in the sense that true needs are addressed, and actual problems are solved.