Design Thinking In Three Words

There are as many definitions of design thinking as there are articles about it. Its power and its curse lie in the fact that it’s as much ‘a way of knowing’ as it is a formal process. Is it possible to boil down the definition of design thinking to something pithy yet accessible? I think that comparing some of the visual representations of design thinking can point us in the right direction.

Stanford d.school’s image of design thinking is my least favorite. It unintentionally implies a linear process. Most importantly, it makes it appear as if empathizing happens once, at the beginning of the process, and then is finished. After you empathize, you go on to do other, more concrete things.

It was when I compared the d.school’s image to this one from Nielson Norman Group that the potential for a brief yet (in my humble opinion) useful definition for design thinking struck me. This diagram makes clear what we all instinctively know; that design thinking is a circular process. Empathy is both the beginning and the end. It allows you to engage in useful definition, ideation, prototyping, and testing. At the same time, though, those subsequent steps also help you tune your ability to empathize.

To me, the key thing to understand is the continuous nature of empathy. Perfect empathy is impossible. The only way to perfectly see things from another’s perspective is to be that person. In addition, people continually evolve, particularly in response to the things we do for them. When we release a new product or feature, people use it in ways we can’t perfectly predict. The very act of using what we’ve created also changes them.

The emergence of social media, for example, has changed how people think, act, and relate to one another. In the process, their expectations of social media have changed. Facebook and Twitter face challenges they couldn’t have foreseen when they started. They couldn’t have foreseen those problems because they didn’t exist yet.

We must therefore approach empathy as something that continuously unfolds and adapts itself. It is in this context that I offer the following, three-word definition of design thinking: continuously seeking empathy. I use the word “seeking” because we can only ever pursue empathy. We can never perfectly achieve it. Even if we can for a moment, our customers and their world change, thus breaking that perfect moment.

“Seeking” also refers to the fact that every part of the design thinking process exists to help us pursue empathy. We ideate to maximize our changes of discovering a truly empathic solution. We test in order to validate how well we’ve in fact empathized.

Design thinking has the potential to help us improve our lives and those of our colleagues and customers across a variety of domains. To practice it successfully, though, we need to move beyond binary, static definitions of empathy. We need to let go of the illusion that we can capture and keep it. Regardless of whether we call it “design thinking”, or just “design”; regardless of whether we apply it to user interface design, or IT procedures, or corporate organizational structures: we need use it approach what we do and how we relate to each other at every level of the post-industrial workplace as a process of continuously seeking empathy.