What is Design Thinking?

Every process has a roadmap. Every product has a map of its creation.

This can be a map of happy or unhappy steps, reconsidered actions, impossibilities, adjustments, and potentials. It's still the map.

Logically, in a design or development process, we would want to minimize the fruitless sidetracks while not cutting them off altogether, for the sake of inquiry (R&D). For the sake of human values inherent in questioning.

In Design Thinking, we learn to embrace the process, including those aspects of human nature one might wish to refine later.

Fundamentally, in a design paradigm, something is created. A phone, a building, adjustments to a health care financing system. A distributed septic system in an Arctic village.

Fundamentally, someone uses the phone, walks in the building, receives the health care support, uses a toilet.

In Design Thinking you may refer to this person in different ways, the user, the end user, the customer, the customer's customer. Likely, the use of your facility or product will result in a "Change of State" for that person. He or she may have a more pleasurable experience doing something burdensome or ordinary. It may be safer, healthier, may reduce pollution, improve quality of life.

We refer to Design Thinking in the following manner:

“Design thinking is an approach to innovation integrating the needs and capabilities of the people who are there, the potentials of the technology, and the requirements for business success.”

What the Bauhaus and the Design Thinking movement have in common is respect for and responsibility to "the end user."

Empathy for others was the engine that ignited the flame of this school of design and is the same reason why Design Thinking is a?tool that helps organizations be more innovative and purpose-driven.

Two mindsets that encourage us to be integrative and radically interdisciplinary.

-Daniela Marzavan