D is for Design Thinking
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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, Executive Chair of Ideo
Whilst many of us are familiar with 5 “steps” of design thinking: Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test). It might be simplified to include 3 interconnected iterative moments: inspiration, iteration, implementation.
As we witness “wicked problems” persist, it becomes evident that despite its ever-growing popularity, design thinking is not entirely suited to solving systemic problems. Its human-centeredness — and arguably its focus on creating economic value — by definition, narrow the field of view.
The process is extremely effective at incremental innovation, at uncovering solutions to slivers of larger challenges, at downstream (turning innovation into economic value) disruption to products or services. But to truly redesign the world and its failing systems we need upstream innovation (identifying root causes). We need to define another layer of intervention to weave the myriad of promising solutions developed, or already exist, into a collective impact-driven, multi-dimensional effort.
Originally published at Seven25.
