#designthinking has been trendy in tech companies or startups. More and more high education institutes offer Design Thinking courses (and yes I’ve been benefited from this trend and got hired as a coach or instructor.) More and more people see it as an opportunity to add Design Thinking or Creative Thinking into their skillset and hope to solve corporate problems, create a new product, or challenge their existing thinking framework.
As a person who teach and coach Design Thinking, it’s sweet and bitter for me to see how this got overused and misused, especially on LinkedIn. For example, people who took one class and would label himself/herself as Design Thinker.
An excerpt from a free PDF “What is Design Thinking” we made
Design Thinking is actually just a systematic “problem-solving” process that all product designers use. (The creation of a product stems from solving user’s needs.) When I was in school, Art Center College of Design, I never had a class called “Design Thinking” with all the lecture and case studies. (The only class with the most lecture was a research class where we learned the techniques of interviewing people.) We just had design project studio every term. In every project, we practiced this process, faced lots of difficulties throughout the project, and learned how to solve them. And that’s what Design Thinking is about - learning by doing.
Design is doing, not just thinking. If you never execute it, then idea stays as an idea. It won’t be created. You don’t learn cooking by watching YouTube videos if you never try to cook by yourself. Design Thinking is the same thing. You have to try to execute your ideas (aka prototyping), understand the complexity your proposed solutions, face the difficulties and try to solve again when it doesn’t work out. Design Thinking doesn’t just stop at the brainstorming phase.
Learn more about the basic of Design thinking: download the FREE PDF here.