The Beginner’s Guide to Design Thinking

Understand Design Thinking and how you can use it to improve your relationships

“A woman's dark silhouette looks out the window into the brightness of the day.” by Kate Williams on Unsplash

In today’s highly globalised world, business problems are significantly more complex. While some problems have yes or no answers, some tend to be vague with no clear parameters in mind. Several frameworks have surfaced over the past decade to tackle problems like these. Design Thinking is one of them and by far one of the more popular frameworks used by major corporations. In this Guide, we will look at the key steps of Design Thinking and discuss a little on how you can use Design Thinking not in a business context, but in your everyday lives.

Design Thinking is essentially an experience-focused framework that allows you to tackle problems through building on wants and needs. Developed in 1969 by Nobel Prize Laureate Herbert Simon, there have been several variations with different amount of stages, although the key premise and focus are similar. They revolve around the stages of empathising with the problem, defining the scope of the problem, generating possible solutions to the problem, prototyping and testing the solution, and lastly implementing it.

Empathise: Understand the Problem