Member-only story
Design Thinking explained (with rubber ducks)
Design Thinking, those two words together are in the mouth of every product designer out there these days, the first time I heard about it, my first thought was something like this: “here we go again, another ‘sexy’ trend that we, designers, are going to repeat like parrots until the next sophisticated theory appears”. You can blame me if you want, but we know that there are a lot of empty words in the community, concepts and theories repeated like slogans, without even thinking about what is behind, who created them and why.
But, and this is a big ‘but’, I was happy to discover that I was wrong about this one, Design Thinking is not bullshit, at least not in the original idea and basic structure. Many people talk about it and make it look more complex than what it is with creative metaphors and a lot of ‘blah blah blah’, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is a very valid methodology in line with something I personally find very valuable in Product Design and in life in general, a beautiful combination of analysis and creativity. You can call it ‘Design Thinking’ if you want, I prefer to call it “Getting shit properly done”.
What is Design Thinking?
“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, President and CEO of IDEO
Or in plain words; Design Thinking is a methodology created to solve complex problems and bring the best possible solutions to the users using a combination of different stages that allows design thinkers to come up with innovative solutions, that at the same time, create value for both, users and business needs.
But this is just the definition, to fully understand Design Thinking we need to know the process, the ‘how’. Here you have it explained with rubber ducks, just to make it…
