Design Thought Leader

Whether it’s called design thinking, lateral thinking, right-brain thinking, systems thinking, integrative thinking, futures thinking, or my own term of ‘metathinking,’ from my perspective, the concept itself is rooted in a capacity to understand the world and our relationship to it, and within it, in a different way.

Design thinking is a ‘human-centered approach,’ and for me that means truly getting down to the core of what we think it means to be human, of what it ‘should’ look like, and how we want to experience life. When we see the word ‘design,’ we may immediately think of just products made by a snooty designer; items we see displayed at a museum that bear no resemblance to something we’d find in our home, artwork that makes us somehow feel stupid because we don’t understand why it’s so special, or architecture that is said to make “a statement” but feels completely alien in the way it impacts us. That is not the same design that is being proposed by design thinking. …

So whether you hope to employ design thinking to restructure the culture of an organization or to innovate a new product or service, it’s important to remember that it’s more than a set of simple tactics that can be implemented overnight. It’s more like a new ecology of mind, that takes time to grow, adapt, and evolve. It still requires an adherence to sound business decision-making, but also a commitment to challenge one’s own beliefs about ‘the way things work,’ and to keep coming back to a human-centered approach by focusing on addressing people’s unspoken and unmet needs.

Venessa Miemis
Pursuing a Masters in Media Studies at the New School, New York City

Design is no longer just about form anymore but is a method of thinking that can let you to see around corners. And the high tech breakthroughs that do count today are not about speed and performance but about collaboration, conversation and co-creation.

Bruce Nussbaum
Editor, BusinessWeek’s innovation and design coverage

Put simply, in order for ‘design thinking’ to be effective (i.e. make the transition from abstract theory or philosophy to a meaningful process of adding value), it has to be applied or limited to a specific relevant context. This might sound incredibly obvious, but my own experience and some of the intellectual discussions recently in the blogosphere indicate that a lot of designers are reluctant to pragmatically constrain the scope or ambition of their thinking. It is this reluctance and the spiralling intellectual gymnastics that follow that leads to ‘design thinking’ becoming esoteric or sounding overly ‘expert’ to novices or non-designers.

Design comes from the latin word ‘designato’—‘to mark out’, thus marking out the boundary or scope of a design problem. To focus creativity has always been a fundamental part of ‘design thinking’ or the design process, perhaps even the fundamental part.

Continued reflection and discussion on the design process and its terminology is particularly important in a new discipline such as service design, however, when it comes to engaging others we also have to contextualise how our ‘design thinking’ is actually going to make things better for people.

Fergus Bisset
Design Researcher