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Design thinking has come a long way since I wrote about it here in 2008. The most valuable company in the world places design at the center of everything it does. Designers are on the founding team of countless disruptive startups. Domains such as healthcare, education, and government have begun to prototype, iterate, and build more nimbly with a human-centered focus. Now that design thinking is everywhere, it’s tempting to simply declare it dead—to ordain something new in its place. It’s a methodology always in pursuit of unforeseen innovation, so reinventing itself might seem like the smart way forward. But in practice, design thinking is a set of tools that can grow old with us.

And I’d argue that in order to create sustained competitive advantage, businesses must be not just practitioners, but masters of the art.

Umpqua

Simply put, design thinking is not enough. True success comes from building a complete design system, and no organization can build such a system on design thinking alone

design thinking only has value when combined with design doing and supported by a strong design culture

successful design thinking must also include an element of making – early experience prototypes are important to validate thinking and align teams.

“We wanted to shift that culture towards a focus on users’ outcomes,” Hill says.

IBM today published its very own set of design thinking guidelines—a selection of best design practices the company hopes other big businesses will look to as they seek to remain relevant and profitable in a rapidly evolving corporate landscape.

corporate trend in design thinking

Impact Design Hub spoke with Sara Cornish and Josh Treuhaft, two graduates from the inaugural class of the School of Visual Arts’ Design for Social Innovation (DSI) program, a two-year, cross-disciplinary MFA program, which aims to teach students to address social challenges through systems-level design thinking and offers one of the first graduate degrees in this field.

Yeah, and I think there was an understanding that we were not only joining the program, but also helping to build it, which was really exciting. I remember that the interviews were so filled with anticipation. They told us, “This is going to be amazing. You’re going to be part of something that’s an absolute first. You’re going to help trailblaze the field.”

it was never explicitly about learning the way to design for social innovation. It was more about teaching a variety of different thought models, processes, and tools that you can use for various types of work relating to social impact. Ultimately, the program is about systems thinking and how things are connected to each other.

We need to look at the world around us and consider what global problems modern society will need our children to solve.

America needs massive change in our understanding of the learning experience, not simply in our exam results.

to change the world, we need a generation of new minds equipped with new ways of thinking.

It has felt like a more powerful version of inquiry through it’s focus on developing empathy, students iterating their understanding and then having to use their knowledge rather than just remembering information.

the most comprehensive definition came from a student: Design Thinking is human centred problem solving where designers go through a process which highly values empathy, feedback and multiple iterations in order to create a solution that best suits a user based on their needs and values

The most powerful student comment in this research shows both what students gain from the use of Design Thinking and a thirst for this authentic, meaningful approach to spread further: “I am quicker to find things that don’t feel very meaningful to me which bothers me when I know there can be meaningful ways to learn where even as a high school student I can be contributing to bigger projects that really impact people’s lives.”

A common trap for us is to take something in its infancy and try to scale it big. Build it. Launch it. Move on. Well, it doesn’t work like that. Remember how long it took before you mastered design thinking? This isn’t something that you have people try once and then expect them to get it. It takes about six to 10 experiential, immersive, contextually relevant experiences before someone finally “gets” it and can make it their own. Eight years later, we’re still building this skill into our employees, one experience at a time.

best advice I got from an SVP at the company was to stop wasting my time trying to find metrics to prove that Design for Delight was worth doing.

find the folks that are ready, willing, and happy to give it away.

The big idea behind the concept of maker empowerment is to describe a kind of disposition—a way of being in the world—that is characterized by seeing the designed world as malleable, and understanding oneself as a person of resourcefulness who can muster the wherewithal to change things through making.

The concept of maker empowerment is meant to be somewhat broader than the label of maker. It certainly includes maker-types—i.e., hackers, DIYers, and hobbyists—but it also includes people who may not define themselves as wholly as makers, yet take the initiative to engage in maker activities from time to time.

We teach art, or history, or auto mechanics not solely to train practitioners of these crafts, but to help all students develop the capacity to engage with world through the lenses of these disciplines—even if not all students will become artists or historians or auto mechanics. The concept of maker empowerment aims for this same breadth.

bringing human-centered design to education, government, healthcare — the sectors that need it most — requires a few important culture shifts:1. We need to bust out of siloed design practices.2. We need to develop ever-broader capacities, taking an interdisciplinary, deeply collaborative approach.

We turn our own questions on ourselves: What if we could help design education that readies today’s kids for the technologically enhanced (and challenged) environment they’ll grow up into? While we’re at it, what if we could then start addressing the very policy that shapes those educational institutions? That kind of moonshot systems thinking requires both agility and scale — it requires networked organizations and creative collectives. It requires designers who never stand still.

when individuals with their own aspirations and talents come together to build upon each other’s work and drive toward a greater goal, we can gain traction on much bigger challenges — and find new ways forward.

Engineering has been getting a lot of attention because of its real-world applications and clear job prospects, but learning to think like an engineer could be useful no matter what students decide to pursue for work

all ninth-graders

I felt like I didn’t know how to make enough stuff,”