5 different ways to think about design thinking.

It is normal that taking into account the multiplicity of approaches and tendencies, we can identify several streams of thinking and education about design. In this post, we selected five of the most popular ones and we present you in a very easy to understand way. Enjoy it.   

Thinking about design thinking:

Contrary to what we might think, design thinking has been around for such a long time. More precisely, probably since the 1960’s, and has been evolving until it configured what we have right now. But what we have right now is just a myriad of decades of different ideas, tools, and methods that previously used to belong to social sciences, creative fields, or technology.

It is normal that taking into account the multiplicity of approaches and tendencies, we can identify several streams of thinking and education about design. In this post, we selected five of the most popular ones and we present you in a very easy to understand way. Enjoy it.

Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (d.school)

The design experts at HPI Stanford present a model where first of all you focus on empathizing with your user needs and then focus on defining what problems they have to focus on, and after that, you enter in a cluster of ideation, making things tangible (aka prototyping) and then validating your first prototypes with testing with real users in controlled environments.

IDEO

IDEO, an international design firm focused on sparking innovation, includes a broader discovery phase where you not just empathize with, but do in-depth research discovery on the scenarios. The fact that you not only talk about testing but also about evolution involves the verbal extension of the life cycle of the project entering in a loop of iterations.

Google Venture’s Design Sprint

Part of the main differences between the Design Sprint and other methods is that this one is time-framed and tied to a series of tools that can help you achieve results in short cycles of time (for example, 4 or 5 days depending on what you need) and with a certain, and kind of non-flexible, pre-defined toolkit.

SAP

The german, product-oriented design company proposes a simple yet complete step where we can see the importance not only of the actions but also of the interactions between them understanding it as a cycle.

UK DESIGN COUNCIL

The design council proposal about how to proceed in design thinking processes takes the shape of the double diamond that combines strategy definition and execution of the process in a simple and straightforward way that includes, inside, the cycle of learning, building, and measuring.

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