How does design thinking solve complex problems?

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With the d.school, Kelley and his team of professors, consisting of Tim Brown, Terry Winograd and Larry Leifer, developed an approach that invited students not only from design disciplines, but also from all other disciplines to work together on complex issues. According to Tim Brown (IDEO), design thinking is about "using a designer's sensibility and methods to align people's needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer benefits and market opportunities."


User-oriented. Innovative. Multi-layered. These are central elements in design canadian colleges universities email list thinking. The starting point for the user-oriented approach of the design thinking method is always a problem that affects people. In order to find possible solutions, it is essential to understand and analyze the problem and the needs of the users concerned. The heart of the design thinking process is therefore always qualitative user research.

The insights gained from this then serve as the basis for all decisions during the development process. This process is similar to peeling an onion: the more layers a design thinker removes, the better he gets to know the potential users - until he finally gets to the core, which recognizes the most important needs and motivations. Some examples of questions that can pave the way into the customer's inner being are:

What do my users need?
How can I help you?
How do they experience the situation/product/my service?
To answer these questions, the design thinking process is divided into six phases: understanding, observing, defining a point of view, generating ideas, building prototypes and testing. These phases are often repeated several times in order to approach the core problem and possible solutions in a playful and exploratory manner. Depending on the scope of the project, this process can take days, weeks or even months. It does not matter whether the end result is a new service, a strategy or a product.

Design thinking is versatile and flexible and has found users all over the world over the past 30 years. Global corporations such as Apple, Netflix, Amazon, IBM, Airbnb and Google are among the first to successfully use the method for innovation. In Germany, design thinking forms a large part of the corporate DNA of Deutsche Bank, Volkswagen, Deutsche Bahn and Siemens, among others. But design thinking is also being used more and more frequently by medium-sized and small companies and start-ups in order to develop and test new ideas more quickly.