Design Thinking Expanded

Design Thinking's goal is to question traditional practices and ways of doing things; to "see" new ideas; to be able to express and share those ideas; to collaborate within teams and begin turning ideas into realities.

The key point for business is that design thinking can be just as effective and work hand-in-glove with more traditional management techniques. While design thinking tools were initially developed by designers in their constant search for truly innovative new products, they can be embedded into any business and taught to people with no background in the visual arts.

In a nutshell Design Thinking is:
• Collaborative: especially with others having different and complimentary experience, to generate better work and form agreement;
• Abductive: inventing new options to find new and better solutions to new problems;
• Experimental: building prototypes and posing hypotheses, testing them, and iterating this activity to find what works and what doesn’t work to manage risk;
• Personal: considering the unique context of each problem and the people involved;
• Integrative: perceiving an entire system and its linkages; and
• Interpretive: devising how to frame the problem and judge the possible solutions.

Wikipedia definition of design thinking:

Design Thinking is a methodology for practical, creative resolution of problems or issues that looks for an improved future result. It is the essential ability to combine empathy, creativity and rationality to meet user needs and drive business success. Unlike analytical thinking, design thinking is a creative process based around the 'building up' of ideas. There are no judgments early on in design thinking. This eliminates the fear of failure and encourages maximum input and participation in the ideation and prototype phases. Outside the box thinking is encouraged in these earlier processes since this can often lead to creative solutions.

NZ definitely better by design

Better by Design is a specialist group within New Zealand's national economic development agency. Their programs connect ambitious companies with leading business experts and design practitioners and are built on the principle that design strategies and processes can be applied to businesses to improve the bottom line. With so much choice available to customers, companies must ensure their products and services are meaningful and relevant. Design unlocks better business – better thinking, better approaches, and better customer connections. Properly applied, design can give you a sustainable advantage, help you command a premium price, gain market share and even reduce production costs. www.betterbydesign.org.nz

Design Thinking Australia: Deborah Kneeshaw

Helps organisations to harness design thinking to grow creative talent and build a culture of innovation. We will help you generate the kind of ideas that create remarkable products, services and strategies. Our creative techniques will make you a market leader – and keep you there. Our workshops introduce you and your team to creative thinking and collaboration. These highly interactive programs can be focused on general content, or custom designed around a specific company goal or issue. We help you establish a creative corporate culture and/or bring design thinking to a specific project. www.designthinking.com.au/

Idea Couture

Idea Couture is a strategic innovation and experience design firm. They partner with clients to uncover uncommon ideas that will advance business goals, create shareholder value and leverage social technologies to transform enterprises. We bring together the analytical capability and financial competency of a strategic consultancy, the customer empathy of a research and design firm, and the creativity and technological capability of an interactive agency. The firm’s core philosophy is that innovation happens at the intersection of business economics, social technology and design culture. www.ideacouture.com

IDEO

A global design consultancy that creates impact through design. Design thinking also enables us to collectively tackle problems and ideas that are more complex than the lone designer can imagine: inaccessible healthcare, billions of people living on a few dollars a day, energy usage outpacing the planet's ability to support it, education systems that fail students, and beyond. These problems all have people at their heart. They require a collaborative, human-centered, iterative, and practical approach to finding the best ideas and ultimate solutions. Design thinking is just such an approach to innovation. www.ideo.com/thinking/approach/

Design Thinking at Singapore Polytechnic

Design Thinking course at Sinapore Polytechnic. They have developed capabilities and accumulated significant experience in the instruction and practice of Design Thinking through a focus on developing Educational approach, ecosystems and people. spdesignthinking.sg/index.html

Institute of Design at Stanford

Five years ago, we started with a dream about building a place for design at Stanford. We wanted to build a place where design thinking is the glue that binds people together, a place we called the d.school. The d.school has become a hub for Stanford students and faculty in engineering, medicine, business, the humanities, and education to learn design thinking and work together to solve big problems in a human centered way. These students have taken the design thinking methodology and applied it in new places to new problems. Along the way, they have developed their own process for reliably producing innovative solutions to nearly any challenge. dschool.stanford.edu/index.php