Design Thinking Essay -- creative problem resolution

Design thinking is a process 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 the design thinking (Simon, 1969, p. 55). Design thinking includes imagination and reason, a combination of convergent and divergent thought, and creativity. Design thinking might be thought of as dialectic, or conversation. It involves design wisdom, judgment, and knowledge. Lastly, design thinking is skill (Hegeman, 2008). Design thinking process has eight generation stages: observation or analysis, framework, imperative or facts, solutions or alternatives, alternative evaluation and concept selection, implementation, construction, and post occupancy evaluation. Within these eight stages, problems can be framed, the right questions can be asked, more idea can be created, and the best answers can be chosen. The steps aren’t linear; they occur simultaneously and can be repeated. Although design is always subject to personal taste, design thinkers share a common set of value the drive innovation: these value are meanly creativity, ambidextrous thinking, teamwork, and user focus curiosity (Owen, 1993). Client(s) may be in the first stage of our design thinking sequences (Archer, 1984, p. 67), and then the designer job is to explore what is the problem, what do we want, what do they need: to produce a design to meet the requirements. The initial design problem presented to the designer may be poorly and incompletely described (McDonnell, 1997, p. 45... ...as a Learning Process: Embedding Design Thinking. California Management Review, 50(1), 24-56. Retrieved from: http://epic.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/pub/Home/TrendsAndConceptsII2008/2_InnovationAsLearningProcess.pdf. Cross, N. (2006). Designerly Ways of Knowing. London, Springer-Verlag. Hegeman, J. (2008). The Thinking Behind Design. Master Thesis submitted to the school of design, Carngie Mellon University. Retrieved from: http://jamin.org/portfolio/thesis-paper/thinking-behind-design.pdf. McDonnell, J. (1997). Descriptive models for interpreting design. Design Studies, 18, 457-473. Owen, C. (1993). Considering Design Fundamentally. Design Process Newsletter, 5(3), 2. Oxman, R. (1997). Design by re-representation: a model of visual reasoning in design. Design studies, 18, 329-347. Simon, H. (1969). The Science of the Artificial. Cambridge: MIT Press.