In 1958, 4 months after Sputnik launched and President Eisenhower created NASA, a Stanford engineering professor named John Arnold proposed that design engineering should be human-centered.

This was a strange thing for Arnold to introduce. It was an era in which engineers were largely focused on twin Cold War driven goals: the space race and the optimization of the hydrogen bomb.

Inspired by Arnold’s work, engineering professor Bob McKim, with the help of art professor Matt Kahn, created an engineering program called Product Design. Within this program, McKim and others helped create a design thinking process that became the foundation for Stanford’s d.school, as well as the guiding framework for design-driven companies like IDEO.

Just as the space race resulted in the invention of Velcro and satellite communications, design thinking plays a large role in how we interact with computers (the mouse and notebook), how we deliver our healthcare, and how we do our banking now and in the future.

Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.
- TIM BROWN, IDEO

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Why has design thinking been embraced not only by forward-thinking innovators like IDEO but large enterprises like IBM? For one, it brings everyone into the process, not just designers; using the design process helps companies solve wicked problems with clear eyes.

Design thinking also helps scale the design process through large organizations.  Business leaders who use the shared vocabulary and toolset of design thinking can confidently create better, human-centered user experiences and disruptive products.

Finally, design thinking helps to instill a bias towards action, balanced with a user-centered perspective that guides the team towards the right outcome.

The design thinking process is not necessarily linear, nor is there one canonical way to approach it; it is an iterative system with many variations. However, Stanford’s d.school teaches a framework that can help jump-start the process for almost any problem:

We’ll walk you through the 5 steps of this design thinking framework, which will provide a toolkit for design challenges large and small in your organization.

The core of the design thinking approach is a focus on empathy, or using a beginner’s mindset and immersing yourself in the user’s experience to uncover deep needs and insights.

Defining the problem with a point of view (POV) is a key part of the process: who is your user (with as many specific details as possible); what is their deep, unmet need; why is this insightful (what insights did you glean from your empathetic needfinding process?). Often, reframing the problem using a unique POV will lead to more innovative solution spaces.

The design thinking process goes through a cycle of generative flaring and selective focusing. In the definition phase, we narrowed down to a specific Point of View; now, in the ideation phase, we flare out and generate as many ideas as possible.

For many designers, prototyping is where the fun begins. Sometimes the key to good empathy is sharing or co-creating a prototype with your users and getting feedback. Prototyping helps us learn, solve disagreements, and test hypotheses quickly and with minimal repercussions.

By testing our prototypes with real users and getting feedback, we can refine our POV, learn more about our users, and make the next iteration of the product that much better. As they say at Stanford’s d.school: “Prototype as if you know you’re right, but test as if you know you’re wrong.”

‍These steps should be considered a way to get started with design thinking. Over time, you will adapt them to your working style and make them your own. With this flexible toolkit, you’ll be prepared to tackle any project, from a new app to—perhaps—new NASA moonshots.

With thanks to Bill Burnett, executive director of the Design Program at Stanford, for giving the lecture that inspired this introduction.

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