Also known as design-thinking process, design thinking methodology
non-linear, iterative process used to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems, and create innovative solutions

What is Design Thinking? — updated 2026 | IxDF
Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative process that teams use to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions.
interaction-design.org →Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative process that teams use to understand users, challenge assumptions , redefine problems and create innovative solutions to prototype and test. It is most useful to tackle ill-defined or unknown problems and involves five phases: Empathize , Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test. Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative process that teams use to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems, and create innovative solutions to prototype and test. It is most useful to tackle problems that are ill defined or unknown. In a rapidly changing world, organizations must be able to adapt and innovate quickly to survive. Design thinking is a powerful tool that can help organizations to do just that. By focusing on the user and their needs, he can help teams to develop creative solutions that meet the real needs of the people they serve. The end goal of a design thinking process is to create a solution that is desirable, feasible and viable. This means that your product should satisfy the needs of a user, be feasible to implement and have a financial model as well. During the bulk of your design thinking process, you'll focus on desirability as you are concerned with testing your ideas and validating your hypothesis about your users. Towards the end of your project, however, you should bring the focus to feasibility and viability so that your solution can be sustainable. 2. The End Goal of Design Thinking: Be Desirable, Feasible and Viable 1. Desirability: Meet People’s Needs 4. Design Thinking Frameworks 1. Head, Heart and Hand by the American Institution of Graphic Arts (AIGA) 6. Design Thinking vs Agile Methodology 1. Similarities between Design Thinking and Agile 1. Iterative Process “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.” Design thinking fosters innovation . Companies must innovate to survive and remain competitive in a rapidly changing environment. In design thinking, cross-functional teams work together to understand user needs and create solutions that address those needs. Moreover, the design thinking process helps unearth creative solutions . Design teams use design thinking to tackle ill-defined/unknown problems (aka wicked problems ). Alan Dix, Professor of Human-Computer Interaction , explains what wicked problems are in this video. Wicked problems have properties... a whole list of properties. I got some of them here. One of them is about being unique. It doesn't mean you can't learn from previous ones, but you can't just take the solution you have from previous problem and apply it to new ones. Wicked problems, each one you have to look at individually. There's no definitive formulation that is actually even stating what the problem is, is problematic. Non-enumerable. You can't just go through a set of things and say which one of these is better. The space of potential ways you might tackle it is unbounded, so you can't just try the first idea and second idea. You've got to go beyond that. It's all about one shot operation, and this is about the fact that often you have to start executing the solution before you know what it is So imagine you are in the desert and you've only got a certain amount of water and you don't know which way to go. And you spot a sort of high, a very high dune. What you might do is walk to the dune in order to spy the land. But walking in to the dune, is a long way away, you, of course, use up some of your water. You got hot. You've used up some of your food. You've you've committed yourself. And real problems are often like that. No stopping rule Have you finished? And that's relates to the fact that often in the real world, you can't just say I've done it because actually you tend to have things that are better or worse solutions rather than the perfect solution. The
~17 min read
Design thinking refers to the set of cognitive, strategic and practical procedures used by designers in the process of designing, and to the body of knowledge that has been developed about how people reason when engaging with design problems.
Design thinking is also associated with prescriptions for the innovation of products and services within business and social contexts.
Excerpt from a page describing this subject · 40,000 chars · not written by Vinony
via Wikidata · CC0
via Wikidata sitelinks · CC0
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).