Introduction to Design Thinking

“Why isn’t technology working better for humans?”

This is the question that is at the center of technology design. People have responded to this question in various ways, shaping our approaches, habits, and mindsets. Our preferences and our biases. All the ways we answer this question add to the collective wisdom about how technology designers approach what they do. Although provocative, the question isn’t just about fixing what is broken. It is also about imagining the possible. But it’s about imagining what’s possible within the bounds of a specific set of constraints: the constraints of humans.

Human-Centered Design

Technology design work begins with the need to understand the human context, human capabilities, human expectations, and human outcomes. And to bring this understanding into the decision-making process when we design technology. And this is why designers refer to their work as “human-centered design.” Human-centered design is the radical idea that we should treat people as people, unique individuals with uniquely human lives, and not as objects or data points to be pushed through conversion funnels. Because this is not just being good at making stuff but being good at making stuff for people.

“Technology design is not just being good at making stuff, but being good at making stuff for people”

Human-centered design is about what it means to put the human at the center of the creative process. To apply the lens of human experience and outcomes to every decision, large and small.

The Adjacent Possible

A big part of technology design is the process of exploration. In science, there’s this idea of “the adjacent possible.” The adjacent possible refers to the range of potential answers to the question, ‘Where do we go from here?’ at any given moment.

In a typical game, a player can make a finite number of moves at any one point based on the current state and the game’s rules. This limited set of moves defines the “adjacent possible” set of game states at any moment. Players are good when they see the “adjacent possible” as better than their opponents.

Similarly, technology designers explore what exists within the constraints of systems, technology, psychology, and behaviors of users. At every point in the design process, some ideas are just one step away from the current state of thinking.

This “adjacent possible” constantly changes as designers’ understanding of the problem continues evolving and the ideas we pursue as we go. Technology design never happens in a straight line. It zigs, zags jump sideways and backward and often ends in dead-ends.

Sometimes the “adjacent possible” expands as new possibilities come into view. And sometimes, it contracts because we’ve learned something that takes options off the table or because every idea carries the rejection of incompatible ideas.

So much of the growth of designers entails growing the ability to understand the adjacent possible throughout the design process. The more designers can do this, the more likely we are to find genuinely innovative solutions. Creative possibilities that are not visible to others.

Design Thinking Mindset and Values

Our access to the adjacent possible is not a matter of our tools and methods but of the mindset and values we bring to the creative process. The way that we broaden our access to the adjacent possible happens daily. What matters is how you make choices throughout the creative process.

“If your creative process is going well, it’s going to throw a lot of choices at you.”

A lot of decisions to make for which the answers could be clearer. It’s about how you respond to those difficult choices and adapt as you move through your creative process — ideally, it is always a discovery process.

Characteristics of Effective Designers

Paying Attention to Context

Designers have to come to this process of discovery with open eyes. They need to soak up all of the information they can about the context of the problem to understand the nature of the problem. Some issues are rooted in old market dynamics; others are rooted in technological shifts. Good designers learn about both. They always try to take in as much information as possible about a problem. They are always seeking a bit of context and more detail. It is not just about users or the market but also about the organizations they work within.

“Without human awareness, we can never be truly human-centred.”

Designers will read articles about the people who lead these organizations to understand their thinking better – to learn how their philosophies shaped the company’s culture. Regarding the human side, going in with open eyes means wanting to learn as much as you can about the people who use the design. This is why research is foundational to any human-centered design practice. Design without research is like solving a physical puzzle with closed eyes.

Curiosity and Continuous Learning

The insistence on always knowing more speaks to a more profound trait of good designers. They are inherently curious people – these are people for whom every answer leads to more questions. They always want to know more about systems, organizations, technology, and, most of all, people. Our work requires us to wonder about our fellow human beings constantly. Wonder about their thoughts, their feelings, and their experiences.

“How can you be human-centred if you aren’t curious about people?”

When our relationship with our users is one of curiosity, of genuinely wanting to understand them more deeply, that understanding will always inform every part of the design process, even if we aren’t talking about the users at that moment.

Exploring Varied and Diverse Problems

“Going broad” means being curious about many different things. It means tackling many problems and working across various product categories and industries. Because you might not think that what you learn in one area can be applied elsewhere, but frequently it can. You can find connections between problems that, on the surface, seem very different because design solutions have broader applications than the specific context in which they might have been created. And valuable insights can come from unlikely sources. So you can find yourself surprised when a previous project for a leisure company inspires the answer to a problem for a financial services company.

Going deep means immersing yourself in whatever problem you’re facing to allow it to become your world for a while. To carry it around with you, always running in the background. Because that background processing is what enables those kinds of lateral, intuitive leaps that lead to innovation.

Thinking Systemically for Better Solutions

Experiences are complex. A lot is going on in any given human experience. When designers go deep, they can develop a holistic sense of the problem and a holistic way of thinking about solutions to the problem.

Designers of human experiences are orchestrating those experiences across many variables and appealing to users’ senses, rational minds, and irrational feelings. We are doing all this while balancing their tasks, goals, and needs with the capabilities and constraints of the systems we’re building.

Experiences are so complex that they can’t be reduced to a set of ideal choices determined with scientific precision by research. Research can inform our creative decisions but can’t dictate them — experience is too messy.

“We don’t do research to inform the design, we do it to inform the designer.”

The designer must take in the problem from multiple points of view and synthesize a holistic understanding of the problem to create a holistic solution. They think in terms of systems, design, visual, and interface systems, all layered together, working together toward a cohesive goal.

Broadening Perspectives and Seeking Input

Part of thinking systemically is recognizing that we, designers and users alike, are embedded in the larger system called “humanity.” Our work is not done by a lone genius slaving away in the workshop, the way a painter, composer, or mathematician might work. Being human-centered means broadening our perspectives beyond ourselves and our own experiences. It means seeking input from those we know see things differently from us – because that is how we stretch, learn and grow. So we stay connected to the larger world, consistently placing our work in the larger context of what we collectively know about people, technology, and society and how all of these things influence our experiences.

Flexibility and Adapting to Context

Figuring out “where to go next” requires having an open mind. The philosophy can be described as “Strong opinions weakly held.” It means always having a point of view on the next step to take, but at any point, be ready to drop the best idea and start over — even if starting over means having no idea. Sometimes that means admitting that we didn’t understand the problem as well as we thought. Or to admit that mistakes were made along the way. We need to move beyond our egos, which get in the way of letting go of things that no longer work.

Our willingness to change our minds makes our ideas flexible and adaptable to new and changing contexts. If we don’t take that flexibility as part of our process, we come out with brittle ideas that break down when the context shifts. We can avoid this brittleness by resisting the impulse to subscribe to a single approach for all design problems. To remain flexible, we must collect a toolkit of design practices. There is no one true way to do this work. There are various methods and the knowledge of when each is best applied.

We choose the most suitable tools for a task rather than forcing each to fit our available tools. Put down the computer, and pick up a pen. Put down the pen, and start telling a story. Whatever it takes.

Having more than one way to think about a problem gives us more than one way to see possible solutions, expanding our access to the adjacent possible. So like a tree whose branches bend in a strong wind, we can bend instead of breaking, weather the storms of organizational, technological, and economic change.

Empathy and Compassion in Design Thinking

Understanding and connecting with users is a fundamental aspect of design thinking. Empathy, the ability to perceive and share the feelings of others, plays a crucial role in this process. It enables designers to enter users’ shoes, gaining insights into their emotional experiences, motivations, and desires.

Being human-centered challenges us to open ourselves to other people’s emotional experiences deeply. It requires us to engage with others as emotional beings and reconcile ourselves to our creative choices’ impact on their emotional lives. Empathy is vital to this work. We must be aware of what others feel beyond simply understanding what they are trying to accomplish.

Empathy fosters a deep connection between designers and users, allowing for a more intuitive understanding of their needs. By developing this emotional bond, designers can create solutions that address the practical aspects of users’ lives and the emotional ones. This holistic approach leads to more satisfying and meaningful user experiences.

However, empathy alone is not enough to transform our design thinking process. To take it to the next level, we must incorporate another essential element: compassion.

While empathy allows us to understand and share users’ emotions, compassion takes it a step further by inspiring us to take action to alleviate their struggles or improve their experiences. In design thinking, incorporating compassion means actively striving to create solutions that meet users’ needs and enhance their well-being and happiness.

But it requires more than empathy – it requires compassion. It requires compassion for our users’ daily emotional pressures beyond our control. It requires compassion for people who make different choices than we make, come from different life experiences, and see the world differently from us. Empathy is not enough because empathy only tells us about other people. What we do in response to that is up to us. And the choice we must make is to be compassionate towards our users. In design thinking, failing to act on our empathetic understanding can lead to solutions that fail to genuinely address users’ emotional needs and desires.

By combining empathy and compassion, designers can create more impactful and human-centered solutions. This approach ensures that our designs cater to users’ practical requirements and foster positive emotions, deepening their connection to our work.

Designing with Meaning and Purpose

When there is a sense of meaning to our work, it guides our choices. It gives us purpose, a role that we play in the world — not a mission, not a finite objective to be achieved, but a state of being we continually live in. Embracing meaning and purpose in design thinking helps us stay focused on the human-centered aspect of our work, ensuring that our creations have a lasting impact on the users’ lives.

With a strong sense of purpose, we strive to create designs that acknowledge and respect the inherent imperfections of human nature. Yes, we want to reduce the incidents of user error out there in the world, but we also want to acknowledge that users will make errors. Machine-like perfection is not the point. Systems that acknowledge the impossibility of machine-like perfection are the point. We can create more adaptable, resilient solutions that accommodate users’ diverse needs and capabilities by accepting this reality.

Meaning and purpose drive us to create designs that solve problems and enrich users’ lives. When we honor the emotional aspects of user experiences and design with compassion, we create solutions that resonate on a deeper level and ultimately lead to more fulfilling interactions.

Cultivating Love for People and the World in Design

A fundamental aspect of design thinking is our love and appreciation for the people we design for and the world we live in. By embracing this mindset, we can create solutions that address practical needs and honor our users’ emotional experiences.

You have to love people. Honor them in your design choices, no matter how irrational these people are or how often they overlook your carefully laid-out interaction cues. By valuing users’ unique perspectives, we can create solutions that resonate with them, leading to more satisfying and memorable experiences.

Beyond that, you have to love the world, love design, and all the incredible possibilities we can make real through the processes of creative problem-solving. Fall in love with the experience and the rich array of ways to shape experiences for one another, and fall in love with the vibrant diversity and complexity in our world that allows such richness.

This love for people and the world around us fuels our passion for design, inspiring us to create more meaningful and impactful solutions. By focusing on the emotional aspects of design and cultivating empathy and compassion, we can create experiences that truly enhance the lives of our users.

The Power of Imagination

Although provocative, the question isn’t just about fixing what is broken. It is also about imagining the possible. But it’s about imagining what’s possible within the bounds of a specific set of constraints: the constraints of humans.

Learning from Failure

One of the most uncomfortable things about design is facing failure. When our work misses the mark, it can be disheartening and lead us to question our abilities.

We drew the wrong conclusion; we gathered the wrong data; we prioritized the wrong things — we got it wrong. And inside, some of us might believe that this makes us wrong as people, as designers. You may believe that this makes you “not good enough.”

“..we need to rise above that voice of shame and own the faulty assumptions, bad judgements and unsatisfactory outcomes..”

This is yet again the ego getting in the way of sound judgment. We must rise above that voice of shame and own faulty assumptions, bad judgments, and unsatisfactory outcomes. This way, we can better understand why they were faulty, bad, or unsatisfactory. If we don’t get caught up in the ego, we can learn faster and make different choices next time.

Cultivating Personal Growth

The best designers are people who cultivate themselves. In most cases, designers – like all humans – grow into these qualities over time. Good designers are invested in their own growth, but not simply from the professional development perspective. They invest in their growth as human beings in many ways that have nothing to do with design.

Pursuing Non-Design Projects

Designers can benefit from creative projects and pursuits beyond design in which they invest their time and energy. These pursuits enable them to experiment, use different muscles, and find meaning they can’t find elsewhere. Engaging in activities unrelated to design can spark new ideas, boost creative thinking, and ultimately help designers become more innovative in their work. Furthermore, exploring other fields of interest can contribute to a well-rounded understanding of various disciplines, making designers more versatile and adaptable.

The Value of Personal Interests

Having passions outside of design work fills up designers as people. Music, art, theatre, sports, and travel are just a few interests that can enrich designers, deepening and diversifying the experiences they empathize with and can draw on in their work. These passions make designers more human-centered by broadening their understanding of the world and its people. They also help designers develop unique perspectives and personal styles to set them apart.

The Importance of Human-Centered Design

Being human-centered is more than just about centering our design process around other humans. It could be about being centered in our humanity. By cultivating our humanity, we cultivate our ability to connect to others. In other words, what makes us more human-centered might also make us more human.

Vulnerability, Authenticity, and Being Human-Centered

Part of embracing our humanity is being open to vulnerability and authenticity. Acknowledging our own feelings, experiences, and emotions allows designers to build stronger connections with their clients and end-users. It also promotes a more empathetic approach to design, as designers can draw on their experiences to inform their work.

Designers who embrace their humanity also accept their faults and infinite capacity to synthesize information, ask new questions, make judgments, take chances, and follow threads into new possibilities. Recognizing and accepting our imperfections can help us better understand and empathize with the people we design for, ultimately leading to more effective and human-centered design solutions.

The Importance of Questioning

Flexibility in changing conditions is great, but it’s hard to get there if we can’t achieve that flexibility within ourselves. Designers need the willingness to ask questions and avoid resting on assumptions or past experiences in deciding what is true and correct in each unique situation.

Being willing to question means being willing to challenge your own ideas. It means admitting that your solution could be flawed. Moving past our ego’s attachment to our work is critical. Questioning your own ideas also invites others into dialogue. If you show you are willing to subject your ideas to open, honest inquiry, people will engage in the inquiry process with you. They’ll help you challenge your ideas; they’ll help you make your ideas better. And hopefully, they’ll invite you to challenge their ideas too.

“..being willing to question means being willing to challenge your own ideas. It means admitting that your solution could be flawed..”

Moreover, designers must be willing to question themselves, the people, and the systems that shape their work. This involves examining our environments, as the design is always situated in the context of human, organizational, and technological systems. To successfully create human-centered experiences, we must understand our constraints and adapt accordingly.

We also have to be willing to question ourselves in other ways. To question our best practices, proven methodologies, and universals that apply to every design problem. Staying open-minded and questioning how we work enables us to continue growing.

Embracing Discomfort and Uncertainty

All of this questioning – of ourselves, questioning of our collaborators and our partners, can be an uncomfortable process.

“In reality, a lot about design is uncomfortable – if you’re doing it right.”

Because exploring new ideas means, by definition, you’re going places where you have not been before, doing things you have not done until now. It can be – should be – a scary feeling. And sometimes, you feel like you are lost in the woods, wondering if you will ever find your way out. You have to be okay with that – you have to be comfortable with that uncertainty. As much as we might always want more context, information, data, and insight, we also have to be comfortable with not having all the answers. As much as the design process involves making judgments, it is often about suspending judgment. And suspending judgment can be challenging because we feel pressure to conclude.

Another source of discomfort arises when designing for people who are very different from us. It requires us to acknowledge the differences in experiences and bridge the gap between our understanding and their reality. Uncertainty is introduced when we have to bridge the gap between our own experience and the experience of other people. It can be uncomfortable because it requires us to acknowledge how different we can be.

Incorporating Physicality

Good designers bring a real sense of embodiment to their work. We tend to think of technology design as intellectual work, but being present in your body is an important part of the creative process.

An entire scientific field is dedicated to “embodied cognition”, which studies how our physical engagement with the world influences our thinking and creativity. As you think through problems, get up from your desk, move around, physically manipulate objects – or go for a walk. By changing how our bodies relate to our environments from moment to moment, we access cognitive resources and problem-solving capabilities that we can’t get any other way.

This affects the creative process in a couple of different ways. Designers tend to be visual thinkers, so we create visual artifacts – slide shows, presentation decks, wireframes, and mockups. This allows us to play with ideas, give them shape and color and manipulate and transform them in our mind’s eye. By moving beyond the simple visual – by creating and working with physical artifacts – we can also engage the visual and motor-sensory systems – feeling our way through the problem even if we are still working at the level of abstract ideas.

A second way embodiment manifests in the creative process is by changing our stimuli. Stand instead of sitting. Go for a walk – get out instead of spending all your time in the office. When we change our stimuli, we change our thinking, which changes our access to the “adjacent possible.”

Self-Awareness

To be present in our bodies, we must be present with ourselves, aware of what’s happening to us from moment to moment. Physical self-awareness can range from knowing when it’s time to turn up the room’s heat to when it’s time to go to the bathroom. If we’re present with our physical bodies, we can become more aware of what we physically need to do our best work.

Some of us know that our peak creative time is first thing in the morning after a croissant and coffee. And for some of us, it’s in the middle of the afternoon, when the sun is out, and we’ve been able to work and get momentum going. And others function best in the middle of the night while the world sleeps.

If you know what works for you and your body, you can create patterns in your life optimized for your optimal personal creativity. If we aren’t paying attention to the body, then we also aren’t paying attention to the cues the body gives us in the creative process when ideas resonate.

The Value of Intuition

The development of creative instinct – means tuning into intuition. The responses from the unconscious mind are transmitted to us through bodily sensations. The unconscious mind works more quickly than the conscious mind. It can process input and respond to information in a fraction of the time it takes the conscious mind to respond.

We receive intuitive messages from the unconscious mind as sensations in our bodies: butterflies in our stomach, our heart skipping a beat, a shiver down our spine. There are many subtle ways in which our unconscious mind gives us clues – reactions to what is being processed. There is a sense of energy when you start moving toward a suitable solution in the creative process. We can feel it in our bodies if we can stay connected to it.

So if we can bring a sense of connection and intuition into the design critique process, we can notice how we respond. Do you start to get fidgety in your chair while discussing an idea? Are people leaning in? Am I feeling physically withdrawn? All of these things tell us what resonates with an idea for us.

Inevitably, when we get to the end of that process, we can always backtrack and fill in with a rational explanation for why the design works. Still, if we listen to those things that our bodies are telling us to feel like the right ideas, we can make more of those intuitive leaps, and broaden (again) our access to the adjacent possible.

The Power of Play in Exploration

In design thinking, exploration is vital to discovering innovative solutions and creative ideas. Embracing a spirit of play enables designers to stay open to dynamic, moment-to-moment opportunities, allowing them to identify the most promising and potential-rich concepts.

This process of exploration requires of us a spirit of play. It means being open to the flow and the dynamic moment-to-moment opportunities that present themselves. Figuring out which is the most promising seems to have the richest potential.

By adopting a playful mindset, we can approach the design process with an open heart, ready to delve into new possibilities without fear or restriction. This spirit of play enriches our creative process and helps us navigate the complex and ever-changing design thinking landscape with curiosity and enthusiasm.

Design thinking the power of play

Embracing Impractical and Absurd Possibilities

A spirit of play also requires us to open ourselves to impractical, impossible, science fiction, and absurd possibilities. By keeping ourselves open to ridiculous possibilities, we prevent ourselves from developing unconscious filters, developing these internal editors and sensors that declare some ideas unacceptable, to declare other ideas off-limits. Those sensors restrict our access to the adjacent possible. So it takes conscious effort to stay in a spirit of play.

“A spirit of play requires us to open ourselves to impractical, impossible, science fiction, absurd possibilities.”

By welcoming seemingly impractical and absurd ideas, we challenge ourselves to think outside the box and expand our creative horizons. This mindset allows us to break free from the limitations of conventional thinking and explore the full spectrum of possibilities, ultimately leading to more innovative and groundbreaking solutions.

“By keeping ourselves open to ridiculous possibilities, we prevent ourselves from developing unconscious filters”

Collaborating and Communicating through Play in Groups

That spirit of play is also important in inviting others into the creative process. Other people bring diverse ways of thinking and different perspectives informed by their own experiences. This requires us to figure out how to work with people who think and work differently from the way we do. It requires us to develop approaches to collaboration and communication that allow for the free flow of creative ideas, even if those ideas come from different places.

“Creative leadership means finding ways to leverage diverse strengths and integrate them into a single creative process”

Encouraging a playful atmosphere within a group setting nurtures creativity and enhances collaboration and communication among team members. By embracing the spirit of play, designers can effectively engage with others and create a space where everyone feels comfortable sharing their unique perspectives and ideas.

Group play allows for a richer creative process, drawing on team members’ collective intelligence and diverse experiences.

Embracing Diversity for Innovative Design

In the world of design thinking, it’s essential to acknowledge that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to design. Each team member can approach design from their unique strengths and perspectives. Creative leadership means finding ways to leverage those strengths and integrate them into a single creative process. It means noticing how divergent thinking plays out on your teams and finding ways to balance and blend complementary approaches.

“We must acknowledge that there is no one way to do design and that each team member can approach it from their own unique strengths.”

We can foster a more inclusive, innovative, and successful design process by valuing team members’ strengths and approaches. This collaborative mindset enhances the final product and promotes a sense of belonging and unity within the team, fostering an environment where everyone feels valued and empowered to contribute their best work.

The Importance of Storytelling

Playing well with others also means having various ways of communicating ideas. This is especially important during those phases of the design process, where our ideas could be clearer and more informed. Finding the best way to communicate an idea to the specific people we’re collaborating with — whether that’s writing an email or drawing on a whiteboard, or simply talking something through — helps bring those people into our process earlier, bringing them along for the ride, where they can help us evaluate and validate ideas before they become maturely developed.

No matter where we are in the design process, we must tell stories well. Sometimes we tell pictures to tell stories, and sometimes we use words. Still, finding the narrative that captures an experience’s essence becomes an effective communication tool and a way to organize our ideas about the design.

“Creative leadership means leveraging diverse strengths and integrating them into a single creative process.”

Playing and Exploring in Product Design

This process of exploration requires of us a spirit of play. It means being open to the flow and the dynamic moment-to-moment opportunities that present themselves. Figuring out whichever one is the one that feels most promising, that seems to have the richest potential.

A spirit of play also requires us to open ourselves to impractical, impossible, science fiction, and absurd possibilities. By keeping ourselves open to ridiculous possibilities, we prevent ourselves from developing unconscious filters, developing these internal editors and sensors that declare specific ideas unacceptable, to declare certain ideas off-limits. Those sensors restrict our access to the adjacent possible. So it takes conscious effort to stay in a spirit of play.

Collaborating and Playing Well in Groups

That spirit of play is also essential in inviting others into the creative process. Other people bring diverse ways of thinking and different perspectives informed by their own experiences. This requires us to figure out how to work with people who think and work differently from how we do. It requires us to develop approaches to collaboration and communication that allow for the free flow of creative ideas, even if those ideas come from different places.

We must acknowledge that there is no one way to design and that each team member can approach it from their unique strengths. Creative leadership means finding ways to leverage those strengths and integrate them into a single creative process. It means noticing how divergent thinking plays out on your teams and finding ways to balance and blend complementary approaches.

The Power of Storytelling

Playing well with others also means having various ways of communicating ideas. This is especially important during those phases of the design process where our ideas are vague and unformed. Finding the best way to communicate an idea to the specific people we’re collaborating with — whether that’s writing an email or drawing on a whiteboard, or simply talking something through — helps bring those people into our process earlier, bringing them along for the ride, where they can help us evaluate and validate ideas before they become maturely developed.

No matter where we are in the design process, we must tell stories well. Sometimes we tell pictures to tell stories, and sometimes use words. Still, finding the narrative that captures an experience’s essence becomes an effective communication tool and a way to organize our ideas about the design.

Closing

In conclusion, human-centered design is an essential approach for creating meaningful and impactful solutions that cater to the needs and desires of users. Designers can better understand their users and create tailored solutions by fostering empathy, compassion, and curiosity. Embracing failure, questioning assumptions, and cultivating a spirit of play are crucial components for driving innovation and creative problem-solving. Designers should invest in personal growth and embrace diverse perspectives to enhance their design capabilities. By adopting these principles, we can create a more empathetic and user-focused world, ultimately improving people’s lives through thoughtful and impactful design.

References

Change Management Lean and Agile Principles Organizational Culture Requirements Management