UX Glossary · D
Design thinking
A problem-solving approach that starts from user needs, works through prototypes, and iterates.
Design thinking describes applying designers’ methods to problems that are not obviously design problems. The intellectual roots go back to Herbert Simon’s The Sciences of the Artificial in 1969, and the popular version comes from IDEO and the Stanford d.school in the 2000s.
The commonly taught model has five modes, which are stages only loosely: empathise, define, ideate, prototype, test.
The honest assessment
Design thinking succeeded at something real, which is giving non-designers a shared language for involving users and testing ideas before committing. In organisations that previously did neither, that is a genuine improvement.
It has also been fairly criticised. Running a two-day workshop with sticky notes and calling the output validated is common, and the framework’s popularity made it easy to perform the ritual without doing the research. Critics have argued it can flatten deep domain expertise into a process anyone can facilitate.
In practice
The parts that survive scrutiny are the parts with evidence behind them: talking to users before deciding, prototyping before building, testing before scaling. Those hold up regardless of what the method is called.
For regulated or safety-critical work, the more precise reference is user-centred design as defined in DIN EN ISO 9241-210, which is a standard rather than a framework.