Vision

Promote Design Thinking as a core competency to support all organizations to become more effective at adding value through a human centered design approach to problem solving.

Mission

• Create a strong community to develop the standard of design thinking practice globally
• Create a center of excellence for design thinking and promote the results of excellent projects
• Seek out the resources needed to solve some of the worlds most intractable problems

What is Design Thinking?

Design Thinking is a human centered approach to problem solving.

It requires a methodology, a general process and the development of skills in order to use it to solve problems. Understanding the methodology and developing the skills are by far the more important. Skills require practice, repetition and deep thinking in order to get good at them.

Design Thinking holds the promise of solving almost any problem, but practicing and becoming an expert in the craft of Design Thinking (sometimes referred to as Design Doing) and how you develop buy-in and execute the methodology within your firm or organization will determine how successful you are.

What’s the difference between human-centered design and design thinking?

These two terms are interlinked and it is worth stating the difference between them. From the IDEO website:

"Human-centered design is a creative approach to problem solving. It’s the backbone of all our work at IDEO. It’s a process that starts with the people you’re designing for and ends with new solutions that are purpose-built to suit their needs. Human-centered design is about cultivating deep empathy with the people you’re designing for; generating ideas; building a bunch of prototypes; sharing what you’ve made with the people you’re designing for; and eventually, putting your innovative new solution out in the world.

Design thinking, as IDEO's Tim Brown explains, is a human-centered approach to innovation. It draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success. Successful innovations rely on some element of human-centered design research while balancing other elements. Design thinking helps achieve that balance. It lets people find the sweet spot of feasibility, viability and desirability while considering the real needs and desires of people."

What we do

The Design Thinking Association develops materials and programs to help practitioners raise their standards of practice. We create a global community through a web platform, events, networking and opportunities to share and discuss design thinking.