Design Thinking in 6 Steps

Design Thinking is a human-centered mindset in which people apply transdisciplinary skills to solve complex problems. It combines a series of steps that can guide you to think as a designer, sparking ideas that can lead to innovation.

Those steps are:

1. Empathise – Aim to gain an understanding of the problem to be solved from multiple perspectives.

2. Define – Identify the issues (core problems) which will need to be addressed in order to solve the problem. Sort and classify the core problems to understand the relationships between them, and how they will potentially affect the outcome.

3. Ideate – It is time to be creative. All ideas should be considered. Ideas can address one or more of the core problems. Even an idea that results in a part of the solution is useful.

4. Prototype – Some or one of the more promising ideas are selected to be developed through mock-ups, storyboards, staging, etc. The objective is to try things out and find the best solutions for the core problems based on the initial ideas.

5. Test – It’s time to test the prototypes created to collect feedback.

6. Evaluate – Test the final product against the defined problem and understand if all the specifications are met.

Note that, in practice, those six stages aren’t always in this sequence. They might happen in parallel and be repeated iteratively. The stages should be viewed as diverse phases that contribute to a project.