What is design thinking ?

---

Nobel Prize laureate Herbert A. Simon first mentioned design thinking in his 1969 book, The Sciences of the Artificial, and then contributed many ideas to its principles. Professionals from a variety of fields, subsequently advanced this highly creative process to address human needs in the modern age. Design-thinking was further popularized in the business world,  when Tim Brown, the chief executive officer of IDEO, wrote an article in 2008 for the Harvard Business Review, about the use of design thinking in business—including at a California hospital, a Japanese bicycle company, and the healthcare industry in India.  Since then, both the methodology and definition of Design Thinking have evolved to cover wider applications.  

'Design Thinking' is founded on the 5 key principles that guide the entire framework:

1. User-Centric:  Design Thinking adopts the user's mindset (empathy) to analyze the problem or evaluate the possible solutions. The users' representatives are part of the entire process, and the decisions are regularly recalibrated based on their feedback. Being User-centric, the design constantly meets the 'Desirability' requirement.

2. Creative reasoning:  Design Thinking uses creative reasoning (abductive), to bring different perspectives for possible explanation of the problem and generate ideas for potential solutions. Creative reasoning is dependent on analytical reasoning as well, to sort through facts, data, and information to evaluate the problem and potential solutions. Creative reasoning is a must requirement to solve complex and unprecedented problems.

3. Collaborative: Design Thinking relies on collaboration with multiple stakeholders (including users), who brainstorm together to analyze the problem, share different perspectives, and come up with creative ideas as potential solutions.  During collaboration, complex and ambiguous problems are broken into simpler sub-problems to tackle, and all kinds of ideas (without analyzing its impact and feasibility) are equally encouraged.

4. Iterative: Design Thinking is an iterative process built with feedback loop at every step, to capture inputs from the stakeholders and the users, over the entire product lifecycle.  The feedback helps improve understanding of the user needs, align or recalibrate the solution with the user needs, and accommodate any change to keep up with unpredictability or ambiguity of the requirements (the key attributes of the complex and dynamic environment). 

5. Empirical:  Empirical means making decisions based on the outcome of experiments, rather than relying on the theoretical assumptions. Design thinking follows through multiple explanations of the problem, and host of creative ideas for the potential solutions.  As a result, it always has multiple alternatives, which are then tested and validated as experiments. The outcomes of these experiments are the basis for decision making to the next step. 

These 5 key principles of 'Design Thinking', are what collectively makes it the most apt and comprehensive problem-solving framework in the current context of complex and dynamic environment, marked with uncertainty and ambiguity.