Study design thinking principles

Design thinking principles read as either obvious or vacuous when studied abstractly, which is why so many workshops fail to land. Applied to a real irritation in your own life for an hour, the method does something specific and slightly uncomfortable: it stops you jumping to the solution you had already decided on before starting.

Why study design thinking principles is worth an hour

The value sits almost entirely in the define stage. Most people begin with a solution and work backwards to justify it. Forcing a reframe of the problem statement, and generating options past the first plausible one, is what surfaces alternatives that would otherwise never have been considered. The remaining stages mostly protect that reframing from being discarded.

How to study design thinking principles step by step

1. 1

   Pick a real annoyance

   Something small and genuine from your own week. Hypothetical problems produce hypothetical insight and nothing else.

2. 2

   Empathise before defining

   Ask who else experiences this and how. Even for personal problems, other perspectives reframe it faster than reflection does.

3. 3

   Write the problem three different ways

   Same situation, three framings. The third is usually more useful than the first, which is the entire point.

4. 4

   Generate twenty ideas, including bad ones

   Quantity deliberately over quality. The obvious solutions appear first and block the interesting ones behind them.

5. 5

   Prototype the cheapest version

   Paper, a mock-up, a conversation. Something testable today rather than something impressive next month.

Tips to get more out of it

• Separate generating ideas from judging them. Evaluating while generating reliably kills the unconventional options first.
• Test with someone who is not you. Self-testing confirms your assumptions rather than exposing them.
• Expect to loop back. The stages are not sequential in practice, whatever the diagram implies.

Ways to mix it up

If you work in a team, run the reframing step together and compare problem statements, since divergence there usually explains disagreements about the solution. If you find the vocabulary off-putting, ignore it entirely and just do the reframe-and-generate steps; the terminology is not the method.

Study design thinking principles: frequently asked questions