Design Thinking: Improving Innovation and User Experience Report

This report provides an overview of Design Thinking, a methodology focused on creating innovative solutions to complex problems. It emphasizes a design mindset that prioritizes user needs and aims to improve the quality of life. The report highlights the cyclical nature of design thinking, including observation, ideation, prototyping, and testing, with a strong emphasis on creativity. Furthermore, it underscores the importance of human-centered innovation, which involves understanding and addressing unarticulated customer needs. The report also references key literature on the subject, discussing the application of design thinking in various contexts, including engineering, education, and brand management. The goal of design thinking is to improve user experience and generate innovative solutions.

Running Head: Design Thinking
Design Thinking

Design Thinking
Design Thinking For Innovation
Design Thinking is a methodology used by designers to solve complex problems, and find
desirable solutions for clients. A design mindset is not problem-focused; its solution focused and
action oriented towards creating a preferred future. Design thinking draws upon logic,
imagination, intuition, and systemic reasoning, to explore possibilities of what could be—and to
create desired outcomes that benefit the end user (the customer).
“Design thinking can be described as a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods
to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy
can convert into customer value and market opportunity.”
You can design the way you lead, manage, create and innovate. The design way of thinking can
be applied to systems, procedures, protocols, and customer/user experiences. The purpose of
design, ultimately, in my view, is to improve the quality of life for people and the planet.
The design thinking cycle involves observation to discover unmet needs within the context and
constraints of a particular situation, framing the opportunity and scope of innovation, generating
creative ideas, testing and refining solutions.
Creativity is the Central to Design Thinking.
Design thinking informs human-centered innovation
Human-centered innovation begins with developing an understanding of customers’ or users’
unmet or unarticulated needs. “The most secure source of new ideas that have true competitive
advantage, and hence, higher margins, is customers’ unarticulated needs.

References
Johansson‐Sköldberg, U., Woodilla, J., & Çetinkaya, M. (2013). Design thinking: past, present
and possible futures. Creativity and Innovation Management, 22(2), 121-146.
Levick-Parkin, M., & Hanson, M. (2015). Design thinking together: how to share the
‘designerly’way of looking at things in order to co-create insights relevant to research
participants.
Yeager, D. S., Romero, C., Paunesku, D., Hulleman, C. S., Schneider, B., Hinojosa, C., ... &
Trott, J. (2016). Using design thinking to improve psychological interventions: The case of the
growth mindset during the transition to high school. Journal of educational psychology, 108(3),
374.
Behm, M., Culvenor, J., & Dixon, G. (2014). Development of safe design thinking among
engineering students. Safety science, 63, 1-7.
Leifer, L. J., & Steinert, M. (2014). Dancing with ambiguity: Causality behavior, design
thinking, and triple-loop-learning. In Management of the Fuzzy front end of innovation (pp. 141-
158). Springer International Publishing.
Beverland, M. B., Wilner, S. J., & Micheli, P. (2015). Reconciling the tension between
consistency and relevance: design thinking as a mechanism for brand ambidexterity. Journal of
the Academy of Marketing Science, 43(5), 589-609.