Design Thinking was proposed by IDEO, an American design firm, and spread throughout the world. IDEO, based in Palo Alto, Silicon Valley, started its activities in 1991 as IDEO Product Development. In the midst of the spread of the Internet and information technology that developed from the latter half of the 1990s to the first half of the 2000s, IDEO made the creation of innovation in business a major corporate challenge. Design Thinking emerged in the early 2000s against this background.

Design Thinking has spread not only in business but also in education, with the establishment of the d-school at Stanford University in 2003 and the i-school at the University of Tokyo in 2009. The momentum to study design as an approach to problem-solving and problem discovery increased. The background to the establishment of the d-school at Stanford University is that there is a tradition of design education in mechanical engineering, and that David Kelley, one of the founders of IDEO, was a professor at the university.

The term “design thinking” is not an IDEO invention; Peter G. Rowe used the term in 1987 in the context of architecture and urban design in his book Design Thinking. There, design thinking is treated not in the context of IDEO, which is intended to integrate business and technology with design, but rather as a systematic verbalization of the internal thought processes of architects and urban planners.

In the first place, Robert McKim started the Human-Centered Product Design Program at Stanford University in 1958, which was the forerunner of design education in mechanical engineering. He also published Visual Thinking in 1973, and Rolf Faste of the same university inherited its contents in the 1980s and 1990s. Based on the accumulation of such research and education, Design Thinking, led by Kelly, was born. What McKim and Faste aimed for was the integration of the production process in engineering and art, and in this respect it differs from design thinking that incorporates business.

According to an article by former IDEO CEO Tim Brown on the company’s website, Design Thinking is defined as “a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.” The goal consists in the customer value and the market opportunity. Three indicators related to the business value are “feasibility,” “viability,” and “desirability.” Starting with “desirability,” which means people’s needs, “profitability” is an indicator of technology, and “viability” is listed as an indicator for business.

There are several different definitions of the Design Thinking process. In a 2008 article in the Harvard Business Review, Brown defined the process in terms of three steps: inspiration, ideation, and implementation. The d-school’s textbook, An Introduction to Design Thinking: Process Guide, defines the process in five steps: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. In any case, the process starts with understanding the user based on observation, and then through ideation, finally follows prototyping.

Human-Centered Design (HCD) is a concept similar to Design Thinking. While HCD focuses on scientific, evidence-based design, such as usability verification, Design Thinking is characterized by a “creative design approach,” and differs in that it focuses on gaining “insight” into latent user needs and desires. For example, one of the outcomes of the d-school is the redesign solution mentioned by Kelly in a “TED talk.” When a senior student saw children crying in front of the MRI, he drew a picture of a pirate ship on the surface of the MRI, and the children who liked the story of boarding the pirate ship willingly took the test.

Design Thinking has become popular as a methodology for innovation based on design methods, and is still influential in business and education today, and its content is evolving through critical discussion. As Brown mentioned, Design Thinking has brought a creative way of thinking to people who do not have the skills of designers in order to solve various problems. However, it is undeniable that as Design Thinking has spread as a methodology, and its methods have been accepted as manuals, the free creativity of the West Coast that it originally possessed has been lost. In this regard, IDEO Tokyo emphasizes on its website that Design Thinking is not a “formula” but rather a “people who practice it, culture, and mindset” and “the courage to be subjective.”

In their book Creative Confidence, David Kelley and his brother Tom Kelley state that the core idea of Design Thinking is that all participants should have “creative confidence” as practitioners. The development of such a new design thinking goes beyond the conventional framework of a two-party relationship between users and creators, to the boundary area of inclusive design, which advocates designing “together” with diverse stakeholders. On the other hand, it is also expanding into a first-person design methodology that confronts its own issues, such as Art Thinking.

（HIRAI Yasuyuki）

Related Classes

Department of Design Strategy

References

• Brown, Tim (2008) Design Thinking, Harvard Business Review
• DESIGN THINKING DEFINED, IDEO DESIGN THINKING, IDEO.
• IDEO Tokyo homepage, IDEO.
• d school , An Introduction to Design Thinking PROCESS GUIDE, Institute of Design at Stanford.
• Kelley, David (2012) How to build your creative confidence, Ted Talks
• Kelley, Tom, David Kelley (2013) Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All, Crown Business, New York.
• Robert, McKim (1973) Experiences in Visual Thinking, Cole Publishing Co.
• Rowe, Peter G (1986) Design Thinking, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
• 山崎和彦（2014）「イノベーションを生み出すデザイン思考と社会環境を考慮した人間中心設計」『NEC技報』66巻3号、15-18頁