Design thinking is an innovative and effective practice that enables a program team to leverage a suite of creative tools and methods to find and solve the right problems. The hallmarks of design thinking are cross-disciplinary teamwork, creativity, a user-centered focus, and continuous discovery.
It involves ambidextrous thinking – solving problems by engaging multiple intelligences, including visual, analytical, experiential, and physical ways of thinking and understanding. It uses both analysis and synthesis – breaking down the problem into its parts, and putting pieces together to find a solution.
And design thinking uses the scientific method. We begin by stating an hypothesis, then iteratively evaluate and rework our model of what the problem is and what we think will work. Through prototyping, testing, and refinement, we converge from many possible solutions to the best one.