The Future of Design Thinking

So many people have come out openly against Design Thinking in recent years and have managed to sway many with their arguments. One famous speech even declared that Design Thinking is bullsh**. The argument goes: Design Thinking lacks criticism within its process and that the process itself forces those applying it into a set of strategies that work to constrict ways of thinking and never truly satisfy the diverse needs of the practitioner. 

You can Watch Design Thinking is Bullshi** here. 

You know what? She is right.

Design Thinking does lack criticism, and codifying it into a set of processes and strategies limits legitimate ways in which we can use it.

But there is one huge problem with this argument.

Having a codified process and a set of strategies is the whole point of Design Thinking.

Let me explain. First of all, let's be clear to those who have made design thinking into a process or a mindset: design thinking is more than a process or a mindset, it is a set of strategies that people all over the world contribute to. These Design Thinking strategies serve a particular function, and yes, they limit how we can perform research, but that is the whole point. When it comes to Design Thinking strategies, these processes are collaborative. They are limited in their approach because it allows the entire team or community to work together to achieve a shared outcome. The true power of Design Thinking is realized when a team or community unleashes its dormant innovative capacity. It is about creating that beautiful human dynamic when several diverse brains converge on a problem and unleash their empathy, experience, perspective, expertise, problem-solving capacity, and ideas upon a given issue or problem. The magic of Design Thinking is to create beautiful experiences through its strategies, which facilitate this human exchange, and new design thinking strategies are born every day with that particular goal in mind. 

I believe what is necessary is that we dont give up on Design Thinking but we find ways to add to its set of growing strategies to meet our diverse needs. Creating new ways for us to collaborate with our teams and even our communities. Creating new strategies that invite criticism and focus on much-needed persona-problem validation. 

In fact, we are doing all of this at The Design Tree which is a new cross-collaborative design thinking toolset that incorporates digital storytelling (basically design thinking for communities). This new approach to design thinking is highly engaging for teams, but through digital stories, we can co-create and cross-collaborate with communities. Through digital storytelling, we can get a picture of our collective target demographics and align our future solutions to ensure the by-product of our collective creations solves a particular problem or creates a certain experience; we can do this for communities or companies with multiple products. 

Digital storytelling our customer story in video format takes Design Thinking to the next level allowing us to design think with each other in mind from the very beginning. With it we can declare a singular vision and then cross-collaborate to brainstorm innovative solutions to implement the new vision. With it we can co-create with other teams assisting them in developing their products. With it we can cross-collaborate in design thinking to capitalize off of the serendipity of our collective innovations designing a new human-centered economy in the process. With it, we can design highly efficient smart communities that meet our human needs, designing how we work, live, and play. With it we can design communities that reflect our shared social, cultural, ethnic, religious backgrounds to create an experience true to who we really are and invite each other to share in that experience. We can also use Design Thinking as a tool to combat social-economic marginalization. Engaging the world to unlock its dormant innovative capacity and innate human potential. With the power of digital storytelling and cross-collaborative design thinking we can design a new world. The one that enters our minds anytime we imagine an ideal Future Earth. Perhaps our collective Destiny.  

You made it this far—-Thank you so much——Can’t wait to share more!!!

To try Design Thinking that incorporates Digital Storytelling—Interview for Empathy click here