The Explainer: What Is Design Thinking?

Popularized by David M. Kelley and Tim Brown of IDEO and Roger Martin of the Rotman School, design thinking has three major stages.



As the complexity of the design process increases, a new hurdle arises: the acceptance of what we might call “the designed artifact” — whether product, user experience, strategy, or complex system — by stakeholders. Design thinking can help strategic and system innovators make the new worlds they’ve imagined come to pass. In fact, with very complex artifacts, the design of their “intervention” — their introduction and integration into the status quo — is even more critical to success than the design of the artifacts themselves.

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