… is the « Thinking » part

The reason I like Design Thinking and the reason it’s useful to innovate, is precisely because it is not so much about « thinking ».

Design Thinking doesn’t expects you to think – quite the contrary. Essential pieces of the Design Thinking process are about disconnecting the mind and being spontaneous. It’s the art of making things pop up without the thinking filter.

A productive brainstorming happens when everyone feels free to come up with any idea, without having to think wether it’s a good enough idea or if it is the right time for it. Often we hear « Don’t think about what to write on the sticky note, just write what comes to your mind – don’t analyse ». There is a kind of magic happening then and that is how unknown possibilities are appearing. Magic isn’t about thinking.

The connection process, also essential to Design Thinking, happens a lot without thinking. « Let’s put these two ideas together and see how it works… oh that’s weird! Let’s dig into it »

In the prototyping phase, it is a lot about touching, playing, experimenting. There again, thinking is not really required and can even slow down the process.

So the « thinking » part of Design Thinking is maybe something at another level of consciousness, but it really isn’t thinking at the usual intellectual level.

Then, of course, there is some « regular » « thinking » needed in the Design Thinking process. You will have to think when you design the project or the research and it is an essential part. You will have to think when you analyse the data. There might also be some thinking needed to find out how to create the environment to make the Design Thinking magic happen. And at one point, you will have to think and make the right choices among all the possibilities, so that you can move to realizing what came out of your ideas. But this is more the structure of Design Thinking and not the heart.

Sometimes Design Thinking is also called Human Centered Design and it can makes some more sense. The point here isn’t really about how to call it, but more about how to explain it to people and this « thinking » misunderstanding can be useful to highlight.