I have recently realized that asking designers “how they learned about design thinking” to be quite a silly question. As a business student, I thought that everyone learned about design thinking the same as I did, as a completely new concept. In reality “design thinking” is integrated into design itself, it’s those who aren’t studying design, like myself, that don’t necessarily learn about it. It wasn’t until my last year in university that I learned about design thinking in an interdisciplinary course called Change Lab. In fact, if I had not stumbled across this class in my last year in university, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to learn about design thinking at all.

As a business student, the design process was difficult to pick-up and even more difficult to apply. The reason behind this is that a strong focus is placed on stability and low risk in all the different subjects you take in business school. Unless you concentrate in entrepreneurship, you learn that risk is bad and that continuing with what you’ve always done and what you’ve always known is generally the safest route. You learn that the average shareholder does not value variability or the unknown, they value structure and organization. It’s not until you look beyond what you’re taught to what’s practiced in the business world that you realize stability does not necessarily equal success and most definitely does not equal innovation.

When you learn about innovation in business school, you learn about it as a tool that businesses use to become more profitable through differentiation. You don’t learn about it as an all encompassing process, this is where design thinking comes in. Businesses that embrace design thinking, like Proctor & Gamble and Herman Miller, have integrated design across the whole organization. Instead of making slight iterations to “what’s worked in the past” they are continuously going back to the drawing board. Businesses today lack the integration of design thinking into their organization, which has resulted in a lack of creativity and inspiration in the majority of products and services we are engaging with every day.
Those are my thoughts on design thinking and why it was a completely new concept for me as a business student!
Jessica