The Brown Book of Design Thinking

As a thinking tool, design thinking fosters the ability to combine: empathy for the context of a problem, creativity in the generation of insights and solutions, and the skill to materialize those solutions through iterative prototyping. Taught as a course at Stanford since 2004, and with a school funded by Hasso Plattner, today design thinking impacts processes not only in engineering practice, but in education and across disciplines. Its tools are used by product and industrial design firms to ideate products. It is also used to solve so called wicked problems – problems for which neither question nor answer is well-defined. Typical wicked problems for researchers are: How to win the next Nobel prize? How to decrease traffic accidents? How to fix global warming?