Design Feast Series: Quotes

“Whether it’s called design thinking, lateral thinking, right-brain thinking, systems thinking, integrative thinking, futures thinking, or my own term of ‘metathinking,’ from my perspective, the concept itself is rooted in a capacity to understand the world and our relationship to it, and within it, in a different way.

Design thinking is a ‘human-centered approach,’ and for me that means truly getting down to the core of what we think it means to be human, of what it ‘should’ look like, and how we want to experience life. When we see the word ‘design,’ we may immediately think of just products made by a snooty designer; items we see displayed at a museum that bear no resemblance to something we’d find in our home, artwork that makes us somehow feel stupid because we don’t understand why it’s so special, or architecture that is said to make “a statement” but feels completely alien in the way it impacts us. That is not the same design that is being proposed by design thinking. …

So whether you hope to employ design thinking to restructure the culture of an organization or to innovate a new product or service, it’s important to remember that it’s more than a set of simple tactics that can be implemented overnight. It’s more like a new ecology of mind, that takes time to grow, adapt, and evolve. It still requires an adherence to sound business decision-making, but also a commitment to challenge one’s own beliefs about ‘the way things work,’ and to keep coming back to a human-centered approach by focusing on addressing people’s unspoken and unmet needs.”

Venessa Miemis, Blogger of Emergent by Design