Steps to Design Thinking in Practice: A Process Walkthrough

Design thinking is a popular approach to innovation that starts with understanding the needs of users or customers. One of the most widely adopted models is from Stanford, which identifies the stages of the design thinking process as empathy, definition, ideation, prototyping, and testing. The process begins with empathizing with the humans you want to design for, followed by defining the problem, generating ideas, creating prototypes, and testing them with users. The process includes diverging, converging, and iterating to co-create with customers and users. Many teams run design thinking workshops, facilitated sessions that guide co-creators through the key stages of design thinking for specific purposes.