Advantages And Disadvantages Of Design Thinking

Design Thinking is a rather new thinking approach which aims to develop new and innovative ideas as solution for diverse problems. This approach is often applied to wicked problems which are immensely complex and does not have a single solution. Worldwide challenges such as education, poverty, and homelessness are tried to examined of the perspectives of various stakeholders to better understand the problem and to find the broadest solution.

In contrast to humanities or science where only observing and proving is the preferred way of solving challenges, design thinking incorporates additionally a high level of creativity. Creativity is often underestimated in other fields and makes this approach therefore extremely unique. It differs also in its structure of the process to the other approaches. Design thinkers are mostly looking for something which is suitable to a working principle and creates value. Other than the typical deductive or inductive approaches which are either looking for an observation or the working principle.

The design thinking concept is based on three key elements. First, multidisciplinary teams favour a diverse environment and thus, highly varying ideas and suggestions. Second, a specified design thinking process. This process consists of

Not only in terms of the whole process to get to a solution but also in terms of fully incorporating this concept. By participating in a one-week workshop, we now know the approach but it would take a lot of additional time of completely acting and being a design thinker. Another aspect which was difficult to me was the demand for creativity on time. Since I am normally not very creative, it was hard to come up with crazy ideas within a specific time cap. Of course, it was also challenging and refreshing but I think one needs to practice that more often for opening one’s mind for ideas when