From Process to Practice: Evolving Design Thinking
As a designer, being able to articulate the value of and difference between design thinking and design methods is essential, especially when working in spaces like social impact or corporate innovation, where you may need to justify the approach to stakeholders unfamiliar with design. If you’re unable to do so, you won’t be able to defend the use of it. This essay explores how design thinking differs from and relates to design methods and the scientific method, while proposing an evolved model of practice that addresses the limitations of current frameworks.
Design Thinking vs. Design Methods
Design thinking is often described as a human-centered approach to innovation. It evolved as a way to package the design process in a way that businesses could adopt, often without a formally trained designer leading the way. As Jeanne Liedtka frames it, design thinking empowers people—not just processes—to improve outcomes by deeply understanding latent customer needs and desires (2018). Instead of focusing on productivity as the lever for innovation, design thinking empowers people to generate new solutions.
This is the design process you typically see illustrated: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test; but this abstraction alone doesn’t allow you to actually do design. You might understand it, but you couldn’t truly practice it. Design methods, on the other hand, are the specific tools and frameworks (such as storyboarding, journey mapping, or contextual inquiry) a designer brings to the table at each step to get the most out of the process. They guide how we move through the process and how we draw insight from ambiguity, helping making the abstract actionable.
The issue with design thinking is that it often leaves out some of the most critical aspects of design—namely, the ability to bring people together and facilitate meaningful collaboration. The best ideas are not just human-centered; they are community-grounded. For example, in the Children’s Health System of Texas redesign, they realized that co-designing an intervention was necessary; but this required bringing together the right blend of people—parents, doctors, community members—so that the final solution reflected the real dynamics of the system and could lead to meaningful, sustainable change (Liedtka, 2018).
Design thinking is often misrepresented as a linear process, but design is nonlinear by nature. The linearity we see is often a product of trying to make it palatable to the business world—a world that needs structure, milestones, and predictable deliverables. As Liedtka explains, this linear structure brings comfort. But does it push ambiguity out of the picture in a harmful way? Each phase of the design process inherently leaves you with data that you then convert into insights in the next phase, creating a chain of traceable logic. Still, this doesn’t mean the process is clean or sequential.
If you think of an "issue" as the abstract version of a "problem," then design thinking is the abstract philosophy and design methods are the concrete tools that can be acted upon to generate outcomes. You can’t separate the two. This disconnect is where some critiques emerge. In Natasha Iskander’s article, she argues that design thinking is poorly defined (2018). I would argue it’s not that it’s poorly defined and instead that it’s been decoupled from the design methods that are essential to enacting it.
However, her critique that design thinking preserves and defends the status quo is valid; and that shows up in some of the methods we use. For instance, user stories and user epics limit ideas to the people in the room and the existing infrastructure. It’s hard to push toward truly innovative or speculative ideas using those tools. So the real question is: is design thinking the issue, or is it the methods being employed? How can we recreate the design process to reflect its inherent non-linearity and emphasize the co-design and facilitation that is so critical to meaningful outcomes?
Scientific Method vs. Design Thinking
There are important overlaps between the scientific method and design thinking. Both are structured, inquiry-driven, and focused on understanding the world; but they diverge in critical ways. The scientific method is about studying people and phenomena from a distance. It generalizes. It leans on quantitative data and statistical validation. A scientist is meant to be an observer, ideally objective and removed. But that’s never truly the case.
Design thinking, on the other hand, is about empathizing—immersing yourself in people’s lives, understanding their context, and using qualitative data to generate rich insights. It brings people into the process to make sense of data together. It doesn’t necessarily test a hypothesis—it asks how things could be different. It doesn’t seek to validate the present; it aims to transform it.
This distinction is echoed in Nigel Cross’s history of design methodology (1993). The first generation of design methods focused on the application of scientific methods; but the second generation began to move away from this framing, acknowledging that designers aren’t observers on the outside. They are partners embedded in the process. The shift moved away from optimization and toward co-creation, argumentation, and appropriateness.
Both science and design try to understand the world; but the scientific method was made to understand the world around us, not necessarily change it. If one were to try to “scientise” design, it would lose its inherent advantage over the scientific method—taking a current state to a preferred state (Cross, 1993). The scientific method only focuses on the current state.
Limitations and Opportunities
The appeal of design thinking is that it offers a clear path forward, but that is also its biggest limitation. It is packaged, linear, and often falsely depoliticized. It provides comfort, structure, and clarity, but sometimes at the cost of creativity, ambiguity, and inclusion.
Design thinking still operates within broader political, social, and economic contexts that favor those with power; so even if a radical idea emerges, it may not survive the room it’s in. Instead of free public transit, we get Uber or self-driving cars. Instead of equitable housing, we get tech-enabled rental platforms.
Another shared limitation between the scientific method and design thinking is that both typically assume the process ends upon delivery. You publish the paper, then you launch the product; but there’s no built-in reflection loop to reconsider or redesign when unintended consequences emerge. Look at the infinite scroll on social media: a ‘great’ design, but never revisited despite the harms.
My Ideal Design Process
Design thinking is changing, and it can be redesigned to empower communities and stakeholders who have historically been left out. This is where radical participatory design and co-design come in. They aim for systemic change, not just product improvement. My ideal design process is a version of the Double Diamond that attempts to bring in co-design and the power of the community. It’s nonlinear, iterative, and always open. It leaves space for ambiguity, contradiction, and change, even after implementation.
This process relies on new methods—ones explicitly designed to support community facilitation, systems thinking, and radical inclusion. We don’t just need a new model of design thinking. We need new methods that move it forward.
Conclusion
Design thinking opened up design to the world; but its true potential lies in how it is practiced, not just how it is packaged. When separated from methods and stripped of its political context, design thinking can preserve the very systems it hopes to challenge. If we reimagine the process and methods, bringing in participatory practices and seeing the designer as a facilitator, design thinking can become a powerful tool for social change.
References
Cross, N. (1993). A history of design methodology. In M. J. de Vries et al. (Eds.), Design methodology and relationships with science (pp. 15–27). Kluwer Academic Publishers
Iskander, N. (September 5, 2018). Design thinking is fundamentally conservative and preserves the status quo. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2018/09/design-thinking-is-fundamentally-conservative-and-preserves-the-status-quo
Liedtka, J. (2018, September–October). Why design thinking works. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2018/09/why-design-thinking-works