Design Thinking for Everyone

Weirdly enough, I took a design thinking class in high school.

I thought the design thinking process was brilliant. I could apply it to anything I wanted to and the framework itself forced me to be creative. I had to generate a lot of ideas, see what they had in common, combine or get rid of some, then create a finished product.

Design thinking is basically a process for solving problems. It consists of multiple cycles of coming up with a lot of ideas and then deleting and synthesizing ideas until you create a great one.

The “inventors” of this process are the authors of this book. I once ran into David Kelley on Stanford’s campus and I freaked out. David and Tom are the Ron Burgundy of the design world—kind of a big deal.

This book talks about design thinking but is primarily a handbook for how anyone can be more creative in their everyday life.

David and Tom want you to unlearn a lot of what you have learned about being creative during your life and learn their way.

If you are still reading this post that means you should definitely read this book, you will get a lot from it.

Here are my highlights.

Creative confidence- the ability to come up with new ideas and the courage to try them out

More creative = more natural

Creativity is in every one of us, it just needs to be unblocked

Design thinking is a methodology used to address a wide variety of personal, social and business challenges in creative new ways.

• • • relies on the ability to be intuitive, recognize patterns and construct ideas that are emotionally meaningful as well as functional
    • must have a growth mindset — must believe that learning and growth are possible

Intentionality- everything in society stems from a collection of decisions made from people

Maximize the number of learning cycles by doing short quick projects

Rediscover the familiar- looking at something closely can affect what you see, let go of what you know and look at things with fresh eyes

To keep ideas fresh constantly seek out new sources of information

If stuck on a problem, take a walk

Take action! It leads to innovation, a body in motion tends to stay in motion

Constraints fuel creative action!

(Read in 2015)