Design Thinking Resources
While design thinking is not a new methodology, it is constantly evolving: tools and techniques are being added, refined, and adapted to handle new challenges and ways of working.
We’ve collected a few of our favourite tools here and we’ll be adding more as time goes on. Enjoy!
Books (Available from your favourite book retailer)
101 Design Methods by Vijay Kumar
Change By Design by Tim Brown
The Design Of Everyday Things by Don Norman
Design Thinking For The Greater Good by Jeanne Liedtka, Randy Salzman & Daisy Azer
The Doodle Revolution by Sunni Brown
Game Storming by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo
How To Solve Big Problems And Test New Ideas In Just Five Days by Jake Knapp with John Zeratsky & Braden Kowitz
The Design Of Business by Roger Martin
This Is Service Design Doing
This Is Service Design Thinking
Articles
Want to know about the history of design thinking? Check out “Design thinking origin story plus some of the people who made it all happen” by Jo Szczepanska
“Shh! Don’t Tell Them There’s No Magic In Design Thinking” by Jared Spool, is a refreshing look at why design thinking isn’t a fad any more than design is a fad.
An article by Schweitzer, Groeger, and Sobel, entitled “The Design Thinking Mindset: An Assessment of What We Know and What We See in Practice” describes the attitude and mental approach successful design thinkers have.
Websites
Interaction Design Foundation is a Danish non-profit whose goal is to share information about interaction design, human-computer interaction, and design thinking. Definitely have a look at their freely available design thinking resources.
Media
This video, from ABC Nightline, introduces IDEO and their approach to problem-solving through design thinking. While the video is from several years ago, it is a great way to get a feeling for design thinking – its strengths and weaknesses, its goals, and its process – from one of its strongest champions
IDEO U’s Creative Confidence Podcast
People, Companies, and Organizations
IDEO, as well as their Design Kit.
OpenIDEO (the social good, open challenge group created by IDEO).
Stanford d.school is one of the modern champions of design thinking. Not only do they teach and write about design thinking, they continue to develop new mental models around its application, and share tools with the community.
Overlap Associates are a design consultancy, based in Kitchener. They are wonderfully friendly, super smart, and share a great many of their resources!
Forms, Artifacts, and Templates
Download the Design Thinking Poster
Where to start? When to finish? What questions should I ask? This poster outlines the key elements of design thinking and how they relate to each other. Perfect for sharing with your team and hanging up in the office, or keeping in the glove compartment of your car (you know, just in case…).
Understanding how your users feel, what their motivations might be, and how they view the world are steps toward empathy. An empathy map is a simple tool designed to get you seeing through their eyes, feeling their frustrations and better understanding of what they value in a service or product
Feedback can often be too narrow or focused. The Feedback Form adds structure to the process, allows stakeholders to provide more comprehensive and insightful feedback, and guides a conversation through all aspects of potential improvement.
Developing a robust understanding of how we interact with a product or service (or even the world around us) can be tricky. By using a Journey Map, we learn more about the detail of the journey, about both positive and negative interactions, and the relationship between all of the elements of the journey.
