Design Thinking is a flexible, iterative, people-centered design process. You’re constantly learning, testing, and refining as you go — all while keeping the end user at the heart of the process. It’s a hands-on, creative way to solve problems and come up with innovative solutions. There are 5 stages of Design Thinking:

1. Empathize

This stage is all about understanding the people you’re designing for. You want to connect with their needs, experiences, and emotions. The goal is to dig deep into their world, understand their problems, and really grasp the challenges they’re facing. This is typically done through research methods like interviews, observations, or surveys.

2. Define

Once you have all the insights from the empathize stage, it’s time to define the problem. Here, you take everything you’ve learned and distill it down into a clear, concise problem statement. This helps you focus on what really needs to be solved and keeps the team aligned.

3. Ideate

In this stage, you brainstorm a variety of possible solutions to the problem. The idea is to generate a wide range of ideas without limiting yourself, encouraging creativity, and thinking outside the box. It’s all about being open-minded and exploring different approaches, even if they seem far out at first.

4. Prototype

Now, you start to build a simple version of your solution. This doesn’t need to be the final, polished product — just something tangible that allows you to test and learn. The prototype helps you see how your ideas might work in the real world and identify areas that need tweaking.

5. Test

Finally, you test your prototype. This is where you gather feedback to see how well the solution works. It helps you understand what’s working, what isn’t, and what needs to be improved. Testing is an ongoing process, and you often go back to the drawing board to refine your prototype based on what you’ve learned.

More about Design Thinking: What is Design Thinking? | Interaction Design Foundation

A classic case study: How an Improved Food Service Creates a Better Life Quality for Elderly People

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