Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation, structuring problem-solving by balancing deep empathy, creative ideation, and rapid experimentation.

The foundational spark is both historic and robust. As early as 1969, Herbert Simon, in The Sciences of the Artificial, defined design as a distinct way of thinking: to design is to devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. Design is not just execution; it is a way of reasoning. David Kelley and Tim Brown (IDEO), along with Stanford's d.school, packaged this into a widely shareable methodology: empathy, definition, ideation, prototyping, and testing.

Its true power has been in democratizing a unique mindset: anchoring everything in real-world usage, suspending judgment during ideation, and testing early rather than betting big. Entire enterprises have gained a brilliant common grammar for innovation.

Yet, with great success came caricature. Through endless Post-it notes and workshops, "thinking" sometimes drifted away from "doing." We began seeing brilliant brainstorms in meeting rooms that produced absolutely nothing. In 2017, designer Natasha Jen captured this critique with her famous catchphrase, "Design Thinking is Bullshit." Her target was not the core philosophy, but its over-processed version, stripped of craftsmanship and raw material. This critique hits the mark whenever design thinking becomes a intellectual theater detached from reality.

Because thinking and doing are not two separate phases—they are a continuous loop. A prototype does not simply illustrate an already finalized idea; it challenges it, and quite often, beautifully transforms it. We think by doing. This is why we passionately champion design doing: not as the opposite of design thinking, but as its essential validation.

Our approach: we retain the robust discipline of design thinking (grounding work in user research, diverging then converging) while completely rejecting the theater. A workshop is only as valuable as what it brings to life on the ground: a tested prototype, a bold decision made, a service successfully transformed. The method is always a vehicle, never the destination—and certainly not a show.

Explore further: design doing (action as thought), the double diamond (the rhythm of diverging and converging), ideation, prototyping and iteration, and empathic research (its essential first step—and its pitfalls).

References: H. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial (1969); IDEO and Stanford's d.school; N. Jen, "Design Thinking is Bullshit" (2017).