Psychological Mechanisms Underlying Design Thinking’s Impact on Gustatory Perception: Implications for Food Experiences and Well-Being

Design thinking is a methodology for creative problem-solving. The most famous model was created by designers working in the heart of Silicon Valley, who went on to find the famous design firm IDEO as well as the “Hasso Plattner Institute of Design” or “d.school” at Stanford University. Practitioners describe it in terms of both a mindset and a process. As a mindset, it is human-centered, meaning its primary focus is on serving human needs and desires through deep and direct empathetic engagement with end-users. It is solution-focused, meaning it encourages a rapid pursuit of creative solutions through a process of ideation and rapid prototyping, and is fundamentally oriented around the aim of unlocking creative potential. As a practical process, it is broken into five “modes” or “mindfulnesses” – empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test – that participants may assume along the path of product or service development (Plattner 2018). While the “modes” are presented as a linear progression, the process itself is inherently iterative, meaning that practitioners may jump from one to another and cycle through them as necessary to generate a result.