Voices from the Field: Exploring Connections Between Design Thinking Approaches and Sustainability Challenges

The range and complexity of the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals make clear the need for innovative, effective, and efficient problem-solving approaches involving the people most impacted by the issues being addressed. In previous work, we argued that design thinking provides a useful and appropriate process for generating sustainability-oriented solutions and outlined five characteristics of design thinking that support this argument. In this chapter, we present findings from 20 semi-structured, qualitative interviews with sustainability practitioners, designers, and university professors from 9 countries who have used design thinking approaches in their work. Based on a deductive coding analysis of the interview data, we found support for all five of our suggested design thinking characteristics as facilitators of sustainability solutions. Nearly all interviewees appeared to value design thinking as a tool for sustainability work because design thinking is participatory and people-focused. Many interviewees also emphasized that design thinking encourages creativity, diversity in thought and action, systems thinking, and a streamlined approach to action. These findings add further support for calls to use design thinking as a tool in sustainability work and suggest a need for more in-depth exploration to solidify a theoretical understanding of why, how, and under what conditions design thinking approaches are effective in the quest for addressing sustainability challenges.