The Design Thinking Methodology at Work: Capturing and Understanding the Interplay of Methods and Techniques

The Design Thinking methodology is one example of a design methodology that supports the creation of innovative products or services. For that purpose, the Design Thinking methodology suggests a repertoire of design phases, design activities, and design methods that can be used to solve wicked problems in terms of innovative solutions. However, since the Design Thinking methodology does not prescribe any order of design phases, activities, and methods, applications of design phases, activities, and methods lead to different shapes of the Design Thinking methodology in practice. We hypothesize that these shapes of Design Thinking at work consist of different characteristics depending on the kind of design project that has been conducted. Understanding these characteristics, their influence on the design flow itself, as well as their impact on the outcome of the design project is of major interest to managers, innovators, and researchers. In this chapter, we report on the result of a case study that we conducted to investigate different shapes of the Design Thinking methodology in practice. As a result of our case study, we conclude that different shapes of Design Thinking methodologies exist in practice. We describe the identified characteristics and their purpose.