The History of Design Thinking

In the past ten years, design thinking has been repackaged, revitalized, and been brought to a broad range of non-designers in different industries. What gets lost sometimes in all the talk about ‘design for innovation’ and all the shiny futures design thinking shall bring about, is a remembrance and awareness to were it all came from. It certainly did not just originate  from today’s dominant design thinking teaching institutions and firms only (think Stanford, IIT.ID, HPI, Rotman, etc.).

The ‘package’ of practices, techniques and mindsets, we emphasize today and call ‘design thinking’ has come a long way. Aforementioned design thinking proponents ‘merely’ did a greatly successful job of codifying and teaching the accumulated knowledge of decades if not centuries of design practice into a didactic concept for teaching design to non-designers. They also turned it into a management concept for organizing innovation in the fuzzy front end and beyond. All this wouldn’t have been possible without the work of people, movements and institutions that we want to feature in our new series on the history of design thinking. Based on their research, different guest authors will write in-depth examinations about aspects of design thinking history.

Author: Jan Schmiedgen | Last modified: May 16, 2017