ccording to Patnaik (2009), Design Thinking is “any process that applies the methods of industrial designers to problems beyond how a product should look.” The term was already used as early as 1987 by Rowe in his eponymous book in an architectural context and has lately become popular through research done at Stanford University and the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany (Schmalzried, 2013). In his introductory article about Design Thinking, Brown (2008), the CEO and president of IDEO, uses the example of Thomas Edison to illustrate the underlying methodology. While Edison invented the lightbulb — which undoubtedly was a significant innovation in itself from a pure engineering perspective — he did not stop at that point. Rather, he understood that the lightbulb alone would be of no use to people, so he also created “a system of electric power generation and transmission to make it truly useful” (Brown, 2008). This means that “Edison’s genius lay in his ability to conceive a fully developed marketplace, not simply a discrete device” (Brown, 2008), which underpins that one of the prime principles of Design Thinking is to consider a broader context with the user at its center.
