Is Design Thinking just from creative people?

Fatma Al Shaibani
Nov 3 · 2 min read

The word design is usually associated with creativity and art-related things, but ever wonder why do people tend to link creativity to only art?

Working in the marketing field for years, the concept of design thinking and creativity wasn’t really known within the team. I personally used to research the topic and tried to adapt to it, with my department. But guess what, it wasn’t comfortable for them to accept the idea and for me to explain in.

Solutions to problems shouldn’t always be limited to someone’s personal preference in solving an issue. While studying and exploring the design thinking methodology during my master’s program, it kind of makes more sense now. The process involves many people from different fields to think outside the box and find the perfect solution to any issue.

I had the opportunity to try their design thinking process with the google team is self! Yup that big company called google! We had the opportunity to go through the design thinking process step by step and solve and issue given.

Here’s where it got interesting. We all had many ideas, but putting them into words and identify the primary core issue that needs to be focused on and solved wasn’t as easy as we thought. Jumping into conclusions and finding a solution within seconds was something we were told to avoid. Oh, but it was tempting! Every idea we came up with had a solution within the problem identified, and stating the solutions was a big NO-NO for us at that stage.

It was hard at first, but it made alot of sense later, if we were to jump into conclusions from the first idea we came up with, we wouldn’t have given a chance for more incredible ideas to pop up.

The design thinking steps are quite exciting and all interrelated; one step leads you to the other going forward, and at the same time, backward when something doesn’t sound right.

I am excited to see how this project is going forward.