Most people would agree that the fork has little room for improvement, yet people haven’t stopped trying to build a better version. There’s the good old-fashioned spork, the chopsticks-fork hybrid, and now — we should have seen this coming — the Bluetooth-enabled smart fork.

While many pile question upon question to form a complex maze of dilemmas, effective solutions are often based on the power of design. Change and success are instigated by looking at products and problems with the mind of a designer and seeking to improve the user experience on every level.

Design goes beyond the color or material of a fork. True design thinking — the kind that changes our daily lives and behavior — comes from the desire to create a better fork in the first place. This mindset creates true game changers and shapes our world. The vision produces the reality.

Design Is a Philosophy, Not a Feature

As far as the end user is concerned, design is all about aesthetics. For example, when Apple launched iOS 7, most people only saw the new color and depth of the icons. They didn’t consider the new physics engine or how removing buttons created a better interface for future devices.

But this isn’t the whole picture. Rather than attractiveness, the end goal of design thinking is to take a big idea and implement it in the real world. Henry Ford once famously said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” The idea for the modern automobile sprang from imagining a revolutionary design that met — and exceeded — the needs of the consumers. Again, this revelatory design enacted global change.

Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, uses Thomas Edison as an example. Widely credited with inventing the light bulb, Edison’s real genius lay in his larger vision for an electric power grid. Even though he wasn’t the first person to think of a light bulb, he’s viewed as its inventor because he conceived how people would actually use what he made.

This is the essence of design thinking: understanding what people need and creating a solution that has immediate consumer appeal. It’s finding the missing piece between the spoon and the knife and filling that void.

The Far-Reaching Impact of Design Thinking

Design thinking, when taken to its logical conclusion, can change how we interact with nearly every aspect of our environment. Take the recent buzz about solar roads. These power-saving streets are beautiful, but their attractiveness isn’t just aesthetic. Their draw comes from a deeper, more visceral place because the solar roadway creates a new use for something we use every day and has the potential to change the world. The technology may be complex, but the idea is beautiful in its simplicity.

Another great example of design thinking can be seen in SpaceX’s recent unveiling of the futuristic-looking Dragon space capsule. It looks like a classic shuttle redesigned for the iPhone age, but in reality, its design is largely the result of trying to make space travel more cost-effective.

Rather than the $71 million dollars NASA spends to shuttle an astronaut to the International Space Station, SpaceX is looking to knock that price down to as low as $20 million per traveler. Elon Musk wants to do more than just redesign a spaceship; he wants to redesign an entire industry.

Design Thinking Considers the Entire User Experience

A few critics of design thinking have complained that companies are sacrificing real-world usability for design. But truly good design considers the entire user experience. It starts with a driving purpose and ends with real-world implementation.

Good design isn’t always aesthetically pleasing. PowerPoint is clunky and ugly, yet it’s still widely used today because digital slides are such a powerful medium. Applications like Keynote and Prezi haven’t reinvented digital presentations; they’ve only streamlined them with a more user-focused design.

Now, back to the fork. It’s probably perfect the way it is. Does this mean any attempt to improve it commits one of those great sins of design by solving a problem that doesn’t exist? Absolutely not. How else could change occur? If someone could build a better fork, it would touch the lives of billions of people. That’s the impact of design.

As a result of the design process, we find elegant, meaningful solutions to both age-old and imminent problems — and that’s how game changers are born.

James Monsees is the CEO and co-founder of Ploom. Founded by two Stanford Design Program master graduates, San Francisco-based Ploom is leading the reinvention of the smoking experience with its premium loose-leaf and pod-system vaporizers. Ploom creates superior, beautiful, and technologically advanced products that are disrupting and redefining the future of the tobacco industry.