Design Thinking in Game Design

While design thinking incorporates an iterative approach, it is broader in scope than the iterative design process. It takes a holistic view, focusing on addressing human-centered needs through creative and collaborative methods. In this sense, design thinking serves as the overarching framework that encompasses the iterative design process.

In other words, design thinking encompasses the entire creative process from understanding users to generating and testing ideas, while iterative design specifically refers to the repetitive refinement phase within that process.

Design thinking has five stages as shown below. One of the most important aspects of design thinking is that using this framework, we are putting the users at the center of our design work and our goal is to always learn more and implement our findings into our design process, no matter where we are in the cycle.

Design thinking promotes experimentation and learning by doing. Maybe it is a bit counter intuitive, but the goal of design thinking is to build something and fail quickly, and learn from the mistakes. This is in essence what a successful design process looks like: building and failing on repeat until we have a good product.