Design Thinking in Game Design

Design thinking is a problem-solving approach that focuses on understanding user needs, generating creative solutions, and iteratively testing and refining ideas to create innovative and user-centered products or services. You would be right in thinking that this sounds very much like the iterative design process; the reason for that is that design thinking encompasses an iterative approach, but is much more broader in essence than the iterative design process. It is holistic, focusing on understanding and addressing human-centered needs through creative and collaborative methods. Hence, design thinking is the framework that contains 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.

• Empathize: Understand the users and their needs through observation, engagement, and immersion in their experiences.
• Define: Clearly articulate the problem based on insights gained from the empathize stage, creating a user-centered problem statement.
• Ideate: Generate a wide range of creative ideas and potential solutions through brainstorming and other ideation techniques.
• Prototype: Build tangible representations or models of selected ideas to explore and test their feasibility. Test: Evaluate prototypes with users, gather feedback, and refine the solutions based on what is learned.

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.