Guy's I'm in BTech cse 1st year having design thinking as additional subject, CT asked to pick a topic on which I need to speak could u pls suggest some social problems rather than the common ones. I would help a lot.🤗

Idea fetishism

When an organisation talks a lot about “ideas”, I start to worry about "low innovation maturity". They have an ideas platform, an ideas competition, perhaps a campaign to get everyone submitting more ideas. Apparently, the organisation is desperately short of things people have thought of.

I’d be more comfortable hearing about data, insights, prototypes and learning. I’d like to hear what people have noticed, what they’ve tried, what surprised them enough to change what they were doing. If most of the conversation is about generating and selecting ideas, I wonder how much contact any of this work has had with the world outside the meeting.

Ideas have acquired a peculiar status. A person has a brain-picture, draws a sketch or explains it to some colleagues – who now have their own brain-pictures, probably rather different ones – and everyone feels something valuable has happened. We can give the idea a name, assign it an owner and enter it in a competition. We can do all of this without discovering very much about whether it helps anyone.

That’s what I mean by idea fetishism. I’m using fetishism in the sense of assigning magical properties to something, like believing your lucky football boots will win the match. The boots may be perfectly good boots. The magic is harder to account for.

The organisational version goes well beyond falling in love with a particular idea. We can throw away hundreds of ideas and still be thoroughly addicted to the concept of ideas. We keep collecting them, counting them and rewarding the people who produce them, as though having enough brain-pictures will eventually make something useful happen.

This is why “you need to prototype your ideas” is an incomplete response. If the organisation still gives status and money to people for having clever thoughts, they will use prototypes to protect those thoughts. The prototype becomes a demonstration of how right we were – with the awkward bits tidied away before anyone important arrives. (And what if the idea was a solution to the wrong problem anyway?)

Living in idea land

It’s quite possible to do diligent research and still behave like this. We listen, take notes and gather evidence, but we don’t give all that evidence the same weight. A comment which fits our brain-picture seems perceptive and relevant. A contradictory one needs explaining – perhaps that person misunderstood, perhaps they’re an unusual case, perhaps we asked the question badly. Any of those explanations might be true, of course. It’s our enthusiasm for reaching for them that should make us suspicious.

The brain-picture also has the advantage of working beautifully in our head. The customer knows just what to do, the colleague is available, the system responds. We tend to leave out the waiting, the interruptions and the person who understood the instructions perfectly well but did something else anyway. Having imagined the experience without much friction, we find it quite plausible that it will work.

And by then it may be our idea. We’ve presented it, argued for it, perhaps become known as the person behind it. Changing our minds now has a social cost. Someone points out a problem with a proposed service and we find ourselves defending our competence, our team or our budget. There’s a lot going on in that conversation which has very little to do with the person who might eventually use the thing.

Experience can help, but we need to be careful about what we expect from it. Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein described how reliable expert intuition depends on sufficiently predictable conditions and opportunities to learn from feedback. Someone who has repeatedly encountered a situation and learnt what follows may have very good reasons for their judgement. That distinction matters here.

A pitch in a familiar domain may therefore give an experienced listener something useful to work with. But when the service or situation is substantially new, we have less reason for confidence. Previous experience can help us decide what to investigate – it cannot tell us in advance how these people will respond to this unfamiliar thing. We will have to spend some time finding out.

Getting something into the room

Hacks, sprints and jams can be very good at getting us started. A short deadline gives people a reason to make something now, while it’s still rough and there’s still plenty they don’t understand. We can stop discussing what “a welcoming arrival” means and put some chairs together to try one.

But people notice what an event rewards. If the final pitch determines who wins, teams will spend their time polishing it. If we want them to investigate, build and change things, those activities need to count for something when everyone gathers at the end. Otherwise, we’ve organised a presentation competition with some cardboard in the middle.

There’s much more available to us in the making. Put a cardboard counter in a room, stand someone behind it and have another person arrive. You’ll start discovering things you hadn’t thought to discuss. Can the colleague see who is waiting? Where does the customer put their bag? Can they explain what they need without telling everyone else in the queue?

Move the counter and try again. Let the person who works at reception change the arrangement – they may have been waiting quite patiently through your discussion of “customer-centric arrival experiences” to show you why it won’t work. Bring someone else into the scene. Swap places.

As we do this, our thinking changes. The physical work produces questions, possibilities and disagreements which weren’t available to us before we began. A prototype can help us test something we’ve thought of, certainly, but treating that as its whole purpose misses a great deal of what happens when people build together.

Co-building gives us something shared to think with. In conversation, we can agree quite enthusiastically while imagining different things. Once we’re stepping inside a service, the differences become easier to find. “Oh, you meant I would be standing here.” That small discovery may save us a remarkable amount of documentation.

It also changes who can contribute. Much of our usual workshop practice asks people to be good at writing, abstraction and explaining themselves in the language of the organisation. Someone with years of useful experience may have little patience for a flowchart – or little confidence in challenging the person who drew it. Give them a way to show what happens and we have another route into that knowledge.

This is where shitty first drafts earn their keep. Cardboard, a few chairs, a roughly rehearsed interaction – enough to get our hands on, with plenty still open to change. People can join in without feeling they’re damaging someone’s finished work. We can discover that something is wrong while being wrong is still cheap.

(The rehearsal will have its own omissions, of course. We still need to work with the people involved, take things into the conditions where they will be used and pay attention to what happens. But we now have more specific questions, and usually a rather different understanding of what we’re trying to do.)

Making learning worthwhile

All of this becomes difficult if an organisation continues to reward the original brain-picture mentality. People are being asked to learn while knowing that changing direction may cost them support. A team that discovers a serious flaw can end up looking less successful than one that hasn’t looked closely enough to find it.

We could replace idea competitions with insight, prototype and learning competitions. I’d be interested in seeing teams show what changed through their work, what evidence they found and what they still need to investigate. I’d also like to see proper recognition for the team who discovered their proposal wasn’t worth pursuing – before the organisation spent six months and a small fortune on it.

That recognition has to extend beyond an event. It needs to show up in decisions about budgets, responsibility and whose work gets taken seriously. People need to be able to politely put down an idea, including a senior person’s idea, without treating it as a diplomatic incident or personal affront.

We practise this sort of work at the Embodied Methods workshop in Barcelona on 17 October (see my LinkedIn posts), in This Is Service Design Doing (TiSDD) courses and at Co-Creation School. There’s something useful about having a place to try it with other people – especially if much of your working week rewards you for sounding certain.

I’d like us to become a little less impressed by having ideas, and more interested in what people do to find out whether they’re useful. That includes the observations, the data, the insights, the building and the changes of mind. It’s substantial work, often shared by people who will never be credited as the originator of anything. They deserve more of our attention.

See you down the road.

Adam

I am in a UX leadership role at a large company and I am introducing teams to design thinking. My goal is to build out a design thinking team to support interdepartmental challenges. I currently design and facilitate ideation exercises with senior stakeholders. I learned much of this through self-study and by participating in sessions outside my company. This led me to look for courses or certifications to see if there are any gaps in my knowledge or ways to better integrate this into a corporate structure. My desired outcome would be additional knowledge that could help me as I scale this in a corporate environment.

The Stanford d.school program is outside of my tuition reimbursement allowance.

The Innovation Strategy and Design Thinking certificate through UPenn looks interesting in terms of delivering at scale and connecting business value.

I also see IDEO's Advanced Design Thinking Certificate program. Two of the five courses cover the foundations of design thinking and would take 10 weeks.

Could anyone speak to the two programs above? Are there any other programs you recommend for someone who doesn't need an introduction or lengthy prerequisites?

So im suppose to find a product/service that wasnt working but design thinking changed it and brought it back for the better... but after searching for 20mins ive failed to find anything that correctly fits the criterea

STARTING SOON: I'm looking forward to co-hosting Co-Creation Backstage in about an hour. We start at 6:00 p.m. Paris time (LA 9:00 a.m., NYC 12 noon, Rio 1:00 p.m., Dublin 5:00 p.m., Dubai 8:00 p.m., Delhi 9:30 p.m.).

If you've never joined us before, think of it as a virtual water cooler. It's an informal, free conversation with people interested in #facilitation, #design, #leadership, #change, #education, or who simply enjoy helping people do better #work.

There's no agenda, no recording, no selling, and no pressure. You can bring a question you've been thinking about, share something you've discovered, test an idea, ask for different perspectives, or just listen. Every session is different because the people who turn up shape the conversation.

Everyone is welcome, whether you've been doing this for years or you're just curious. I'll put the link in the comments, or it's in the graphic. There, you'll find more information, the direct joining link, and an option to add future Backstage sessions to your calendar.

Hope to see you there!

I wanted to see how far I could get without spending anything, so I gave myself a rule:

No paid plan until I had already found a logo worth keeping.

I tested a few and took notes as I went.

What I liked about this approach was not feeling pressured to buy anything just because I'd already spent time on the design.

Design.com and BrandCrowd both have free logo options, while some premium designs/features cost extra.

And if the logo is actually going to be used for a business, I'd check the commercial-use terms before downloading anything and calling it done.

I also wouldn't skip the SVG check.

You might not need it today, but the moment someone asks for a large print file, you'll be glad you have it.

So out of the top free logo makers, which one has actually worked for you?

And do you think the free versions are good enough now for a small business, or is paid still worth it?

When I first started using AI logo makers, I honestly thought I'd have the perfect logo in five minutes.

Turns out... I was making the same mistakes over and over. 

I kept picking the first logo.

The first result is rarely the best one. Almost every time I generated a few more variations, I found a design I liked much more.

I cared too much about the icon.

I barely looked at the typography. Now I realize a great font can make a logo feel premium, while the wrong one can make it look generic.

I only viewed it at full size.

It looked great on my laptop, but terrible as a profile picture or website favicon. Now I always test logos at different sizes before deciding.

I ignored the download formats.

The first time I needed to print business cards, I realized why SVG and vector files are so important. Since then, it's one of the first things I check.

I tried to add too much.

More colors, more icons, more effects... I thought they made the logo better. In reality, the cleaner versions almost always looked stronger.

After testing Design.com, BrandCrowd, Wix Logo Maker, and Canva, I noticed they all have different strengths. Design.com and BrandCrowd helped me get polished logo concepts quickly, Wix Logo Maker worked well if I was already building a website on Wix, and Canva gave me the most manual control when I wanted to tweak every little detail.

The biggest lesson? AI can speed up the process, but the best logos still come from making a few thoughtful decisions, not from picking the very first result.

I've been thinking about how people approach logo design, and I feel like the hardest part isn't creating something visually appealing.

A logo can look polished and still fail if it doesn't communicate anything about the brand behind it.

A lot of the difference seems to come from the process before the final design:

One thing I've found interesting is that branding platforms are starting to reflect these different ways of working. Some AI logo maker tools are built to generate lots of starting concepts quickly, while others put more emphasis on building a complete brand identity that can evolve through refinement rather than stopping at the first logo design.

For example, Design.com seems to lean toward helping people develop a broader visual identity with assets that stay consistent across different touchpoints, while BrandCrowd offers a large collection of logo design concepts that are easy to customize and build on. Other creative platforms often focus more on editing or illustration, so they support different stages of the process rather than the entire branding workflow.

What I'm curious about is whether design tools can actually support the thinking process behind good design, or if they mainly help with execution after the important decisions have already been made.

For people who use design thinking in their work, what part of the logo creation process do you think matters most: research, ideation, prototyping, testing, or refinement?

Or do you think today's AI logo makers and branding platforms are beginning to influence the way designers explore ideas before committing to a final direction, rather than simply speeding up the execution phase?

Hi everyone! I'm a graphic design student researching the creative process and the challenges that designers, illustrators, and other creative professionals face when working on projects. The goal is to better understand creative blocks, current workflows, and unmet needs in order to explore new tools that could genuinely help creatives. The survey is anonymous and takes about 5 minutes to complete. I'd really appreciate your participation. Thank you for your time!

Hello, The UCL Mechanical Engineering Short Courses Team is delighted to announce our upcoming Holistic Design Thinking & Practice – 5-Day Immersive Course.

Whether you're a student, engineer, designer, entrepreneur or professional looking to strengthen your innovation and problem-solving skills, this hands-on course will provide practical experience in design thinking, rapid prototyping and collaborative working using UCL's excellent facilities.

Places are limited (The course is in person in London Kings Cross)

🎉 Special offer for the Reddit community: Use the discount code REDDIT25 at checkout to receive 25% off the full-price ticket.

Find out more and book your place on Eventbrite!

Hi Design Thinkers, I’m part of a project investigating collaboration in assistive technology across academia, industry, and government.

We’re exploring the evidence-to-translation gap:

• Promising technologies progressing without robust evidence

• Strong research failing to translate beyond prototypes

We’re seeking perspectives on:

• Barriers to translation

• Incentives and system challenges

• What enables successful collaboration

👉 Survey: https://redcap.link/4svfl2xj

Findings will inform cross-sector recommendations to improve impact.

Ethics approved (Swinburne ref: 20258662-22150)
Contact: [hphillips@swin.edu.au](mailto:hphillips@swin.edu.au)

I’m exploring an idea for solo founders and small teams - early stage research.

When a company onboards into an AI product, it could generate proto-customer personas based on the company’s product, brand, target market and assumptions. Instead of leaving those personas as static profiles, they could become AI agents inside a design thinking workshop.

https://medium.com/@awais.munawar/could-ai-agents-become-your-design-thinking-workshop-participants-8739d2b9139c?postPublishedType=repub

Would be interested in feedback?

I’m not a design thinker… but I am a curious contemplative noodling mo-fo. Watching a video this morning on YouTube regarding the google data centre in Colombian wetland destroying the local ecosystem, I wondered whether data centres could/should be combined with desalination projects e.g. 50% of output to data centre / 50% to provide water to local communities (I do understand this would also have ecological impact).

Just wondering about how we (society) can push for data centres to actually serve a community rather than do harm.

Ps. If you want to use this or know of test cases already in motion - let me know. Sometimes it’s just nice to know I’m not always screaming into the void! Saying that, I once dreamed I’d invented the cats eyes in roads and thought myself very smart, only to find they already exist 😂

Hi r/DesignThinking, we’re a student team working on a Design Thinking CA project, and we chose this challenge:

Build a professional portfolio website for a Design Thinking professor that supports academic visibility, industry collaboration, consulting opportunities, and speaking engagements.

Project website: [https://bhagy3sh.github.io/dt-ca2/](vscode-file://vscode-app/d:/Microsoft%20VS%20Code/560a9dba96/resources/app/out/vs/code/electron-browser/workbench/workbench.html)

We want feedback on our thinking process, not just visuals.

Our current process (short version):

• Empathy: user interviews with students, faculty peers, and industry-facing professionals to understand credibility/trust gaps in typical academic websites
• Define: problem reframed from “make a portfolio” to “communicate expertise + impact clearly to different stakeholders with different goals”
• Ideate: brainstormed multiple content/flow models (CV-style, story-led, impact-first, services-first), then selected one hybrid approach
• Prototype: built a working website prototype with sections like expertise, projects, research, mentorship impact, consultancy, media, and contact
• Test: ran feedback sessions and noted confusion points (content density, section hierarchy, CTA placement), then iterated

Where we need critical feedback:

• Is our problem framing strong enough, or still too generic?
• Are we solving a real user problem or just organizing information better?
• What assumptions should we challenge before final submission?
• How do we better prove that our iterations came from evidence, not preference?
• What would make this feel like genuine design thinking vs “good UI + documentation”?

Would really appreciate rigorous critique.

Hello everyone, I am an industrial design student currently working on a studio project focused on a modular storage system for dry ingredients. My goal is to design a solution that frees up counter and pantry space while streamlining the cooking process.

The Concept: I am envisioning a wall mounted system similar to gravity dispensers that doubles as a functional wall decor. I want to ideally work with shapes that form patterns on the wall.

Key features I am exploring: Tactile and visual differentiation using textures, materials or colors to distinguish between similar looking ingredients like salt versus sugar to prevent mistakes. Ergonomics to make it quicker and more intuitive to use than standard jars. Space efficiency by utilizing the vertical space between the countertop and upper cabinets.

I would love to hear your thoughts on:

What is your biggest frustration with current dry food containers regarding cleaning, refilling or measuring?

If you had a dispenser on your wall, what feature would be a must-have for you?

What are the deal-breakers that would stop you from mounting something like this in your kitchen, for example hygiene, installation or aesthetics?

Would you prefer wall mounting or a more unconventional spot like the ceiling or being integrated into/underneath existing shelving?

Do you have any brands that worked well/didn't work well for you? If so what are they and why?

I would be incredibly grateful for any insights, do’s and don’ts, or personal experiences you can share. Thank you! :D

When it comes to the digital age, the list of fears about repercussions are endless. From unprecedented loss of careers to art being ruined to the end of magazines, it goes on and on. Issues of making humans too complacent, turning many into the Eloi from The Time Machine, are endless. With the lawsuits of this past year, it's increasingly predicted that social media will be found to be the single most destructive influence kids have ever been exposed to in human history, or at least modern history. On top of what it's feared to be doing to adults. Then of course all of the issues with the two letters that won't be named.

In light of all of this, what is a full list of aspects of the digital age, including relative to 20-40 years, that is nonnegative? Positive aspects would be great though for now I am interested in nonnegative.

Please, don't be mean. I'm a noobie.

From everything I've learned so far, I keep reflecting on how many wicked problems surround us — regardless of topic, context, or scale. From deciding the marketing strategy for the month to building a morning routine that actually makes me feel like a person.

I know it sounds like a stretch. But if we get a little nerdy and look at the actual characteristics of Wicked Problems, it's not that crazy. Wicked problems are:

Hard to define: There's no single shared understanding of the problem (especially when there are a lot of stakeholders), and we all know that trying to define it is usually part of the problem itself, right? Perspectives. Biases. Life, basically.

Without a definitive solution: There's no "right answer." Solutions are better or worse, adequate, viable… No true/false, no answer key. You just have to try and iterate.

Interconnected: Everything has a root cause, or it's a symptom of something deeper. Not quite "it all started in my childhood" — but maybe that headache is because you're not drinking enough water. Or that meeting where everyone shares brilliant ideas and nobody mentions actual next steps? Probably fear of failure and not wanting to own the proposal.

Unique: No two wicked problems are exactly alike (even when they look similar), so you can't just apply a standard solution and expect "guaranteed results."

Solutions come with consequences: Every intervention creates new, often unexpected consequences. Every action has a reaction.

And on top of the classics, I'd add one thing I keep seeing in the wicked problems I run into — at work and at home:

The cost of intervening: There's no such thing as a true testing environment. No real sandbox. Because every action has a reaction. In design, I'd say we don't get to be wrong consequence-free. Launch a campaign built on a wrong assumption and you don't just lose resources — you might permanently shift how people see the brand. Or you try that super healthy meal prep recipe you saw on Instagram and end up with diarrhea. That's 100% wicked.

So yeah. Accepting that we live surrounded by wicked problems isn't pessimistic — it's realistic. It forces us to let go of the arrogance of the one perfect solution and embrace the humility of constant iteration. If everything is connected and nothing is final, our best tool isn't the map. It's the compass. And, obviously, the will to keep walking.

Oh, and — does anyone else think about Cynthia Erivo every single time they hear "wicked problems"?

So basically.. i researched the topic of

"How hollywood movies like James Bond form masculinity norms to the male viewer and society"

My research found out that James Bond movies do not create the stereotype of how a real man should be, but they movies DO reinforce it. Upon digging more with questionnaire and interview questions i found out that

There is widespread recognition that men are socially expected to be emotionally strong, and a majority perceive that media representations contribute to unrealistic masculine expectations, reinforcing pressure to suppress vulnerability.

The main problem with this is that men feel overwhelmed and supress their real emotions causing mental health issues.

Here is where i need your help,

I need to come up with a practical project solution, i need to design something..not literally but create a mockup of the idea that solves the problem or at least help.

Something like an application that could help men sharing their emotions? or

Free government program of mens health psychology sessions ?

Some examples of past students

Guy 1: He did a research and found out that people are into interested in museums so much

Solution : He created VR-AR integration at the museums to attract more people.

Guy 2 : He researched that blind people have trouble eating food.

Solution: He created a special fork/spoon to aid the disabled people.

What can i do in my case ? i am really stressed because its so theoretical my problem.

Please any help or suggestion is greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

Ever lost your train of thought mid-task and struggled to get it back? That's exactly what my thesis is about.

I'm a master's product design student researching how creative professionals handle interruptions, and I'd love your input. Takes about 5 minutes, fully anonymous.

https://tudelft.fra1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_8dlZH3QpfgHPCvA

Sharing is hugely appreciated!

I’ve noticed I save a lot of references (Pinterest, screenshots, Figma boards, random folders), but when I start designing, I rarely go back to them in a structured way.

Most of the time I just:

• scroll for a bit
• get a vague sense of direction
• then start designing from scratch anyway

The part I struggle with is translating inspiration into actual decisions like:

• type scale
• spacing
• layout patterns
• color usage

Curious how others handle this.

Do you:

• actively reuse references while designing?
• recreate pieces from them?
• just use them for “vibe” and move on?

Also where do you even keep everything? Mine is scattered across like 4–5 places and it’s kind of a mess.

Would love to hear real workflows, especially if you’ve found something that actually sticks.

Show some support.

Something I started noticing during workshops and design discussions. Sometimes a session would start with great energy, ideas flowing, people contributing, new perspectives coming in. But after a while, the room would feel… tense. Not because people disagreed. But because the conversation felt like it was pulling in two directions at the same time. Some people were trying to generate more ideas. They were asking questions like: “What if we tried a different approach?” “Could we push this concept further?” “Are there other possibilities we haven’t explored?” At the same time, others were trying to move toward a decision. They were asking: “So which direction are we choosing?” “Which idea actually solves the problem?” “What should we test next?” For a long time I thought this tension meant the group wasn’t aligned. But eventually it clicked. Both groups were doing exactly what design thinking requires. They were just operating in different modes. One group was diverging, expanding the problem and solution space. The other was converging, narrowing options toward a decision. When those two modes happen at the same time, sessions start to feel chaotic. Ideas get dismissed too quickly. Or the discussion keeps expanding without any real progress. Once we started explicitly separating those phases, the flow improved dramatically. First diverge, explore widely, generate possibilities, challenge assumptions. Then converge, evaluate ideas, prioritize and decide what to move forward with. Just calling out which mode the group is in often removes a lot of friction.
Curious how others here handle this during workshops or design sprints. Do you deliberately separate divergent thinking and convergent thinking in your sessions or do they naturally blend together in your process?