Summary
Design thinking is a human-centred way of solving problems. You start by understanding the people you’re designing for, frame the real problem, generate lots of possible answers, then build rough prototypes and test them with those people. Repeat until it works. The term was popularised in the 2000s by the design firm IDEO and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (the “d.school”). Tim Brown, IDEO’s CEO, set it out for a business audience in “Design Thinking” (Harvard Business Review, June 2008).
For game designers very little of this is new. Schell’s lenses, paper prototypes and playtests cover the same ground. What design thinking adds is a shared vocabulary and a habit of separating understanding the problem from solving it, which student teams often skip.
Key ideas
The d.school’s five modes
The d.school’s Bootcamp Bootleg (a free card-style guide, an update of its 2009 edition) organises the process into five modes. It calls them modes, not steps, because teams move back and forth between them.
- Empathise. Understand the people you are designing for. Observe them in context, engage them in interviews, immerse yourself in their experience. “Empathy is the foundation of a human-centered design process.”
- Define. Turn what you learned into a focused, actionable problem statement, which the d.school calls a point of view (POV). Define is a mode of “focus” rather than “flaring”. A good POV fuels brainstorming by suggesting “how might we” questions.
- Ideate. Go wide. Generate a large quantity and a wide variety of ideas, getting the obvious ones out of your heads so the team can move past them.
- Prototype. Get ideas out of your head into a form people can experience: sticky notes, role-play, an object, an interface, a storyboard. Keep early prototypes “rough and rapid”. The Bootleg lists four reasons to prototype: gaining empathy, exploration, testing and inspiration.
- Test. Put low-resolution prototypes in front of real users in context, learn and refine. Testing can show that you framed the problem wrongly, which sends you back to Define. The Bootleg’s best-known line: “Prototype as if you know you’re right, but test as if you know you’re wrong.”
(d.school, Bootcamp Bootleg, Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford. The current Design Thinking Bootleg (2018) keeps the same five modes and is published under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0: https://dschool.stanford.edu/resources/design-thinking-bootleg)
The d.school mindsets
The Bootleg pairs the modes with seven mindsets: show don’t tell, focus on human values, craft clarity, embrace experimentation, be mindful of process, bias toward action and radical collaboration. Two matter most for game students. Embrace experimentation says prototyping is part of how you think, not a final check (“We build to think and learn”). Bias toward action calls the name design thinking “a misnomer” because “it is more about doing than thinking”.
The Double Diamond
The UK Design Council’s Double Diamond is the other common map of the process. A team at the Design Council started work on it in 2003 by comparing how its own project teams worked, and began presenting it in 2004. It is usually dated 2005. It has four phases:
- Discover: question the challenge and research user needs.
- Define: make sense of the findings and write a design brief that states the challenge clearly.
- Develop: develop, test and refine several possible solutions.
- Deliver: pick one solution that works and prepare it for launch.
The two diamonds show the shape of the thinking. The first diamond opens out to explore the problem, then narrows to a definition. The second opens out to explore solutions, then narrows to one. The Design Council traces the diverge-converge-iterate pattern back to design researchers such as Herbert Simon and Nigel Cross. (Design Council, “History of the Double Diamond”, https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/our-resources/the-double-diamond/history-of-the-double-diamond/)
Brown’s three spaces
Brown’s 2008 article groups the work into three overlapping “spaces” instead of stages: inspiration (the problem or opportunity that motivates the search for solutions), ideation (generating, developing and testing ideas, where prototyping lives) and implementation (taking the idea to market). (Brown, “Design Thinking”, Harvard Business Review, June 2008)
In practice
Mapping the five modes onto a student game project:
| Mode | Game development version | Wiki pages |
|---|---|---|
| Empathise | Watch people play games like yours. Interview target players. Play the genre yourself with fresh eyes. | player-centric-design, player-personas |
| Define | Write the problem statement and the essential experience in one or two sentences. | design-lenses (Lens #1 Essential Experience, #12 Problem Statement) |
| Ideate | Brainstorm mechanics and themes, then run the shortlist through a handful of lenses. | lenses-reference |
| Prototype | Paper prototype or greybox the riskiest idea first. | prototyping (Lens #14 Risk Mitigation, #15 The Toy) |
| Test | Playtest, observe and ask questions, then decide what changes. | playtesting (Lens #91 Playtesting) |
A worked example. A team in a 48-hour jam has the theme “lost signal”. The temptation is to start coding the first idea. A design-thinking version spends the first two hours differently. Ten minutes asking other jammers what “lost signal” makes them feel (Empathise). One sentence: “Players should feel the panic of losing contact and the relief of finding it again” (Define). Fifteen ideas on sticky notes in twenty minutes (Ideate). Two paper prototypes, one tested on a neighbouring team (Prototype, Test). Then the team codes the one that survived. It feels slower. It usually isn’t, because the dead ends get found on paper instead of at 3am on day two.
Schell makes the same argument in his own words with the Rule of the Loop: the more times you test and improve your design, the better your game will be (Schell, The Art of Game Design, Ch. 7, see source-art-of-game-design).
Evidence
- The d.school frames the modes as non-linear and the mindsets as “vital attitudes for a design thinker to hold” (d.school, Bootcamp Bootleg).
- The Design Council built the Double Diamond from a review of its own programme projects plus outside methods and publications, not from a controlled study (Design Council, “History of the Double Diamond”).
- Brown defines design thinking as matching people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can turn into value (Brown, HBR, 2008). That business framing explains why “viability” sits alongside “desirability” in later IDEO material.
Implications
- Most student design problems are framing problems. Teams solve the wrong problem very efficiently. A forced Define step (a written POV or Schell’s Lens #12) catches this cheaply.
- “Empathise” needs care in games. Designers are often players of their own genre and assume they are the audience. Lens #16 The Player and Koster’s point that different players find different patterns fun (Koster, A Theory of Fun, see source-theory-of-fun) are useful correctives.
- Design thinking says little about what makes a game good. Pair it with lenses, mda-framework or elemental-tetrad for the content, and use design thinking for the process.
Open questions
- Critiques. Natasha Iskander (“Design Thinking Is Fundamentally Conservative and Preserves the Status Quo”, HBR, September 2018) argues that the method puts the designer above the people being served and limits their participation. Is co-design with players a better model for community-heavy games?
- How much “empathy” research is realistic in a short student project or a jam, and what is the minimum that still changes decisions?
- Design thinking came from product and service design, where the goal is usually to remove friction. Games add friction on purpose (game-balance, Lens #31 Challenge). Where does the user-research mindset mislead game designers?
Related
- game-thinking — Amy Jo Kim’s method, which builds on design thinking and adds game design ideas such as superfans and core learning loops
- prototyping — The Prototype mode in depth: risk-driven, paper and digital prototypes
- playtesting — The Test mode for games
- design-lenses and lenses-reference — Schell’s question sets, useful in Define and Ideate
- player-centric-design — Designing from the player’s experience outward
- player-personas — A Define-mode tool for keeping target players in view
- preproduction-and-concept-validation — Where design thinking fits in a production schedule
- agile-design — Iterating on playable builds instead of documents
- source-art-of-game-design