How Does AI Support Design Thinking?

For centuries, technology has transformed how people live, work, and think. But the recent growth of AI has lit a fire in technology transformation, leading to the exponential growth of new content, products, and ideas.

At the same time, human-centered design thinking has also blossomed, ringing in a wave of original creativity.

What happens when we combine two of the most powerful forces: the human power of design thinking and the technological prowess of AI? Nearly limitless potential.

In this article, we’ll dive into design thinking and how it integrates with AI.

4 Steps to Design Thinking

Design thinking is a human-centered approach to creativity that can be applied to everything from design to project planning and program innovation. 

Rather than other problem-solving approaches that focus on the problem itself, design thinking is user-centric and focuses on solutions. For example, design thinking is proactively creating a solution to solve a customer's pain point instead of focusing on the competition. Design thinking focuses on creating meaningful and impactful solutions, not just innovating for innovation's sake.

Design thinking provides a structured approach with four key steps:

1. Clarify. Observe a situation without bias and empathize with those affected by a problem. Ask questions and identify what needs to be solved, then create a problem statement or question to be your rallying cry.

2. Ideate. Dive into creativity and brainstorm potential solutions, all with your problem statement in mind.

3. Develop. Create potential solutions to test, experiment, and reiterate. It’s common to return to the first two steps after developing ideas. 

4. Implement. After testing and adjusting several ideas, you’ll land on a solution that brings positive results. This step also invites changes and adjustments, even to the final product. 

Design thinking focuses on customers and users to create solutions that resonate with people and will actually get used. And it works–research shows that organizations that use design thinking see a 33% increase in revenue and 56% higher returns than the competition.

Design Thinking in the Age of AI

On the surface, design thinking and AI may seem completely opposed: design thinking prioritizes human creativity and empathy, while AI tends to drive automation and efficiency. However, the two can actually work together seamlessly and combine some of their strongest elements to support each other.

Here are just a few of the ways AI integrates with and supports the entire design thinking framework:

Data-Driven Research and Analysis

Before design thinking can begin, teams need to understand who they’re designing for and get to the root of the problem. That can create a huge amount of data that can be time-consuming and challenging to sort through. But not with AI. Teams can lean into the technology and use natural language processing and machine learning to analyze user feedback, analyze sentiment, and find common themes. AI is like a cheat code for understanding users and can highlight trends and connections humans may not easily find on their own. 

Ideate Solutions

AI breaks down many of the limitations of implementing ideas, such as not having the resources, workforce, or time to create a new product or program. AI opens the door to new solutions, giving teams the power to expand their thinking and create innovative solutions. 

Efficiently Create Prototypes 

With traditional methods, teams may be limited in the number of prototypes they can create, and adjustments or iterations are slow. AI makes it easy to create prototypes at scale, meaning teams can test more ideas and make faster adjustments to find the right solution quickly. 

Accurate Testing 

AI is a useful tool for facilitating experiments, especially for running a prototype through various scenarios. Leaning into automation removes many variables from the testing process, creating more accurate results. And when the testing is done, AI can dive into the data to calculate accurate results and find patterns far more efficiently and quickly than a human can. 

AI has the power to transform the entire design thinking experience. Combining these powerhouse tools advances design thinking and allows teams to unleash new technology to create proven, impactful solutions.