Design Thinking for Social Innovation

By working closely with the clients and consumers, design thinking allows high-impact solutions to social problems to bubble up from below rather than being imposed from the top.

It enables an organized collective of people from across sectors, fields, and socio-economic markers to collaboratively create social change through design thinking and social innovation processes.

Design Thinking relies on local expertise to uncover local solutions. Design thinkers look for work-arounds and improvise solutions and they find ways to incorporate those into the offerings they create. They consider what we call the edges, the places where “extreme” people live differently, think differently, and consume differently. 

Design thinking is centered on innovating through the eyes of the end user and as such encourages in-the-field research that builds empathy for people, which results in deeper insights about their unmet needs.