In an increasingly uncertain world, where crises follow one another and models keep reinventing themselves, companies need approaches that combine creativity, agility, and meaning.
Design Thinking, born in design schools and popularized by IDEO, offers a powerful framework for solving complex problems by putting people at the center.
But faced with today's environmental and systemic challenges, this approach now needs to expand to address the emergence of new economic models such as the circular economy.
What you should remember:
- Design Thinking is a human-centered innovation approach, based on empathy, creativity, and experimentation.
- Born at Stanford and popularized by IDEO, Design Thinking offers an iterative approach to solving complex problems by mobilizing collective intelligence.
- Faced with today's climate and economic challenges, Circular Design extends this method by integrating the notions of systems thinking and planetary boundaries.
- By combining Design Thinking & Circular Design, companies can design more sustainable, circular, resilient models suited to the challenges of the 21st century.
What is Design Thinking?
Design Thinking is a human-centered innovation approach, based on understanding users' real needs and co-creating concrete solutions.
Far more than a method, it's a true mindset: a way of thinking and acting that combines empathy, experimentation, and collaboration to solve complex problems.
An approach born to go beyond "object" design
Historically, design long focused on the form, function, and aesthetics of products. Designers created objects meant for use, but rarely for the systems they belonged to.
Starting in the 1960s-1970s, as technological and organizational challenges grew, some design pioneers like Herbert A. Simon or Victor Papanek proposed a broader vision: that design could help solve societal, economic, and environmental problems.
This shift paved the way for Design Thinking, a cross-cutting approach that applies design tools (observation, ideation, prototyping) to any kind of challenge, whether social, strategic, or organizational.
The history of Design Thinking
The concept of Design Thinking took root at Stanford University in the 1980s. That's where Rolf Faste, a design professor, built on the work of Robert McKim and, for the first time, formalized the concept of Design Thinking.
It's in this dynamic that, in the 1990s, David Kelley, a Stanford professor and founder of IDEO, played a key role. At that time, David Kelley and Tim Brown helped formalize this approach into a true collaborative innovation process, accessible to all teams, not just designers.
Their ambition was simple: to let everyone think like a designer by combining creativity, empathy, and methodological rigor to turn ideas into concrete, desirable solutions.
IDEO thus popularized Design Thinking among businesses and institutions, presenting it as a collaborative innovation process grounded in rapid experimentation and real-world testing. What was once reserved for designers became a shared project culture, now used in management, healthcare, digital transition, and, today, in sustainability strategies.
A philosophy centered on people and experimentation
Design Thinking rests on a simple conviction: to innovate effectively, you need to start from real needs. This means observing, listening, putting yourself in end users' shoes, and then co-building solutions with them. Each idea is then tested, improved, and transformed in an iterative cycle where mistakes become a source of learning.
This approach fosters collective intelligence, critical thinking, and applied creativity, in service of fairer, more viable solutions.
Today, faced with the challenges of the 21st century (resource scarcity, climate crises, geopolitical instability, etc.), Design Thinking is no longer enough on its own, because it's not enough to focus solely on people. You also need to account for the ecosystem as a whole.
And this is exactly where Circular Design comes in. It retains Design Thinking's collaborative spirit but adds a systemic, circular dimension.
The key steps of Design Thinking
It's important to understand that Design Thinking isn't a linear process, but an iterative approach where you move forward, test, go back, and improve.
It's a sequence of steps that help you better understand real needs, surface new ideas, and turn viable solutions into reality. This method thus encourages experimentation and co-creation rather than "rigid" planning.
The 5 steps of the process, according to the Stanford model
Today, the most widely used reference in Design Thinking remains the one developed by Stanford's d.school. It rests on five main phases:
- Empathize, in other words: understand the users. Observe, listen, put yourself in users' shoes to understand both their explicit and, above all, their implicit needs. This phase rests on empathy, a fundamental pillar of Design Thinking.
- Define, in other words: reframe the problem. Based on the observations, you identify the real challenges to address. The problem is reframed as a human issue, not a technical or commercial one.
- Ideate, in other words: generate ideas. In this step, collective creativity takes over, using techniques like brainstorming, collaborative workshops, and so on. Here, anything goes to explore as many avenues as possible, without self-censorship.
- Prototype, in other words: give form to ideas. A significant phase, since you'll turn ideas into tangible objects (mockups, scenarios, storyboards). The goal isn't to produce a perfect result, but to learn by doing.
- Test, in other words: experiment and learn. You quickly confront the prototype with users to gather their feedback and adjust and improve the concept. Afterward, the cycle starts again to refine the concept if needed.
You may have guessed it, but this method is notably inspired by agile approaches and Lean Startup, allowing for continuous improvement and rapid experimentation.
Tim Brown's approach
In parallel, Tim Brown, head of IDEO, summarized Design Thinking into three broader, more strategic steps:
- Inspiration. To understand the context, observe usage, and identify unmet needs. It's an opening phase, where you collect as many signals as possible to fuel your thinking.
- Ideation. To explore, generate, and combine ideas without judgment. Teams move from divergence (opening up) to convergence (selecting promising avenues).
- Implementation. To turn ideas into concrete actions. This last step is essential, since you move from concept to the field, with a logic of rapid prototyping, testing, and iteration.
This more fluid vision emphasizes moving into action, because Design Thinking doesn't stop at ideation. Indeed, it's measured by its ability to surface concrete, viable solutions.
The importance of iterative loops and prototyping
It's important to keep in mind that Design Thinking rests on a clear conviction: you can't plan everything in advance. As in our current world, you need to accept uncertainty and move forward step by step, continuously testing and adjusting, to be able to create solutions that are truly relevant and well-suited.
Prototyping then becomes a collective learning tool, because it makes an idea visible, lets you identify its limits, and lets it evolve based on feedback from users and stakeholders. It's a deeply collaborative, empirical approach that transforms the way teams innovate.
Why adopt Design Thinking in business?
As we've mentioned in several articles, and as you probably already know, companies today operate in a volatile, uncertain, and complex world (a VUCA world). In this context, classic project management approaches quickly reach their limits, since they struggle to respond to the complexity of social, environmental, and economic challenges.
Design Thinking thus offers an alternative. By putting people at the center and valuing experimentation, it helps organizations rethink their products, services, and business models in a more creative, agile, and sustainable way.
Stimulate creativity and strengthen collaboration
Design Thinking reintroduces an essential dimension often lost in organizations: collective creativity. By mobilizing co-creation tools (brainstorming, prototyping, empathy maps, etc.), this method lets teams explore new ideas, imagine alternative scenarios, and move past internal silos.
This approach also fosters a diversity of viewpoints, since several stakeholders are involved (designers, engineers, CSR managers, HR, etc.) working together toward a shared goal.
After this type of workshop, which mobilizes collective intelligence, you'll notice in particular that team dynamics have been strengthened and that the project has progressed faster than expected.
Break out of silos with a cross-functional, agile method
Unlike traditional project management approaches, which are often top-down and linear, Design Thinking adopts an iterative, agile logic. Ideas aren't set in stone. They evolve based on tests and feedback.
This flexibility lets companies become more responsive, reduce the risk of error, and improve customer satisfaction by quickly incorporating feedback from end users. It's a way of learning gradually, experimenting on a small scale before scaling up.
Innovate sustainably in a complex, uncertain world
Design Thinking isn't just a rapid innovation method. It's also a philosophy of lasting transformation. By relying on field observation and an understanding of real needs, it pushes companies to design relevant, inclusive, and even resilient solutions.
Increasingly, this approach aligns with environmental and social concerns, since it fosters innovation that considers not only users but also resources and ecosystems.
This is where the link with Circular Design becomes clear. As you understood, Design Thinking helps you understand usage. Circular Design, in turn, helps you design sustainable, circular, resilient systems.
Adopting Design Thinking in business, combined with Circular Design, means shifting your posture: from planning to exploration, from certainty to learning, from product to experience, and from short-term thinking to sustainability and resilience, in order to face current and future changes and crises.
The complementarity of Design Thinking and Circular Design
Design Thinking and Circular Design share the same philosophy: using design not merely as a tool for creating objects, but as a method for transforming systems.
While the first focuses primarily on users and their needs, the second broadens the thinking to include all actors, resources, and impacts. One teaches you to innovate with empathy, the other to design with responsibility and systemic vision.
From human-centered design to life-centered design
Design Thinking has let companies put people back at the heart of innovation. But in an era of climate disruption, resource depletion, and geopolitical tensions, it's becoming necessary to go further, since people are no longer the sole center of the system.
Circular Design considers living systems, ecosystems, and value chains as inseparable elements of design. With this method, the goal is no longer just to create desirable, useful products, but to design solutions compatible with planetary boundaries.
Circular Design thus invites you to reflect on what you're designing with, within what system, and with what consequences.
Changing perspective to innovate
Where Design Thinking fosters experimentation and co-creation, Circular Design adds a layer of systemic analysis. This approach integrates economic, social, and environmental dimensions from the design phase onward, to imagine models that are viable in the long term. In short, Circular Design invites you to change your perspective, because:
- You're no longer just trying to solve a problem, but to understand the interactions between actors, resources, and impacts.
- You're no longer aiming solely for incremental innovation, but for the total transformation of models.
Circular Design thus acts as a natural extension of Design Thinking, adding the notion of planetary boundaries, resource loops, and ecosystem dynamics.
Tools to move from idea to action
Combining Design Thinking and Circular Design is great, but how do you actually do it?
At Circulab Academy, we offer free tools that let you turn reflection into action, and intention into impact.
- Circular Canvas. To rethink a business model as a whole by identifying the main resources, partners, impacts, and dependencies.
- Partner Map. To visualize the ecosystem's stakeholders and imagine new forms of cooperation.
- Value Chain Canvas. To analyze a company's value chain, detect its vulnerabilities, and reveal circular opportunities.
Used together, these tools offer a vision that is at once creative, systemic, and strategic, essential for designing sustainable, circular, resilient solutions.
Get trained in a method combining Design Thinking and Circular Design
Moving from idea to action takes more than a method. It takes a mindset, a systemic vision, and concrete tools. This is exactly what Circulab Academy offers, by training professionals in methods that transform business models and usage patterns.
Our training programs help you learn to think differently, design collectively, and sustainably transform your business models.
A training program to innovate sustainably, circularly, and resiliently
Innovating sustainably means understanding that every decision affects the whole system (users, suppliers, territories, etc.). Our training integrates the fundamentals of Design Thinking and mobilize collective intelligence, enriching them with systems thinking, to help you connect the dots and identify the real levers for transformation.
Through real-world cases, collaborative exercises, and visual tools, you'll learn to:
- Observe your ecosystem to change your perspective.
- Identify real needs and hidden dependencies.
- Build solutions aligned with planetary boundaries.
All our training is available remotely and can be organized in an in-house format to support your teams in a responsible innovation approach.
In short
Design Thinking teaches us to innovate with empathy and creativity. Circular Design, in turn, invites us to go further by accounting for planetary boundaries and the interdependencies between actors, resources, and uses.
By combining these two approaches, organizations can imagine solutions that are more useful, more sustainable, and more resilient. This blend of methodologies is exactly what we pass on through our training, to help you design a future that's truly sustainable and desirable.