the difference between design thinking and critical thinking

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What Is Design Thinking & Why Is It Important?

• 18 Jan 2022

In an age when innovation is key to business success and growth, you’ve likely come across the term “design thinking.” Perhaps you’ve heard it mentioned by a senior leader as something that needs to be utilized more, or maybe you’ve seen it on a prospective employee's resume.

While design thinking is an ideology based on designers’ workflows for mapping out stages of design, its purpose is to provide all professionals with a standardized innovation process to develop creative solutions to problems—design-related or not.

Why is design thinking needed? Innovation is defined as a product, process, service, or business model featuring two critical characteristics: novel and useful. Yet, there’s no use in creating something new and novel if people won’t use it. Design thinking offers innovation the upgrade it needs to inspire meaningful and impactful solutions.

But what is design thinking, and how does it benefit working professionals?

What Is Design Thinking?

Design thinking is a mindset and approach to problem-solving and innovation anchored around human-centered design . While it can be traced back centuries—and perhaps even longer—it gained traction in the modern business world after Tim Brown, CEO and president of design company IDEO, published an article about it in the Harvard Business Review .

Design thinking is different from other innovation and ideation processes in that it’s solution-based and user-centric rather than problem-based. This means it focuses on the solution to a problem instead of the problem itself.

For example, if a team is struggling with transitioning to remote work, the design thinking methodology encourages them to consider how to increase employee engagement rather than focus on the problem (decreasing productivity).

The essence of design thinking is human-centric and user-specific. It’s about the person behind the problem and solution, and requires asking questions such as “Who will be using this product?” and “How will this solution impact the user?”

The first, and arguably most important, step of design thinking is building empathy with users. By understanding the person affected by a problem, you can find a more impactful solution. On top of empathy, design thinking is centered on observing product interaction, drawing conclusions based on research, and ensuring the user remains the focus of the final implementation.

The Four Phases of Innovation

So, what does design thinking entail? There are many models of design thinking that range from three to seven steps.

In the online course Design Thinking and Innovation , Harvard Business School Dean Srikant Datar leverages a four-phase innovation framework. The phases venture from concrete to abstract thinking and back again as the process loops, reverses, and repeats. This is an important balance because abstract thinking increases the likelihood that an idea will be novel. It’s essential, however, to anchor abstract ideas in concrete thinking to ensure the solution is valid and useful.

Here are the four phases for effective innovation and, by extension, design thinking.

The first phase is about narrowing down the focus of the design thinking process. It involves identifying the problem statement to come up with the best outcome. This is done through observation and taking the time to determine the problem and the roadblocks that prevented a solution in the past.

Various tools and frameworks are available—and often needed—to make concrete observations about users and facts gathered through research. Regardless of which tools are implemented, the key is to observe without assumptions or biased expectations.

Once findings from your observations are collected, the next step is to shape insights by framing those observations. This is where you can venture into the abstract by reframing the problem in the form of a statement or question.

Once the problem statement or question has been solidified—not finalized—the next step is ideation. You can use a tool such as systematic inventive thinking (SIT) in this stage, which is useful for creating an innovative process that can be replicated in the future.

The goal is to ultimately overcome cognitive fixedness and devise new and innovative ideas that solve the problems you identified. Continue to actively avoid assumptions and keep the user at the forefront of your mind during ideation sessions.

The third phase involves developing concepts by critiquing a range of possible solutions. This includes multiple rounds of prototyping, testing, and experimenting to answer critical questions about a concept’s viability.

Remember: This step isn’t about perfection, but rather, experimenting with different ideas and seeing which parts work and which don’t.

4. Implement

The fourth and final phase, implementation, is when the entire process comes together. As an extension of the develop phase, implementation starts with testing, reflecting on results, reiterating, and testing again. This may require going back to a prior phase to iterate and refine until you find a successful solution. Such an approach is recommended because design thinking is often a nonlinear, iterative process.

In this phase, don’t forget to share results with stakeholders and reflect on the innovation management strategies implemented during the design thinking process. Learning from experience is an innovation process and design thinking project all its own.

Check out the video about the design thinking process below, and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more explainer content!

Why Design Thinking Skills Matter

The main value of design thinking is that it offers a defined process for innovation. While trial and error is a good way to test and experiment what works and what doesn’t, it’s often time-consuming, expensive, and ultimately ineffective. On the other hand, following the concrete steps of design thinking is an efficient way to develop new, innovative solutions.

On top of a clear, defined process that enables strategic innovation, design thinking can have immensely positive outcomes for your career—in terms of both advancement and salary.

As of December 2021, the most common occupations requiring design thinking skills were:

• Marketing managers
• Industrial engineers
• Graphic designers
• Software developers
• General and operations managers
• Management analysts
• Personal service managers
• Architectural and engineering managers
• Computer and information systems managers

In addition, jobs that require design thinking statistically have higher salaries. Take a marketing manager position, for example. The median annual salary is $107,900. Marketing manager job postings that require design thinking skills, however, have a median annual salary of $133,900—a 24 percent increase.

Overall, businesses are looking for talent with design thinking skills. As of November 2021, there were 29,648 job postings in the United States advertising design thinking as a necessary skill—a 153 percent increase from November 2020, and a 637 percent increase from November 2017.

As businesses continue to recognize the need for design thinking and innovation, they’ll likely create more demand for employees with those skills.

Learning Design Thinking

Design thinking is an extension of innovation that allows you to design solutions for end users with a single problem statement in mind. It not only imparts valuable skills but can help advance your career.

It’s also a collaborative endeavor that can only be mastered through practice with peers. As Datar says in the introduction to Design Thinking and Innovation : “Just as with learning how to swim, the best way to practice is to jump in and try.”

If you want to learn design thinking, take an active role in your education. Start polls, problem-solving exercises, and debates with peers to get a taste of the process. It’s also important to seek out diverse viewpoints to prepare yourself for the business world.

In addition, if you’re considering adding design thinking to your skill set, think about your goals and why you want to learn about it. What else might you need to be successful?

You might consider developing your communication, innovation, leadership, research, and management skills, as those are often listed alongside design thinking in job postings and professional profiles.

You may also notice skills like agile methodology, user experience, and prototyping in job postings, along with non-design skills, such as product management, strategic planning, and new product development.

Is Design Thinking Right for You?

There are many ways to approach problem-solving and innovation. Design thinking is just one of them. While it’s beneficial to learn how others have approached problems and evaluate if you have the same tools at your disposal, it can be more important to chart your own course to deliver what users and customers truly need.

You can also pursue an online course or workshop that dives deeper into design thinking methodology. This can be a practical path if you want to improve your design thinking skills or require a more collaborative environment.

Are you ready to develop your design thinking skills? Explore our online course Design Thinking and Innovation to discover how to leverage fundamental design thinking principles and innovative problem-solving tools to address business challenges.

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Reasoning: The synapse between critical thinking and design thinking

Thinking critically and the approach of reasoning itself, can become a precursor to an innovative solution for the problem proposed at hand. Designers have long employed different methods of reasoning to create the most relevant and innovative solution for their customers.

If you were to create a loan application, which made loaning process simple and convenient for rural users, what kind of a reasoning approach would you follow? 

As a designer thinking of creating a solution for such a problem, you might think in 3 different ways. Consider some scenarios:

You find through census data that 90% of the people in the village cannot read or write but can communicate verbally. You deduce on the basis of this fact that any user can easily engage with a voice-based application, based on the local language and create one.

You start by an observation gathered from all the people you met that they were able to read and understand numbers. So you induce that an application interface which has numerics written could be understood directly and integrate it in the solution.

During your survey, you observe mobile users (especially women), to be using their phones during midafternoon hours of 3 – 4 pm. You start to think that maybe women are free at that time in the village and think of creating an application which runs a 15 min program. The app sends notification during this one hour and educates the users of basic terminology of the loan process through an interactive story.

Which of these ways of thinking would you consider most valid, likely to work or innovative?

The tale of the 3 styles of reasoning.

Although formal logic is not introduced to a majority of people systematically, but through inference, two forms of dominant logic, grounded in the scientific tradition, have been exposed to most of us.

Deductive reasoning

All men are mortal. Since Socrates is a man. He is also a mortal. The most classical example of this is the 2000-year-old question of whether the ancient Greekgreek Philosopher Socrates was mortal or not. As indicated by scenario 1,  deductive reasoning begins with the assertion of a general rule and ends up in a guaranteed specific conclusion. It stands on a foundation that the conclusion holds true if the premise is true.

Inductive reasoning

If you study and find out patterns of increased mobile sales among younger population than older, you can induct that teenagers are a better market to target by mobile phone makers than the older generations. Inductive reasoning starts with observations that are specific and ends up with a conclusion that is likely but not certain, as explored in scenario 2. Statistical advances have empowered us to reason inductively with the ease of sharing the likelihood of occurrence of a future phenomenon, by studying patterns and using regression to indicate probability. 

Abductive reasoning

The doctor hears her patient’s symptoms, including the regular shortness of breath on cold days and when exercising and abduces that the best explanation of these symptoms is that her patient is an asthma sufferer. Scenario 3 points abductive reasoning to be the one which begins with an incomplete set of observations and ends up with a most likely explanation, given the circumstances. Two different reasoners can abduct different answers, as per their experience, leading to the uniqueness of this method. 

In the 19th century, there was an emergence of a set of philosophers who called themselves as pragmatists, believing that the acquisition of knowledge and understanding did not entail only in progressing towards an absolute truth, but needed active engagement and interaction with one’s context and experiences. These together, John Dewey, William James and Charles Sanders Peirce, laid the cornerstone of a form of reasoning, which came to be known as abductive reasoning from the 19th century.

Is design thinking abductive.

According to Tim Brown of IDEO design thinking is “a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.”

Design thinking as a process,  however, takes you through different stages of observation/interaction, empathy, problem formulation, solution deduction, testing, alteration, and reiteration. Each of these steps is intentioned to helps one to think critically and allowing one to do things differently, while remaining focused on the solution to be created for a context or a client. In this way, Design thinking has always been considered analogous to innovative problem-solving.

How design thinking and abduction are considered to be interrelated is by the fact that the abduction alone(among all other reasoning approaches), is able to introduce new ideas to solve problems and lead one to new explanations of life and reality. It is, as Peirce notes,  “the only logical operation which introduces any new idea.”  

New ideas arise when a thinker observes data (or even a single data point) that does not fit with the existing model or models. Hence you can deduct or induct after you have made the speculative leap but unless you make that speculative leap to a new design organization with emergent properties, then there is nothing new that has been designed.

Reason your way towards winning design solutions

1. abduct to innovate.

No good idea was ever proven ahead of time with data. While envisioning to create the next innovative solution it is of value to challenge accepted explanations,  actively look for new data points and infer possible new worlds. Embracing abduction as the coequal of deduction and induction is in the interest of every person who wants to be a design thinker and every company which wants to prosper from design thinking.

2. Do not founder with technological feasibility

Design must be matched to what is technologically feasible, designing products that do not yet have supporting technology can be a difficult proposition. Software designers, two decades earlier inferred from the growth of the Internet, that consumers would want to do all their shopping online, from pet supplies to games to groceries. Startups which tried to work this business model at a time when online security and back-end infrastructure had not yet caught up to their ideas, doomed themselves to failure.

3. Keep the business possibility in mind

Designing an innovative product or service, needs to make business sense. Even if a solution is backed by technological efficacy, if it does not solve a new and urgent user and business problem it might as well go back into the shelves. At the end of the day design is incumbent to create innovative solutions to solve real problems of the end users, intentioned to ease their lives.

4. Strive towards achieving a balance

There are chances we over-complicate things if we indulge in critical thinking when we have clear conclusions or clear observations – one where deductive and inductive reasoning can be applied. However striving for achieving a balance in reasoning and preventing an environment hostile to abductive reasoning can lead us to create both relevant, feasible and innovative solutions.

The pragmatic thinkers argued that no new idea could be proved deductively or inductively using past data, pointing to the relevance of abduction among the different logical models of thinking. In a world which is driven by data and is also valuing creativity and critical thinking as an essential 21st century skill, it is pertinent to check our reasoning habits now and then, and eliminate being invalid and redundant.

Hari nallan.

Founder and CEO of Think Design, a Design leader, Speaker and Educator. With a master's from NID and in the capacity of a founder, Hari has influenced, led and delivered several experience driven transformations across industries. As the CEO of Think Design, Hari is the architect of Think Design's approach and design centered practices and the company's strategic initiatives.

Mohita Jaiswal

Research, Strategy and Content consultant. With a master's from IIT Delhi, Mohita has diverse experience across domains of technical research, big data, leadership development and arts in education. Having a keen interest in the science of human behavior, she looks at enabling holistic learning experiences, working at the intersection of technology, design, and human psychology.

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Creative Thinking vs. Critical Thinking

What's the difference.

Creative thinking and critical thinking are two distinct but equally important cognitive processes. Creative thinking involves generating new ideas, concepts, and solutions by exploring various possibilities and thinking outside the box. It encourages imagination, originality, and innovation. On the other hand, critical thinking involves analyzing, evaluating, and questioning ideas, arguments, and information to make informed decisions and judgments. It emphasizes logical reasoning, evidence-based thinking, and the ability to identify biases and fallacies. While creative thinking focuses on generating ideas, critical thinking focuses on evaluating and refining those ideas. Both thinking processes are essential for problem-solving, decision-making, and personal growth.

Further Detail

Introduction.

Creative thinking and critical thinking are two distinct cognitive processes that play crucial roles in problem-solving, decision-making, and innovation. While they share some similarities, they also have distinct attributes that set them apart. In this article, we will explore the characteristics of creative thinking and critical thinking, highlighting their differences and showcasing how they complement each other in various contexts.

Creative Thinking

Creative thinking is a cognitive process that involves generating new ideas, concepts, or solutions by exploring possibilities, making connections, and thinking outside the box. It is characterized by originality, flexibility, and fluency of thought. Creative thinkers often challenge conventional wisdom, embrace ambiguity, and are open to taking risks. They are adept at finding alternative perspectives and exploring multiple solutions to problems.

One of the key attributes of creative thinking is the ability to think divergently. This means being able to generate a wide range of ideas or possibilities, often through brainstorming or free association. Creative thinkers are not limited by constraints and are willing to explore unconventional or unorthodox approaches to problem-solving.

Another important aspect of creative thinking is the ability to make connections between seemingly unrelated concepts or ideas. This skill, known as associative thinking, allows creative thinkers to draw upon a diverse range of knowledge and experiences to generate innovative solutions. They can see patterns, analogies, and relationships that others may overlook.

Furthermore, creative thinking involves the willingness to take risks and embrace failure as a learning opportunity. Creative thinkers understand that not all ideas will be successful, but they are not deterred by setbacks. They view failures as stepping stones towards finding the right solution and are persistent in their pursuit of innovative ideas.

In summary, creative thinking is characterized by divergent thinking, associative thinking, risk-taking, and persistence. It encourages the exploration of new ideas and unconventional approaches to problem-solving.

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking, on the other hand, is a cognitive process that involves analyzing, evaluating, and interpreting information to form reasoned judgments or decisions. It is characterized by logical, systematic, and objective thinking. Critical thinkers are skilled at identifying biases, assumptions, and fallacies in arguments, and they strive to make well-informed and rational decisions based on evidence.

One of the key attributes of critical thinking is the ability to think analytically. Critical thinkers break down complex problems or situations into smaller components, examine the relationships between them, and evaluate the evidence or information available. They are adept at identifying logical inconsistencies or flaws in reasoning, which helps them make sound judgments.

Another important aspect of critical thinking is the ability to evaluate information objectively. Critical thinkers are skeptical and question the validity and reliability of sources. They seek evidence, consider alternative viewpoints, and weigh the strengths and weaknesses of different arguments before forming their own opinions. This attribute is particularly valuable in today's information-rich society, where misinformation and biased narratives are prevalent.

Furthermore, critical thinking involves the ability to think systematically. Critical thinkers follow a logical and structured approach to problem-solving, ensuring that all relevant factors are considered. They are skilled at identifying assumptions, clarifying concepts, and drawing logical conclusions based on the available evidence. This systematic approach helps minimize errors and biases in decision-making.

In summary, critical thinking is characterized by analytical thinking, objective evaluation, skepticism, and systematic reasoning. It emphasizes the importance of evidence-based decision-making and helps individuals navigate complex and information-rich environments.

Complementary Attributes

While creative thinking and critical thinking have distinct attributes, they are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they often complement each other and can be seen as two sides of the same coin.

Creative thinking can benefit from critical thinking by providing a framework for evaluating and refining ideas. Critical thinking helps creative thinkers assess the feasibility, viability, and desirability of their innovative ideas. It allows them to identify potential flaws, consider alternative perspectives, and make informed decisions about which ideas to pursue further.

On the other hand, critical thinking can benefit from creative thinking by expanding the range of possibilities and solutions. Creative thinking encourages critical thinkers to explore unconventional approaches, challenge assumptions, and consider alternative viewpoints. It helps them break free from rigid thinking patterns and discover innovative solutions to complex problems.

Moreover, both creative thinking and critical thinking require open-mindedness and a willingness to embrace ambiguity. They both involve a certain level of discomfort and uncertainty, as individuals venture into uncharted territories of thought. By combining creative and critical thinking, individuals can develop a well-rounded cognitive toolkit that enables them to tackle a wide range of challenges.

Creative thinking and critical thinking are two distinct cognitive processes that bring unique attributes to problem-solving, decision-making, and innovation. Creative thinking emphasizes divergent thinking, associative thinking, risk-taking, and persistence, while critical thinking emphasizes analytical thinking, objective evaluation, skepticism, and systematic reasoning.

While they have their differences, creative thinking and critical thinking are not mutually exclusive. They complement each other and can be seen as two sides of the same coin. Creative thinking benefits from critical thinking by providing a framework for evaluation and refinement, while critical thinking benefits from creative thinking by expanding the range of possibilities and solutions.

By cultivating both creative and critical thinking skills, individuals can enhance their ability to navigate complex problems, make well-informed decisions, and drive innovation in various domains. These cognitive processes are not only valuable in academic and professional settings but also in everyday life, where the ability to think creatively and critically can lead to personal growth and success.

Comparisons may contain inaccurate information about people, places, or facts. Please report any issues.

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Mapping the Relationship Between Critical Thinking and Design Thinking

• Published: 02 February 2021
• Volume 13 , pages 406–429, ( 2022 )

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• Jonathan D. Ericson   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9076-0596 1  

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Critical thinking has been a longstanding goal of education, while design thinking has gradually emerged as a popular method for supporting entrepreneurship, innovation, and problem solving in modern business. While some scholars have posited that design thinking may support critical thinking, empirical research examining the relationship between these two modes of thinking is lacking because their shared conceptual structure has not been articulated in detail and because they have remained siloed in practice. This essay maps eleven essential components of critical thinking to a variety of methods drawn from three popular design thinking frameworks. The mapping reveals that these seemingly unrelated modes of thinking share common features but also differ in important respects. A detailed comparison of the two modes of thinking suggests that design thinking methods have the potential to support and augment traditional critical thinking practices, and that design thinking frameworks could be modified to more explicitly incorporate critical thinking. The article concludes with a discussion of implications for the knowledge economy, and a research agenda for researchers, educators, and practitioners.

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Ericson, J.D. Mapping the Relationship Between Critical Thinking and Design Thinking. J Knowl Econ 13 , 406–429 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13132-021-00733-w

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What Is Design Thinking? A Comprehensive Beginner's Guide

Design thinking is both an ideology and a process, concerned with solving complex problems in a highly user-centric way.

In this guide, we’ll give you a detailed definition of design thinking, illustrate exactly what the process involves, and underline why it matters: What is the value of design thinking, and in what contexts is it particularly useful?

We’ll also analyze the relationship between user experience design and design thinking and discuss two real-world case studies that show design thinking in action.

All sound a little overwhelming? Don’t worry—we’ve broken the guide down into digestible chunks.

If you want to skip to a certain section, just click on the relevant menu heading and you’ll go straight there.

• What is Design Thinking?
• What is the Design Thinking process?
• What is the purpose of Design Thinking?
• How do Design Thinking, lean, and agile work together?
• What are the benefits of Design Thinking at work?
• Design Thinking methodology in action: Case studies
• What is the relationship between Design Thinking and UX Design?

Ready to explore the fascinating world of Design Thinking? Let’s go!

1. What is Design Thinking?

Design thinking is an approach used for practical and creative problem-solving. It is based heavily on the methods and processes that designers use (hence the name), but it has actually evolved from a range of different fields—including architecture, engineering and business. Design thinking can also be applied to any field; it doesn’t necessarily have to be design-specific.

For an audio-visual introduction, watch this video from design expert and CareerFoundry mentor, Camren Browne:

It’s important to note that design thinking is different from user-centered design . Learn more about this other approach to design here: Design Thinking vs. User-Centered Design .

Design thinking is extremely user-centric. It focuses on humans first and foremost , seeking to understand people’s needs and come up with effective solutions to meet those needs. It is what we call a solution-based approach to problem-solving.

What does this actually mean? Let’s take a look.

What’s the difference between Solution-Based and Problem-Based Thinking?

As the name suggests, solution-based thinking focuses on finding solutions; coming up with something constructive to effectively tackle a certain problem. This is the opposite of problem-based thinking, which tends to fixate on obstacles and limitations.

A good example of these two approaches in action is an empirical study carried out by Bryan Lawson, a Professor of Architecture at the University of Sheffield. Lawson wanted to investigate how a group of designers and a group of scientists would approach a particular problem.

He set each group the task of creating one-layer structures from a set of coloured blocks. The perimeter of the structure had to use either as many red bricks or as many blue bricks as possible (we can think of this is as the solution, the desired outcome), but there were unspecified rules regarding the placement and relationship of some of the blocks (the problem or limitation).

Lawson published his findings in his book How Designers Think , in which he observed that the scientists focused on identifying the problem (problem-based thinking) whilst the designers prioritized the need to find the right solution:

“The scientists adopted a technique of trying out a series of designs which used as many different blocks and combinations of blocks as possible as quickly as possible. Thus they tried to maximise the information available to them about the allowed combinations. If they could discover the rule governing which combinations of blocks were allowed, they could then search for an arrangement which would optimise the required colour around the layout.”

The designers, on the other hand:

“…selected their blocks in order to achieve the appropriately coloured perimeter. If this proved not to be an acceptable combination, then the next most favourably coloured block combination would be substituted and so on until an acceptable solution was discovered.”

Lawson’s findings go to the heart of what Design Thinking is all about: it’s an iterative process which favours ongoing experimentation until the right solution is found.

To learn more, check out this video introduction to design thinking , led by expert designer Camren Browne. For now, let’s take a look at the design thinking process and what that entails.

2. What is the Design Thinking process?

As already mentioned, the Design Thinking process is progressive and highly user-centric . Before looking at the process in more detail, let’s consider the four principles of Design Thinking as laid out by Christoph Meinel and Harry Leifer of the Hasso-Plattner-Institute of Design at Stanford University, California.

The Four Principles of Design Thinking

• The human rule: No matter what the context, all design activity is social in nature, and any social innovation will bring us back to the “human-centric point of view”.
• The ambiguity rule: Ambiguity is inevitable, and it cannot be removed or oversimplified. Experimenting at the limits of your knowledge and ability is crucial in being able to see things differently.
• The redesign rule: All design is redesign. While technology and social circumstances may change and evolve, basic human needs remain unchanged. We essentially only redesign the means of fulfilling these needs or reaching desired outcomes.
• The tangibility rule: Making ideas tangible in the form of prototypes enables designers to communicate them more effectively.

The Five Phases of Design Thinking

Based on these four principles, the Design Thinking process can be broken down into five steps or phases, as per the aforementioned Hasso-Plattner-Institute of Design at Stanford (otherwise known as d.school): Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test. Let’s explore each of these in more detail.

Phase 1: Empathise

Empathy provides the critical starting point for Design Thinking . The first stage of the process is spent getting to know the user and understanding their wants, needs and objectives.

This means observing and engaging with people in order to understand them on a psychological and emotional level. During this phase, the designer seeks to set aside their assumptions and gather real insights about the user. Learn all about key empathy-building methods in our guide .

Phase 2: Define

The second stage in the Design Thinking process is dedicated to defining the problem. You’ll gather all of your findings from the empathise phase and start to make sense of them: what difficulties and barriers are your users coming up against? What patterns do you observe? What is the big user problem that your team needs to solve?

By the end of the define phase, you will have a clear problem statement . The key here is to frame the problem in a user-centered way; rather than saying “We need to…”, frame it in terms of your user: “Retirees in the Bay area need…”

Once you’ve formulated the problem into words, you can start to come up with solutions and ideas — which brings us onto stage three.

Phase 3: Ideate

With a solid understanding of your users and a clear problem statement in mind, it’s time to start working on potential solutions. The third phase in the Design Thinking process is where the creativity happens, and it’s crucial to point out that the ideation stage is a judgement-free zone!

Designers will hold ideation sessions in order to come up with as many new angles and ideas as possible. There are many different types of ideation technique that designers might use, from brainstorming and mindmapping to bodystorming (roleplay scenarios) and provocation—an extreme lateral-thinking technique that gets the designer to challenge established beliefs and explore new options and alternatives.

Towards the end of the ideation phase, you’ll narrow it down to a few ideas with which to move forward. You can learn about all the most important ideation techniques in this guide .

Phase 4: Prototype

The fourth step in the Design Thinking process is all about experimentation and turning ideas into tangible products. A prototype is basically a scaled-down version of the product which incorporates the potential solutions identified in the previous stages. This step is key in putting each solution to the test and highlighting any constraints and flaws.

Throughout the prototype stage, the proposed solutions may be accepted, improved, redesigned or rejected depending on how they fare in prototype form. You can read all about the prototyping stage of Design Thinking in our in-depth guide .

Phase 5: Test

After prototyping comes user testing, but it’s important to note that this is rarely the end of the Design Thinking process. In reality, the results of the testing phase will often lead you back to a previous step, providing the insights you need to redefine the original problem statement or to come up with new ideas you hadn’t thought of before. Learn all about user testing in this guide .

Is Design Thinking a linear process?

No! You might look at these clearly defined steps and see a very logical sequence with a set order. However, the Design Thinking process is not linear; it is flexible and fluid, looping back and around and in on itself! With each new discovery that a certain phase brings, you’ll need to rethink and redefine what you’ve done before—you’ll never be moving in a straight line!

3. What is the purpose of Design Thinking?

Now we know more about how Design Thinking works, let’s consider why it matters. There are many benefits of using a Design Thinking approach—be it in a business, educational, personal or social context.

First and foremost, Design Thinking fosters creativity and innovation. As human beings, we rely on the knowledge and experiences we have accumulated to inform our actions. We form patterns and habits that, while useful in certain situations, can limit our view of things when it comes to problem-solving.

Rather than repeating the same tried-and-tested methods, Design Thinking encourages us to remove our blinkers and consider alternative solutions. The entire process lends itself to challenging assumptions and exploring new pathways and ideas.

Design Thinking is often cited as the healthy middle ground of problem-solving—it is not steeped wholly in emotion and intuition, nor does it rely solely on analytics, science and rationale; it uses a mixture of both.

Another great benefit of Design Thinking is that it puts humans first. By focusing so heavily on empathy, it encourages businesses and organizations to consider the real people who use their products and services—meaning they are much more likely to hit the mark when it comes to creating meaningful user experiences. For the user, this means better, more useful products that actually improve our lives. For businesses, this means happy customers and a healthier bottom line.

What’s a “wicked problem” in Design Thinking?

Design Thinking is especially useful when it comes to solving “wicked problems”. The term “wicked problem” was coined by design theorist Horst Rittel in the 1970s to describe particularly tricky problems that are highly ambiguous in nature.

With wicked problems, there are many unknown factors; unlike “tame” problems, there is no definitive solution. In fact, solving one aspect of a wicked problem is likely to reveal or give rise to further challenges. Another key characteristic of wicked problems is that they have no stopping point; as the nature of the problem changes over time, so must the solution.

Solving wicked problems is therefore an ongoing process that requires Design Thinking! Some examples of wicked problems in our society today include things like poverty, hunger, and climate change.

If you’d like to learn more about them, and how Design Thinking can help tackle them, check out our full guide to wicked problems .

4. Design Thinking in the workplace: How do Design Thinking, lean, and agile work together?

Now we know what Design Thinking is, let’s consider how it fits into the overall product design process. You may be familiar with the terms “lean” and “agile”—and, as a UX designer, it’s important to understand how these three approaches work together.

What are lean and agile?

Based on the principles of lean manufacturing, lean UX focuses on streamlining the design process as much as possible—minimizing waste and maximizing value. Some core tenets of lean UX are:

• Cross-functional collaboration between designers, engineers, and product managers.
• Gathering feedback quickly and continuously, ensuring that you’re constantly learning and adapting as you go.
• Deciding as late as possible and delivering fast, with less focus on long-term deliverables.
• A strong emphasis on how the team operates as a whole.

Lean UX is a technique that works in conjunction with agile development methods. Agile is a software development process that works in iterative, incremental cycles known as sprints. Unlike traditional development methods, agile is flexible and adaptive. Based on the Agile Development Manifesto created in 2001, agile adheres to the following principles:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
• Working software over comprehensive documentation.
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
• Responding to change over following a plan.

Combining Design Thinking with lean and agile

Design Thinking, lean, and agile are often seen as three separate approaches. Companies and teams will ask themselves whether to use lean or agile or Design Thinking—but actually, they can (and should!) be merged for optimal results.

Why? Because applying Design Thinking in a lean, agile environment helps to create a product development process that is not only user-centric, but also highly efficient from a business perspective. While it’s true that each approach has its own modus operandi, there is also significant overlap.

Combining principles from each can be crucial in keeping cross-functional teams on the same page—ensuring that designers, developers, product managers, and business stakeholders are all collaborating on one common vision.

So how do Design Thinking, lean, and agile work together?

As Jonny Schneider, Product Strategy and Design Principal at ThoughtWorks , explains: “Design Thinking is how we explore and solve problems; Lean is our framework for testing our beliefs and learning our way to the right outcomes; Agile is how we adapt to changing conditions with software.”

That’s all well and good, but what does it look like in practice?

As we’ve learned, Design Thinking is a solution-based approach to exploring and solving problems. It focuses on generating ideas with a specific problem in mind, keeping the user at the heart of the process throughout. Once you’ve established and designed a suitable solution, you’ll start to incorporate lean principles —testing your ideas, gathering quick and ongoing feedback to see what works—with particular emphasis on cross-team collaboration and overcoming departmental silos.

Agile ties all of this into short sprint cycles, allowing for adaptability in the face of change. In an agile environment, products are improved and built upon incrementally. Again, cross-team collaboration plays a crucial role; agile is all about delivering value that benefits both the end user and the business as a whole.

Together, Design Thinking, lean, and agile cut out unnecessary processes and documentation, leveraging the contributions of all key stakeholders for continuous delivery and improvement.

5. What are the benefits of Design Thinking at work?

As a designer, you have a pivotal role to play in shaping the products and experiences that your company puts to market. Integrating Design Thinking into your process can add huge business value, ultimately ensuring that the products you design are not only desirable for customers, but also viable in terms of company budget and resources.

With that in mind, let’s consider some of the main benefits of using Design Thinking at work:

• Significantly reduces time-to-market: With its emphasis on problem-solving and finding viable solutions, Design Thinking can significantly reduce the amount of time spent on design and development—especially in combination with lean and agile.
• Cost savings and a great ROI: Getting successful products to market faster ultimately saves the business money. Design Thinking has been proven to yield a significant return on investment; teams that are applying IBM’s Design Thinking practices , for example, have calculated an ROI of up to 300% as a result.
• Improves customer retention and loyalty: Design Thinking ensures a user-centric approach, which ultimately boosts user engagement and customer retention in the long term.
• Fosters innovation: Design Thinking is all about challenging assumptions and established beliefs, encouraging all stakeholders to think outside the box. This fosters a culture of innovation which extends well beyond the design team.
• Can be applied company-wide: The great thing about Design Thinking is that it’s not just for designers. It leverages group thinking and encourages cross-team collaboration. What’s more, it can be applied to virtually any team in any industry.

Whether you’re establishing a Design Thinking culture on a company-wide scale, or simply trying to improve your approach to user-centric design, Design Thinking will help you to innovate, focus on the user, and ultimately design products that solve real user problems.

6. Design Thinking methodology in action: Case studies

So we’ve looked in quite some detail at the theory behind Design Thinking and the processes involved — but what does this look like in action? Let’s explore some case studies where Design Thinking has made a huge real-world impact .

Healthcare Case Study: How Design Thinking transformed the Rotterdam Eye Hospital

Executives at the Rotterdam Eye Hospital wanted to transform the patient experience from the typically grim, anxiety-riddled affair into something much more pleasant and personal. To do this, they incorporated Design Thinking and design principles into their planning process. Here’s how they did it:

First, they set out to understand their target user — patients entering the hospital for treatment. The hospital CEO, CFO, managers, staff and doctors established that most patients came into hospital with the fear of going blind.

Based on their findings from the empathise stage, they determined that fear reduction needed to be a priority. Their problem statement may have looked something like the following: “Patients coming into our hospital need to feel comfortable and at ease.”

Armed with a deep understanding of their patients and a clear mission statement, they started to brainstorm potential solutions. As any good design thinker would, they sought inspiration from a range of both likely and unlikely sources. They looked to flagship airline KLM and supermarket chain Albert Heijn to learn about scheduling, for example, while turning to other medical organizations for inspiration on operational excellence.

In the prototyping stage, the team presented the most promising ideas they had come up with so far to those in charge of caregiving at the hospital. These teams of caregivers then used these insights to design informal, small-scale experiments that could test a potential solution and see if it was worthy of wide-scale adoption.

The testing phase consisted of running the aforementioned experiments and seeing if they took off. As Dirk Deichmann and Roel van der Heijde explain , the “transition to formal adoption of these ideas tended to be more gradual. If an idea worked, sooner or later other groups would ask if they could try it too, and the best ideas spread organically.”

The outcome

By adopting a Design Thinking approach, the Rotterdam Eye Hospital were able to get to the heart of their users’ needs and find effective solutions to fulfil them. In doing so, they have greatly improved the user experience: patient intake has risen 47%, and the hospital has since won several awards for safety, quality and design.

Business Case Study: How Design Thinking helped financial service provider MLP regain consumer trust

After the financial crisis hit, financial service provider MLP found that consumer trust was at an all-time low. They needed to re-engage with their target users and come up with new ways of building trust. In search of innovation, they decided to test out a Design Thinking approach. Here’s what they learned:

By focusing on their users and making a conscious effort to understand their needs first-hand, MLP learned that the assumptions they’d been going on were not so accurate after all. As Thomas Freese, division manager for marketing at MLP, explains :

“We always used to speak to customers about the goals they want to achieve. But they do not want to commit to a certain goal, as they often do not know themselves what that is. Rather, they want to talk about their ideas as it is more open and flexible regarding their financial planning.”

With this newfound empathy for their users, MLP were able to reframe their mission statement. They knew that they needed to rebuild consumer trust, and that the way to do this would be to speak to the customer in their own language and become a more relatable brand.

Ideate and Prototype

During the ideate and prototype phases, they decided to experiment with a completely new image. Instead of the formal business attire typically associated with the financial sector, the MLP team members went out in casual clothing. They tested Lego prototypes and homemade posters in designated hotspots — including a university campus and train stations.

By testing this new approach, they learned some extremely valuable lessons about their users and how to communicate with them. They found that even something as simple as dressing more casually had a huge impact in reducing the negative connotations associated with financial services. They also learned the value of asking open questions; rather than trying to sell their prototype, Design Thinking taught them to ask questions that focus on the user’s needs.

The Outcome

Their first foray into Design Thinking proved to be a huge learning curve for MLP. Taking the time to speak to their users gave them the insights they needed to redesign their messaging, allowing them to start marketing much more effectively.

In light of their findings, MLP opened up a new office space in a student district, putting their editorial and social media teams in close proximity to their customer base. Of course, Design Thinking is an iterative process, so this is just one way in which MLP hopes to continue learning to speak their customers’ language.

7. What is the relationship between Design Thinking and UX Design?

At this point, you’ve no doubt noticed lots of similarities between Design Thinking and user experience design , and may be wondering how they relate to one another. Both are extremely user-centric and driven by empathy, and UX designers will use many of the steps laid out in the Design Thinking process, such as user research , prototyping and testing.

Despite these similarities, there are certain distinctions that can be made between the two. For one, the impact of Design Thinking is often felt on a more strategic level; it explores a problem space—in the context of understanding users, technological feasibility, and business requirements—to discover possible solutions. As we have seen from the Rotterdam Eye Hospital and MLP case studies, Design Thinking is embraced and implemented by all different teams across the business, including C-level executives.

If Design Thinking focuses on finding solutions, UX design is concerned with actually designing these solutions and making sure they are usable, accessible and pleasant for the user.

You can think of Design Thinking as a toolset that UX designers dip into, and if you’re operating within the UX design field, it is one of many crucial methodologies you’ll rely on when it comes to creating fantastic user experiences. You can learn more about UX Design and Design Thinking in our UX Design Course , as well as earn a design thinking certification by completing a course in it.

Further reading

Want to see what design thinking looks like in practice? Here’s an article for you: 5 Game-Changing Examples of Design Thinking .

And if you’re new to the design field and wondering what all these newfangled terms mean, you may well be interested in the following guides:

• Learn How To Run Your Very Own Design Thinking Workshop!
• What Are Design Sprints?
• A Brief Guide To The Steps And Principles Of The Design Thinking Process
• How To Learn UX Design And Become A UX Designer

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What is Design Thinking and Why Is It So Popular?

Design Thinking is not an exclusive property of designers—all great innovators in literature, art, music, science, engineering, and business have practiced it. So, why call it Design Thinking? What’s special about Design Thinking is that designers’ work processes can help us systematically extract, teach, learn and apply these human-centered techniques to solve problems in a creative and innovative way—in our designs, in our businesses, in our countries, in our lives.

Some of the world’s leading brands, such as Apple, Google and Samsung, rapidly adopted the design thinking approach, and leading universities around the world teach the related methodology—including Stanford, Harvard, Imperial College London and the Srishti Institute in India. Before you incorporate design thinking into your own workflows, you need to know what it is and why it’s so popular. Here, we’ll cut to the chase and tell you what design thinking is all about and why it’s so in demand.

What is Design Thinking?

Design thinking is an iterative and non-linear process that contains five phases: 1. Empathize , 2. Define, 3. Ideate, 4. Prototype and 5. Test.

Design thinking is an iterative process in which you seek to understand your users, challenge assumptions , redefine problems and create innovative solutions which you can prototype and test. The overall goal is to identify alternative strategies and solutions that are not instantly apparent with your initial level of understanding.

Design thinking is more than just a process; it opens up an entirely new way to think, and it offers a collection of hands-on methods to help you apply this new mindset.

In essence, design thinking:

Revolves around a deep interest to understand the people for whom we design products and services.

Helps us observe and develop empathy with the target users.

Enhances our ability to question: in design thinking you question the problem, the assumptions and the implications.

Proves extremely useful when you tackle problems that are ill-defined or unknown.

Involves ongoing experimentation through sketches , prototypes, testing and trials of new concepts and ideas.

• Transcript loading…

In this video, Don Norman , the Grandfather of Human-Centered Design , explains how the approach and flexibility of design thinking can help us tackle major global challenges.

What Are the 5 Phases of Design Thinking?

Hasso-Platner Institute Panorama

Ludwig Wilhelm Wall, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Design thinking is an iterative and non-linear process that contains five phases: 1. Empathize, 2. Define, 3. Ideate, 4. Prototype and 5. Test. You can carry these stages out in parallel, repeat them and circle back to a previous stage at any point in the process.

The core purpose of the process is to allow you to work in a dynamic way to develop and launch innovative ideas.

Design thinking is an iterative and non-linear process that contains five phases: 1. Empathize, 2. Define, 3. Ideate, 4. Prototype and 5. Test.

Design Thinking Makes You Think Outside the Box

Design thinking can help people do out-of-the-box or outside-the-box thinking. People who use this methodology:

Attempt to develop new ways of thinking —ways that do not abide by the dominant or more common problem-solving methods.

Have the intention to improve products, services and processes. They seek to analyze and understand how users interact with products to investigate the conditions in which they operate.

Ask significant questions and challenge assumptions. One element of outside-the-box / out-of-the-box thinking is to to make previous assumptions falsifiable—i.e., make it possible to prove whether they’re valid or not.

As you can see, design thinking offers us a means to think outside the box and also dig that bit deeper into problem-solving. It helps us carry out the right kind of research, create prototypes and test our products and services to uncover new ways to meet our users’ needs.

The Grand Old Man of User Experience , Don Norman, who also coined the very term User Experience , explains what Design Thinking is and what’s so special about it:

“…the more I pondered the nature of design and reflected on my recent encounters with engineers, business people and others who blindly solved the problems they thought they were facing without question or further study, I realized that these people could benefit from a good dose of design thinking. Designers have developed a number of techniques to avoid being captured by too facile a solution. They take the original problem as a suggestion, not as a final statement, then think broadly about what the real issues underlying this problem statement might really be (for example by using the " Five Whys " approach to get at root causes). Most important of all, is that the process is iterative and expansive. Designers resist the temptation to jump immediately to a solution to the stated problem. Instead, they first spend time determining what the basic, fundamental (root) issue is that needs to be addressed. They don't try to search for a solution until they have determined the real problem, and even then, instead of solving that problem, they stop to consider a wide range of potential solutions. Only then will they finally converge upon their proposal. This process is called "Design Thinking." — Don Norman, Rethinking Design Thinking

Design Thinking is for Everybody

How many people are involved in the design process when your organization decides to create a new product or service? Teams that build products are often composed of people from a variety of different departments. For this reason, it can be difficult to develop, categorize and organize ideas and solutions for the problems you try to solve. One way you can keep a project on track, and organize the core ideas, is to use a design thinking approach—and everybody can get involved in that!

Tim Brown, CEO of the celebrated innovation and design firm IDEO, emphasizes this in his successful book Change by Design when he says design thinking techniques and strategies belong at every level of a business.

Design thinking is not only for designers but also for creative employees, freelancers and leaders who seek to infuse it into every level of an organization. This widespread adoption of design thinking will drive the creation of alternative products and services for both business and society.

“Design thinking begins with skills designers have learned over many decades in their quest to match human needs with available technical resources within the practical constraints of business. By integrating what is desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable, designers have been able to create the products we enjoy today. Design thinking takes the next step, which is to put these tools into the hands of people who may have never thought of themselves as designers and apply them to a vastly greater range of problems.” — Tim Brown, Change by Design, Introduction

Design thinking techniques and strategies belong at every level of a business. You should involve colleagues from a wide range of departments to create a cross-functional team that can utilize knowledge and experience from different specialisms.

Tim Brown also shows how design thinking is not just for everybody—it’s about everybody, too. The process is firmly based on how you can generate a holistic and empathic understanding of the problems people face. Design thinking involves ambiguous, and inherently subjective, concepts such as emotions, needs, motivations and drivers of behavior .

In a solely scientific approach (for example, analyzing data), people are reduced to representative numbers, devoid of emotions. Design thinking, on the other hand, considers both quantitative as well as qualitative dimensions to gain a more complete understanding of user needs . For example, you might observe people performing a task such as shopping for groceries, and you might talk to a few shoppers who feel frustrated with the checkout process at the store (qualitative data). You can also ask them how many times a week they go shopping or feel a certain way at the checkout counter (quantitative data). You can then combine these data points to paint a holistic picture of user pain points, needs and problems.

Tim Brown sums up that design thinking provides a third way to look at problems. It’s essentially a problem-solving approach that has crystallized in the field of design to combine a holistic user-centered perspective with rational and analytical research—all with the goal to create innovative solutions.

“Design thinking taps into capacities we all have but that are overlooked by more conventional problem-solving practices. It is not only human-centered; it is deeply human in and of itself. Design thinking relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, to construct ideas that have emotional meaning as well as functionality, to express ourselves in media other than words or symbols. Nobody wants to run a business based on feeling, intuition, and inspiration, but an overreliance on the rational and the analytical can be just as dangerous. The integrated approach at the core of the design process suggests a ‘third way.’” — Tim Brown, Change by Design, Introduction

Design Thinking Has a Scientific Side

Design thinking is both an art and a science. It combines investigations into ambiguous elements of the problem with rational and analytical research —the scientific side in other words. This magical concoction reveals previously unknown parameters and helps to uncover alternative strategies which lead to truly innovative solutions.

The scientific activities analyze how users interact with products, and investigate the conditions in which they operate. They include tasks which:

Research users’ needs.

Pool experience from previous projects.

Consider present and future conditions specific to the product.

Test the parameters of the problem.

Test the practical application of alternative problem solutions.

Once you arrive at a number of potential solutions, the selection process is then underpinned by rationality. As a designer, you are encouraged to analyze and falsify these solutions to arrive at the best available option for each problem or obstacle identified during phases of the design process.

With this in mind, it may be more correct to say design thinking is not about thinking outside the box, but on its edge, its corner, its flap, and under its bar code—as Clint Runge put it.

Clint Runge is Founder and Managing Director of Archrival, a distinguished youth marketing agency, and adjunct Professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Resetting Our Mental Boxes and Developing a Fresh Mindset

Thinking outside of the box can provide an innovative solution to a sticky problem. However, thinking outside of the box can be a real challenge as we naturally develop patterns of thinking that are modeled on the repetitive activities and commonly accessed knowledge we surround ourselves with.

Some years ago, an incident occurred where a truck driver tried to pass under a low bridge. But he failed, and the truck was lodged firmly under the bridge. The driver was unable to continue driving through or reverse out.

The story goes that as the truck became stuck, it caused massive traffic problems, which resulted in emergency personnel, engineers, firefighters and truck drivers gathering to devise and negotiate various solutions for dislodging the trapped vehicle.

Emergency workers were debating whether to dismantle parts of the truck or chip away at parts of the bridge. Each spoke of a solution that fitted within his or her respective level of expertise.

A boy walking by and witnessing the intense debate looked at the truck, at the bridge, then looked at the road and said nonchalantly, “Why not just let the air out of the tires?” to the absolute amazement of all the specialists and experts trying to unpick the problem.

When the solution was tested, the truck was able to drive free with ease, having suffered only the damage caused by its initial attempt to pass underneath the bridge. The story symbolizes the struggles we face where oftentimes the most obvious solutions are the ones hardest to come by because of the self-imposed constraints we work within.

It’s often difficult for us humans to challenge our assumptions and everyday knowledge because we rely on building patterns of thinking in order to not have to learn everything from scratch every time. We rely on doing everyday processes more or less unconsciously—for example, when we get up in the morning, eat, walk, and read—but also when we assess challenges at work and in our private lives. In particular, experts and specialists rely on their solid thought patterns, and it can be very challenging and difficult for experts to start questioning their knowledge.

Stories Have the Power to Inspire

Why did we tell you this story about the truck and the bridge? Well, it’s because stories can help us inspire opportunities, ideas and solutions. Stories are framed around real people and their lives and are important because they’re accounts of specific events, not general statements. They provide us with concrete details which help us imagine solutions to particular problems.

Stories also help you develop the eye of a designer. As you walk around the world, you should try to look for the design stories that are all around you. Say to yourself “that’s an example of great design” or “that's an example of really bad design ” and try to figure out the reasons why.

When you come across something particularly significant, make sure you document it either through photos or video. This will prove beneficial not only to you and your design practice but also to others—your future clients, maybe.

The Take Away

Design Thinking is an iterative and non-linear process. This simply means that the design team continuously uses their results to review, question and improve their initial assumptions, understandings and results. Results from the final stage of the initial work process inform our understanding of the problem, help us determine the parameters of the problem, enable us to redefine the problem, and, perhaps most importantly, provide us with new insights so we can see any alternative solutions that might not have been available with our previous level of understanding.

Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative process that consists of 5 phases: 1. Empathize, 2. Define, 3. Ideate, 4. Prototype and 5. Test. You can carry out the stages in parallel, repeat them and circle back to a previous stage at any point in the process—you don’t have to follow them in order.

It’s a process that digs a bit deeper into problem-solving as you seek to understand your users, challenge assumptions and redefine problems. The design thinking process has both a scientific and artistic side to it, as it asks us to understand and challenge our natural, restrictive patterns of thinking and generate innovative solutions to the problems our users face.

Design thinking is essentially a problem-solving approach that has the intention to improve products. It helps you assess and analyze known aspects of a problem and identify the more ambiguous or peripheral factors that contribute to the conditions of a problem. This contrasts with a more scientific approach where the concrete and known aspects are tested in order to arrive at a solution.

The iterative and ideation -oriented nature of design thinking means we constantly question and acquire knowledge throughout the process. This helps us redefine a problem so we can identify alternative strategies and solutions that aren’t instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding.

Design thinking is often referred to as outside-the-box thinking, as designers attempt to develop new ways of thinking that do not abide by the dominant or more common problem-solving methods—just like artists do.

The design thinking process has become increasingly popular over the last few decades because it was key to the success of many high-profile, global organizations. This outside-the-box thinking is now taught at leading universities across the world and is encouraged at every level of business.

“The ‘Design Thinking’ label is not a myth. It is a description of the application of well-tried design process to new challenges and opportunities, used by people from both design and non-design backgrounds. I welcome the recognition of the term and hope that its use continues to expand and be more universally understood, so that eventually every leader knows how to use design and design thinking for innovation and better results.” — Bill Moggridge, co-founder of IDEO, in Design Thinking: Dear Don

References & Where to Learn More

Enroll in our engaging course, “Design Thinking: The Ultimate Guide”

Here are some examples of good and bad designs to inspire you to look for examples in your daily life.

Read this informative article “What Is Design Thinking, and How Can SMBs Accomplish It?” by Jackie Dove.

Read this insightful article “Rethinking Design Thinking” by Don Norman.

Check out Tim Brown’s book “Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation Introduction,” 2009.

Learn more about Design Thinking in the article “Design Thinking: Dear Don” by Bill Moggridge.

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0

Design Thinking: The Ultimate Guide

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Human centered design vs. Design thinking: an overview

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Explore the differences and similarities between Design Thinking and Human Centered Design, then learn how you can apply them for better results.

Design is a critical component of many industries, from product design to software engineering and beyond. Human-centered design and design thinking are two approaches to problem solving that focus on the user — understanding their needs and creating meaningful solutions. 

In this article, we'll explore the differences and similarities between human-centered design and design thinking, as well as look at how they can be applied in various industries. We’ll also discuss how both approaches involve understanding the user experience, empathizing with them, and creating effective solutions.

Design thinking vs. human-centered design: What's the difference?

While not exactly the same, the concepts of design thinking and human-centered design have quite a bit of interplay. It's common for a design team to balance the two to end up with a product that's both useful and profitable.

Consider that they both inform product development, but each plays a distinct role in how the product comes about.

What is design thinking?

Design thinking is an iterative problem-solving process that balances consumer needs and usability with technical capabilities. It typically follows five distinct stages: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. 

The goal of design thinking is to comprehend user preferences to resolve their issues. It encourages diverse thoughts to generate new ideas and challenge traditional assumptions in a creative manner.

A key characteristic of design thinking is that it’s an iterative process. That means product teams can rapidly move from idea formation through prototyping, feedback gathering, and refining until they solve the problem. Design teams use this iterative process as an instrument for establishing what works best for users before developing full products or services.

What is human-centered design?

Human-centered design is a product development methodology built to help create innovative solutions through empathy-driven design. To make it work, the focus should be on the human perspective: how they view the product, interact with it, find it useful or beautiful, or continue to engage with it over time. If possible, the way you design your product should support their goals, values, and motivations, too.

By maintaining this mission of deep empathy from ideation to launch, you have a better chance of creating something truly valuable for your end-user.

Understanding key differences

Let’s say you’re creating a time management app to help people manage their busy schedules — you might use design thinking to do market research, develop, and prototype. It may involve beta testing or real-user feedback, but it doesn't have to. 

Human-centered design may be present in your decision to add new features to your app (which would be based on the feedback you received from users about specific problems they face or their usage habits). It's done with the sole purpose of understanding your customer and meeting them where they are.

Goal: Direction vs. iteration

In the example of the app above, we mentioned that products and solutions are typically designed with customer needs in mind. Design thinking provides direction for new product development by establishing a framework for brainstorming solutions to user problems. A marketing team may sit and try to think of all the ways the app can help people, what issues they may run into, or what features could be added over time. Design thinking drives the car, so to speak.

Human-centered design, on the other hand, aims to improve the customer experience through updates. (Can we make this app faster or use less storage space?) Once the app is released or even while still in beta, new versions are released as needed. There's an acceptance of inevitable future iterations and knowing that design may truly never be completed as long as people's needs change.

Focus: Problem vs. feedback

There's another major difference in how design thinking and human-centered design works. While design thinking tries to anticipate what customers may want from their app (and then test user reception), it tends to be more problem-focused rather than user-focused. Designers put processes in place for when needs change or problems arise so that they can address these issues as they happen.

Human-centered design, however, takes the user experience into account at every angle. Practitioners continually seek out feedback from users to see how they interact with the app and if it's what they originally expected. Is the engagement seamless? Uplifting? Inspiring? Helpful? Just meeting a need isn't enough if it's not also a lovely experience. This is what human-centered design seeks to do from day one of the design meetings until the product is no longer offered for sale.

Related: Learn how to use co-design to design solutions with the end-user

Human-centered design and design thinking work together to improve the customer experience

If there seems like just enough overlap between these two ideas to not know which one you subscribe to, you don’t have to worry. Great designers try to incorporate both into their work, even if they don’t realize that’s what they’re doing.

Human-centered design can be used alongside design thinking, and it’s one that’s changing products (and people’s lives) for the better. By starting with a human-centered focus and testing solutions, HCD fits into every phase of the design thinking process. And, because it can be used to evaluate existing products, it continues the mission of human empathy, even after products are launched.

Design thinking tries to look at the big picture

When thinking back to the overall mission of a product, you’re likely embracing design thinking. Questions like “Who is this for?” and “What do we want to see?” fall in line with this overarching, thematic process for creating great products and services. Big and small design tweaks happen along the way, but form, function, and financial considerations may be held in equal esteem.

Related: Be sure to map your assumptions to evaluate the feasibility, viability, and desirability of your proposed solutions

If you’ve ever sat in a meeting where a stakeholder suggests, “Let’s make the buttons bigger!” or, “My mom would never use this without more pockets,” you’ve witnessed attempts to be more human-centric. Real people use your products and services. Putting yourself in their shoes and seeing how they interact with your designs every day means you’ll notice tiny opportunities to create better experiences — from good, to great. 

Human-centered design thinking in action

Whenever Apple makes a new update to deal with a security risk, it has likely involved design thinking. 

When it makes icons larger, more beautiful, and fun to tap, you are seeing the principles of human-centered design at work. 

Often, human-centered design doesn’t necessarily make the product functional, although it certainly can. The focus, however, is on what humans value, and whether your design is solving problems that support those values — even if they aren’t necessary to product function. 

Related: 4 great examples of human-centered design

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Thinking Vs. Critical Thinking: What’s the Difference?

Thinking and critical thinking do not sound that different in nature. After all, they both include the verb thinking, and therefore, imply that some form of thinking is taking place. If you find yourself wondering, what is the difference between thinking vs critical thinking, you have had an excellent thought.

Going back to your question. When you thought, what is the difference between thinking and critical thinking and you began to weigh the difference, you were performing the action of critical thinking! Let’s take some time to dig further into the differences in thinking and critical thinking.

What is Thinking?

There are many things that can lead to thinking. If you are walking down the street and pass a bakery and you smell the sweet smell of apple pie and you think about being in your grandma’s kitchen, this process of thinking is initiated by something called stimuli.

Have you ever laid in bed trying to go to sleep, but you kept thinking about the pile of papers you left on your desk or the long to-do list you have waiting for you tomorrow? You may be thinking too much because you are stressed or simply because it is difficult for you to turn off your brain, so to speak, at night when it is time to sleep.

What is Critical Thinking?

Since critical thinking goes beyond the basic formation of thought that we do hundreds if not thousands of times a day, it is considered a skill that must be practiced. This is why students study things in school like problem-solving, critical analysis, and how to compare and contrast different things.

Though critical thinking in its most basic form can come naturally, in order to really master and feel comfortable with various aspects of critical thinking, we must learn about the different processes involved in critical thinking. Then we can more confidently apply these individual thinking skills that fall under the umbrella term of critical thinking.

Why do We Use Critical Thinking?

We all have opinions, and when we meet someone with a different opinion, we use critical thinking skills to form arguments. We take our knowledge of a particular subject and logically piece together an argument that supports our opinion of that subject. This can be something a simple as whether pineapple belongs on pizza or something more complex like the causes of global warming.

5 Everyday Critical Thinking Skills

There are more than a dozen different critical thinking skills ranging from analyzing to critiquing. Oftentimes, we use multiple critical thinking skills at one time.

Comparing and Contrasting

When you look at two or more things and decide what is similar and what is different between them, you are using the critical thinking skills of comparing and contrasting. We do this when we look at universities or job options. We look at the majors that are offered or the benefits that come with the job to see how they are similar and different.

Forecasting

If you believe the housing market is going to crash, you sell while you can to get the most for your money. If you believe a particular stock is going to increase in value in the future, you buy now while the prices are low.

Though we may not be movie or food critics professionally, it is human nature to critique things. Though the critical thinking skill of critiquing usually goes much deeper than deciding whether your meal was delicious or not, you still critique things in your daily life.

Have you ever decided that you wanted to buy something online like a computer or a new pair of shoes? Most of the time, when we shop online, we will look at different websites to check customer reviews. Even if you just glance at a product’s star rating or look at the available features for a specific product, you are evaluating the overall product before you decide to purchase.

Similarities and Differences

It is a general belief that every person is capable of thinking. However, the skills of critical thinking take practice. This does not mean some people are incapable of critical thinking. It only means that it may be more difficult for some than others.

If you want to challenge yourself to go beyond just thinking and reach a level of critical thinking, keep pondering questions like what is the difference between thinking and critical thinking? Questions like these will naturally push you to use your critical thinking skills. As you further develop your ability to think critically, you will find that other skills like problem solving and brainstorming come more easily to you.

Difference Between Thinking and Critical Thinking

Critical Thinking vs. Creative Thinking

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Design thinking, systems thinking, strategic thinking: all the same.

Interest in thinking is trending. I have read multiple articles promoting design thinking and the value of systems thinking.

We are also seeing strategic thinking skills identified as desired competencies in job postings more than ever. So it is unsurprising that corporate training programs are looking for ways to increase strategic thinking across their organizations.

But, are design thinking,  systems thinking, and strategic thinking phrases for the same concept?

No, not really.

Let's start with some definitions.

Design Thinking is a form of creative problem-solving that centers around deeply understanding the needs of the people with the problem you are striving to resolve. This creative process is used primarily for designing new or enhancing existing products or services. When pulled into the right planning step, it can also be applied to resolving business or team management issues. The first step in design thinking is to empathize with an individual user or consumer, employee or stakeholder, and then use ideation and experimentation to design the best solution or option.

Systems Thinking is an approach to problem-solving that comes from systems theory.  It is the orientation to or awareness of the whole rather than a singular event or activity.  Groups using systems thinking seek to understand the patterns, cycles, or structures an event or activity exists within as a starting place for examining how to improve an event or activity or resolve a problem.  

Strategic Thinking is the ability to focus on the ultimate goal and work backward to ensure action aligns with this goal as one plans or resolves problems. It disrupts the incremental pattern of traditional problem-solving processes by opening a space for new thinking to thrive. By orienting thinking to longer-term goals, strategic thinkers ensure the deeper exploration of stakeholders, new alternatives, and possibly reexamining options previously dismissed.  

Are these complementary or redundant to one another?

When used correctly, these disciplines complement each other and, when used appropriately, can create a competitive advantage.

Design thinking helps creative teams stay true to the needs of the individuals they are striving to serve rather than allowing ideas to develop within an echo chamber of a team’s brilliant ideas.

Systems thinking can be used by teams engaged in design thinking as they seek to understand and empathize with the user of their design. It is also used in strategic thinking to fully explore the context of long-range goals and build more comprehensive plans.

Strategic thinking incorporates both design thinking and systems thinking to build strategic plans .

How do you leverage them for your success?

Each of these approaches to planning and problem-solving requires more time and potentially additional resources than the classic problem-solving approaches used most frequently by teams. They are more robust disciplines to use for high-stakes or important decisions.

Design thinking requires a clear definition of who you are designing for and needs the time and budget to research, explore, experiment, and test alternatives fully. 

Systems thinking, like design thinking, requires the time and possibly research budget to fully explore the structures, patterns, and cycles to create a system map or hypothesis.

Strategic thinking requires defining and sharing broadly a well-understood long-range vision or ultimate goal to be effective and not chaotic. It also requires a strategic plan.

As strategic planning consultants, we are experts at leveraging strategic thinking and its sisters, design thinking and system thinking to produce long-range plans that guide organizations for years. 

Are you looking to bump your strategic thinking to the next level?  

Start with downloading our eBook on fostering strategic thinking.

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What Is The Difference Between Critical Thinking And Creative Thinking

Annie Walls

In today's fast-paced world, problem-solving and decision-making have become essential skills in both personal and professional life. We face constant challenges, ranging from simple ones such as managing our daily schedule to complex ones such as strategic planning for a business. Two major thinking approaches that have gained significant attention in recent times are critical thinking and creative thinking. Although these two thinking styles are often viewed as opposites, they are both needed to solve problems effectively. In this article, we'll explore the key differences between critical thinking and creative thinking, their components, and the advantages of balancing both styles.

Understanding Critical Thinking

As individuals, we encounter a vast amount of information every day, and it is essential to be able to analyze and evaluate that information to make informed decisions. Critical thinking is a valuable skill that enables individuals to think logically and systematically, while also questioning assumptions and biases.

Definition of Critical Thinking

At its core, critical thinking involves analyzing information and ideas by breaking them down into smaller components to evaluate their accuracy, validity, relevance, and completeness. This process allows individuals to question assumptions, evidence, and arguments made by others and use logical reasoning to make sound decisions.

Furthermore, critical thinking involves identifying biases, stereotypes, and fallacies and preventing them from influencing our judgment. It is a systematic process that entails evaluating multiple sources of information and perspectives, weighing up evidence, and forming an informed opinion based on available facts.

Components of Critical Thinking

Critical thinking comprises several components that play a crucial role in the thinking process. According to experts, the key components of critical thinking include:

• Interpretation - understanding the meaning and significance of information. This component involves analyzing and interpreting data, identifying patterns and trends, and drawing conclusions based on the available evidence.
• Analysis - breaking down complex information into smaller parts to examine their relationships and distinctions. This component involves identifying the underlying assumptions and arguments, evaluating the evidence presented, and identifying any potential biases or fallacies.
• Evaluation - assessing the strength and validity of arguments and evidence presented. This component involves evaluating the credibility of sources, weighing up the evidence presented, and identifying any gaps in the argument.
• Inference - making logical conclusions based on available information and evidence. This component involves drawing conclusions based on the available evidence and identifying any potential implications or consequences.
• Explanation - presenting a clear and concise rationale for the conclusions drawn. This component involves communicating the results of the analysis and evaluation in a clear and concise manner.
• Self-regulation - monitoring one's own thinking process to overcome biases and errors. This component involves being aware of one's own biases and assumptions and actively seeking out new information to challenge those assumptions.

Examples of Critical Thinking in Action

Critical thinking is widely used in various domains of life, including education, healthcare, law enforcement, and business. Here are a few examples of how critical thinking is applied in practice:

• A doctor making a diagnosis based on a set of symptoms observed - A doctor uses critical thinking to analyze the symptoms presented by a patient, evaluate potential causes, and make a diagnosis based on the available evidence.
• A lawyer evaluating evidence presented in a court hearing to support their case - A lawyer uses critical thinking to evaluate the credibility of witnesses, weigh up the evidence presented, and construct a compelling argument to support their case.
• A teacher designing a lesson plan that engages students in critical thinking skills - A teacher uses critical thinking to design a lesson plan that encourages students to analyze and evaluate information, draw conclusions based on the available evidence, and communicate their findings effectively.
• A business executive analyzing market trends and customer preferences to make informed decisions - A business executive uses critical thinking to analyze market trends, evaluate customer preferences, and make informed decisions based on the available evidence.

In conclusion, critical thinking is a vital skill that enables individuals to analyze and evaluate information, draw logical conclusions, and make informed decisions. By developing critical thinking skills, individuals can overcome biases and assumptions, evaluate evidence objectively, and communicate their findings effectively.

Understanding Creative Thinking

Creativity is a fascinating and complex phenomenon that has captivated the attention of scholars, artists, and entrepreneurs for centuries. It is a multifaceted construct that involves a wide range of cognitive, affective, and behavioral processes. At its core, creativity is about generating novel and valuable ideas that have the potential to transform the world.

Definition of Creative Thinking

Creative thinking is the process of generating new ideas, possibilities, or solutions that are original, useful, and novel. It involves breaking away from traditional or conventional patterns of thinking and exploring alternative perspectives. Creative thinking is characterized by fluidity, flexibility, and originality. It is a free-flowing mindset that allows individuals to connect dissimilar ideas and develop innovative concepts that solve problems or meet needs. Creative thinking is central to innovation, invention, and entrepreneurship.

When we engage in creative thinking, we are tapping into our imagination and exploring the unknown. We are willing to take risks, challenge assumptions, and embrace ambiguity. Creative thinking is not just about coming up with wild and crazy ideas; it is about generating ideas that are both feasible and valuable.

Components of Creative Thinking

Creative thinking comprises several interrelated components, including:

• Fluency: This refers to the ability to generate a large number of ideas with ease. The more ideas we generate, the more likely we are to come up with something truly innovative.
• Flexibility: This involves considering different possibilities and perspectives. We need to be open-minded and willing to explore diverse options in order to generate truly creative ideas.
• Originality: This refers to the ability to produce unconventional and unique ideas. We need to break away from conventional thinking and explore new and uncharted territories.
• Elaboration: This involves refining and developing ideas with details and depth. We need to flesh out our ideas and explore their potential in order to turn them into reality.
• Imagery: This refers to the ability to visualize and manipulate images or metaphors to generate ideas. We can use our imagination to create mental images that inspire us and spark our creativity.
• Association: This involves connecting seemingly unrelated ideas to form new concepts. We need to be able to see the connections between different ideas and concepts in order to generate truly innovative ideas.

Examples of Creative Thinking in Action

Creative thinking is applied in various fields, such as art, design, science, and technology. Here are some examples of how creative thinking is used:

• An artist creating a new genre of art: By blending traditional and modern techniques, an artist can create a new style of art that is both unique and captivating.
• A software developer designing a user-friendly interface: By combining cutting-edge technology with user-centered design principles, a software developer can create an interface that is both intuitive and efficient.
• A chef creating a unique dish: By combining diverse ingredients and experimenting with new flavors and textures, a chef can create a dish that is both delicious and memorable.
• A scientist inventing a new process: By exploring new methods and technologies, a scientist can invent a new process that has the potential to revolutionize an industry or even change the world.

Overall, creative thinking is a powerful tool that can help us solve problems, innovate, and make a positive impact on the world. By embracing our creativity and exploring new possibilities, we can unlock our full potential and achieve great things.

Key Differences Between Critical and Creative Thinking

Critical thinking and creative thinking are two distinct modes of thinking that have different purposes, processes, and outcomes. While critical thinking is focused on evaluating and analyzing information, creative thinking is aimed at generating new and innovative ideas and solutions to problems. Let's explore the differences in more detail.

Purpose and Goals

Critical thinking is primarily aimed at evaluating, analyzing, and critiquing information critically. It involves questioning assumptions, evaluating evidence, and identifying biases and fallacies in arguments. The goal of critical thinking is to arrive at well-reasoned and informed judgments or decisions based on the available evidence.

On the other hand, creative thinking is focused on generating new and innovative ideas and solutions to problems. It involves exploring possibilities, making connections, and thinking outside the box. The goal of creative thinking is to come up with novel and useful ideas that can lead to innovation and change.

Process and Approach

Critical thinking requires a systematic and rigorous process of analysis and evaluation based on available evidence and data. It involves breaking down complex information into its component parts, examining each part critically, and evaluating the evidence and arguments presented. Critical thinking requires a structured approach that involves identifying and analyzing arguments, evaluating evidence, and drawing conclusions based on the available information.

Creative thinking, on the other hand, involves a free-flowing process of divergent thinking that encourages unconventional ideas and connections. It involves exploring different perspectives, generating multiple ideas, and making unexpected connections between seemingly unrelated concepts. Creative thinking requires a more open and exploratory approach that involves brainstorming, visualizing, and associating ideas.

Skills and Abilities Involved

Critical thinking is associated with skills such as analysis, inference, evaluation, and reasoning. It requires the ability to identify and evaluate evidence, recognize biases and assumptions, and draw well-reasoned conclusions based on the available information. Critical thinking also involves the ability to communicate effectively, both orally and in writing.

Creative thinking requires skills such as imagination, brainstorming, visualization, and association. It involves the ability to generate new and original ideas, make connections between seemingly unrelated concepts, and explore different perspectives. Creative thinking also requires the ability to communicate ideas effectively, both orally and in writing.

In conclusion, critical thinking and creative thinking are two distinct modes of thinking that have different purposes, processes, and outcomes. While critical thinking is focused on evaluating and analyzing information, creative thinking is aimed at generating new and innovative ideas and solutions to problems. Both modes of thinking are important for success in today's complex and rapidly changing world.

The Importance of Balancing Critical and Creative Thinking

Benefits of combining both types of thinking.

The integration of critical and creative thinking leads to better problem solving, decision making, and innovation by combining analysis and creativity. The following are some benefits of balancing these thinking styles:

• Increase in productivity and efficiency
• Improved communication and teamwork skills
• Better problem-solving and decision-making abilities
• Enhancement of individual and organizational creativity and innovation

Strategies for Developing a Balanced Thinking Approach

Developing a balanced thinking approach requires a conscious effort to integrate critical and creative thinking strategies. Some practical ways of achieving this are:

• Practicing active listening and asking thoughtful questions to clarify and evaluate information
• Encouraging brainstorming sessions that involve diverse perspectives and ideas
• Challenging personal assumptions and biases and adopting a growth mindset
• Using visualization techniques to generate creative solutions to problems

Real-World Applications of Balanced Thinking

The application of a balanced thinking approach leads to better decision-making processes and outcomes. Here are some real-world examples:

• A company using a combination of critical analysis and creativity to develop new products and marketing strategies.
• An individual using critical thinking skills to analyze career opportunities and creative thinking skills to identify alternative paths.
• A teacher using critical analysis to evaluate student's work and creative thinking to design engaging lessons that foster innovation and growth.

To sum up, critical thinking and creative thinking are two essential thinking skills needed for successful problem solving and decision making. While critical thinking involves the systematic evaluation of information and arguments, creative thinking is focused on generating novel and innovative ideas and solutions. Balancing these thinking styles results in enhanced productivity, better communication, and more creative and effective problem-solving. By combining critical and creative thinking strategies, individuals can achieve a balanced thinking approach that leads to better decision-making processes and outcomes.

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Critical thinking vs analytical thinking: The differences and similarities

The ability to think clearly and make informed decisions is paramount to life. This article delves deep into the realms of analytical thinking and critical thinking, shedding light on their differences and how they complement each other. By understanding these thinking styles, you’ll be better equipped to tackle complex problems, evaluate information, and make well-informed decisions. Let’s dive in!

Introduction to Analytical and Critical Thinking

Analytical and critical thinking are two skills essential for solving problems and making decisions in various aspects of life. While both involve the use of logic and reasoning, they differ in their approach and outcomes. Analytical thinking involves breaking down complex information into smaller parts, while critical thinking involves taking a holistic view and evaluating information from different angles. Analytical thinking involves the ability to dissect a problem or situation into its individual components and examining each part separately. It requires careful observation and the ability to identify patterns and relationships. This type of thinking is essential for tasks such as data analysis, problem-solving, and troubleshooting.

Critical thinking, on the other hand, involves the ability to assess information objectively, evaluate its credibility, and make logical judgments. It involves questioning assumptions, examining evidence, and considering different perspectives. Critical thinking is crucial for making informed decisions, weighing pros and cons, and avoiding biases and fallacies.

Both analytical and critical thinking complement each other and are necessary for effective problem-solving and decision-making. Analytical thinking provides a structured and systematic approach to understanding complex problems , while critical thinking helps evaluate different options and make sound judgments.

Developing analytical and critical thinking skills can greatly benefit individuals in various aspects of life. In academia, these skills are necessary for understanding and interpreting complex subjects, conducting research, and writing analytical essays. In the workplace, analytical and critical thinking skills are highly valued by employers as they enable employees to solve problems efficiently and make informed decisions. In daily life, these skills are essential for evaluating information, distinguishing between fact and opinion, and making rational choices.

There are various ways to improve analytical and critical thinking skills. Engaging in activities that require logical reasoning, such as puzzles, brain teasers, and mathematical problems, can help develop analytical thinking abilities. Reading diverse sources of information, questioning assumptions, and actively seeking different perspectives can enhance critical thinking skills . Additionally, engaging in debates, discussions, and problem-solving exercises can promote both analytical and critical thinking.

Analytical and critical thinking skills are essential for problem-solving and decision-making in various aspects of life. They involve breaking down complex information and evaluating it from different angles. Developing these skills can lead to more effective problem-solving, informed decision-making, and overall improved cognitive abilities. 

Traits of an Analytical Thinker

An analytical thinker is one who is adept at breaking down complex problems into smaller parts. This type of thinking is linear and involves analyzing cause and effect relationships. Analytical thinking uses logic and reasoning to come to a conclusion, often relying on data and facts. Some key traits of an analytical thinker include:

• The ability to dissect complex information into smaller pieces.
• A knack for recognizing patterns and relationships.
• A methodical approach to problem-solving.

What Does It Mean to Think Critically?

Critical thinking, on the other hand, is a type of higher-order thinking that requires a more holistic approach. Critical thinkers are often skeptical, questioning the validity of information before accepting it. They are adept at evaluating information from various sources and are not easily swayed by outside information. Key aspects of critical thinking include :

• The ability to form an opinion based on evidence.
• Considering multiple perspectives before making a decision.
• Recognizing biases and challenging one’s own assumptions.

Analytical Thinking vs Critical Thinking: The Major Differences

While both analytical and critical thinking are essential for solving problems, they differ in several key ways:

• Approach : Analytical thinking is more linear and focuses on breaking down complex information into smaller parts. Critical thinking, however, is holistic and looks at the bigger picture.
• Use of Information : Analytical thinkers rely heavily on facts and data, while critical thinkers use facts in conjunction with other pieces of information and perspectives.
• Outcome : Analytical thinking often leads to a single logical conclusion, whereas critical thinking might result in multiple potential solutions or outcomes.

The Processes: Analytical Thinking Process vs Critical Thinking Process

Both styles of thinking have distinct processes:

• Analytical Thinking Process : Starts with gathering data, followed by breaking down complex problems, analyzing the cause and effect relationships, and finally drawing a conclusion.
• Critical Thinking Process : Begins with gathering diverse pieces of information, evaluating their validity, considering various perspectives, and finally forming an opinion or decision.

Using Analytical and Critical Thinking in Real Life Scenarios

In real-life scenarios, these thinking styles can be applied in various ways. For instance, when faced with a business decision, an analytical thinker might focus on the numbers and statistics, while a critical thinker might consider the potential impact on employees, company culture, and external stakeholders.

Analytical thinking can be particularly useful when analyzing financial data and making data-driven decisions. For example, a business owner might use analytical thinking to analyze the company’s financial statements and determine the profitability and financial health of the business. They might examine key financial ratios, such as return on investment or gross profit margin, to assess the efficiency and effectiveness of various business operations.

On the other hand, critical thinking can be applied when evaluating different options and considering the potential consequences of each option. For example, when considering a potential business expansion, a critical thinker may explore the potential impact on existing employees, the company’s culture, and the external stakeholders. They may assess the potential risks and benefits of the expansion, considering factors such as increased competition, resource allocation, and market demand.

Analytical and critical thinking can also be applied in personal decision-making. For example, when considering a major life decision such as buying a house or changing careers, analytical thinking can help weigh the financial implications, such as the monthly mortgage payments or future earning potential. Critical thinking can help evaluate the potential impact on personal goals, values, and overall satisfaction.

In everyday life, analytical thinking can be useful when evaluating product options or making purchasing decisions. For example, comparing different phone models based on features, specifications, and customer reviews can help individuals make an informed choice. Critical thinking can be applied when assessing the potential consequences of a decision, such as considering the long-term environmental impact of a product or the ethical practices of a particular company.

Both analytical and critical thinking are valuable skills in problem-solving. They can help individuals identify the root causes of a problem, analyze potential solutions, and evaluate their effectiveness. Whether it’s troubleshooting a technical issue, resolving a conflict, or devising strategies to improve personal or professional performance, these thinking styles can be instrumental in finding effective solutions. 

Analytical and Critical Thinking in Problem-Solving

Problem-solving requires a combination of both analytical and critical thinking. Analytical thinking helps break the problem into manageable parts, while critical thinking helps in evaluating potential solutions and considering their implications.

The Importance of Combining Both Thinking Styles

While both styles are powerful on their own, combining analytical and critical thinking skills can lead to more robust solutions. This combination allows for a thorough analysis of a problem while also considering the broader implications and potential consequences of a decision.

Mistakes to Avoid: Misconceptions about Analytical and Critical Thinking

Many assume that analytical thinking and critical thinking are one and the same, but this is a misconception. It’s important to recognize their distinct differences and strengths. Another common mistake is over-relying on one style and neglecting the other, leading to potential oversights in decision-making.

Key Takeaways: The Future of Analytical and Critical Thinking

In summary, here are the most important things to remember:

• Distinct yet Complementary : While analytical and critical thinking have distinct processes and outcomes, they are complementary and can be used together for more effective decision-making.
• Real-world Applications : Both styles are essential in various aspects of life, from business decisions to personal choices.
• Continuous Learning : As the world becomes more complex, honing both analytical and critical thinking skills will be crucial for success.

Embrace both styles of thinking and watch as your decision-making skills, problem-solving abilities, and overall understanding of complex situations improve dramatically.

Q: What is the difference between critical thinking and analytical thinking?

A: Critical thinking and analytical thinking are similar thinking skills, but there are some differences between the two. Critical thinking involves gathering information, evaluating and interpreting it, and then making a judgment or decision based on that information. Analytical thinking, on the other hand, focuses more on breaking down complex problems into smaller components, analyzing the relationships between these components, and coming up with solutions based on this analysis. So while both skills involve a logical and systematic approach to thinking, critical thinking is more focused on making judgments and decisions, whereas analytical thinking is more focused on problem-solving and analysis.

Q: How do I use critical thinking in everyday life?

A: Critical thinking is a valuable skill that can be applied in various aspects of everyday life. To use critical thinking, you need to approach situations and problems with an open and questioning mind. This involves challenging your own assumptions and beliefs, gathering and evaluating information from different sources, considering alternative perspectives, and making informed decisions based on evidence and logical reasoning. By using critical thinking, you can enhance your problem-solving skills, improve your decision-making abilities , and think more creatively and independently.

Q: How do I use analytical thinking in my professional life?

A: Analytical thinking is an important skill in many professional fields. To use analytical thinking, you need to be able to break down complex problems or tasks into smaller parts, analyze the relationships between these parts, and come up with logical and well-reasoned solutions. This involves gathering and evaluating relevant data, identifying patterns or trends, and using logical reasoning to draw conclusions. By using analytical thinking, you can improve your problem-solving and decision-making abilities, demonstrate a logical and organized approach to your work, and effectively communicate your analysis and solutions to others.

Q: Can critical thinking and analytical thinking be used together?

A: Yes, critical thinking and analytical thinking are complementary skills that can be used together. Both skills involve a systematic and logical approach to thinking, and they can reinforce each other in problem-solving and decision-making processes. Critical thinking provides the framework for evaluating and interpreting information, while analytical thinking provides the tools for breaking down complex problems and finding solutions. By using both skills together, you can enhance your ability to think critically and analytically, make more informed decisions, and solve problems more effectively.

Q: What are the differences between analytical reasoning and critical thinking?

A: Analytical reasoning and critical thinking are related skills that involve a logical and systematic approach to thinking. However, there are some differences between the two. Analytical reasoning is more focused on the process of breaking down complex problems or arguments, identifying logical relationships between different elements, and drawing conclusions based on this analysis. Critical thinking, on the other hand, is a broader skill that involves evaluating and interpreting information, questioning assumptions and biases, and making judgments or decisions based on evidence and logical reasoning. While analytical reasoning is an important part of critical thinking, critical thinking encompasses a wider range of cognitive processes and skills.

Q: How can I develop and improve my analytical thinking skills?

A: To develop and improve your analytical thinking skills, you can engage in activities that stimulate your logical and problem-solving abilities. This may involve practicing with puzzles and brainteasers, analyzing case studies or real-life scenarios, participating in debates or discussions, learning and applying different analytical frameworks or models, and seeking feedback on your analytical thinking from others. Additionally, you can also cultivate your analytical thinking skills by staying curious, asking thoughtful questions, and continuously seeking new knowledge and perspectives. With practice and perseverance, you can enhance your analytical thinking abilities and become a more effective problem solver and decision maker.

Q: How can I become a critical thinker?

A: Becoming a critical thinker requires a conscious effort to develop and refine your thinking skills. Here are some steps you can take to become a critical thinker : 1. Cultivate intellectual humility and open-mindedness: Be willing to consider alternative viewpoints and challenge your own assumptions and beliefs. 2. Develop strong analytical and reasoning skills: Learn to gather and evaluate evidence, identify logical fallacies, and draw logical and well-supported conclusions. 3. Practice active listening and effective communication: Listen attentively to others’ perspectives, ask thoughtful questions, and communicate your own ideas clearly and persuasively. 4. Seek out diverse sources of information: Expose yourself to different perspectives and viewpoints to broaden your understanding and avoid bias. 5. Reflect and evaluate your own thinking: Regularly reflect on your own thinking processes, identify any biases or logical gaps, and work on improving your critical thinking skills.

Q: What role does critical thinking play in problem-solving?

A: Critical thinking is a fundamental skill in problem-solving. It helps you approach problems with a logical and systematic mindset, evaluate potential solutions, and make informed decisions. Critical thinking allows you to gather and analyze relevant information, identify patterns or trends, consider different perspectives or alternatives, weigh the pros and cons, and choose the most effective solution. By using critical thinking in problem-solving, you can enhance your ability to find creative and innovative solutions, overcome obstacles, and make well-informed decisions that are based on sound reasoning and evidence.

Q: Why is critical thinking important?

A: Critical thinking is important because it enables you to think independently, make informed decisions, solve problems effectively, and evaluate information and arguments critically. In a rapidly changing and complex world, critical thinking allows you to navigate through information overload, identify biases or misinformation, and make sense of a wide range of conflicting information. It also helps you develop a deep understanding of concepts and ideas, construct well-reasoned arguments, and communicate your thoughts effectively. In both personal and professional contexts, critical thinking is a valuable skill that empowers you to be a more effective and successful individual.

Q: How does analytical thinking contribute to problem-solving?

A: Analytical thinking is a key component of problem-solving. It involves breaking down complex problems into smaller components, analyzing the relationships between these components, and identifying patterns or trends. Analytical thinking helps you understand the underlying causes of problems, explore different possible solutions, and evaluate their feasibility and effectiveness. By using analytical thinking, you can approach problems in a structured and systematic way, make well-informed decisions, and find creative and innovative solutions. Analytical thinking provides a solid foundation for problem-solving, enabling you to effectively address challenges and find solutions in various domains.

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The Peak Performance Center

The pursuit of performance excellence, critical thinking.

Critical thinking refers to the process of actively analyzing, assessing, synthesizing, evaluating and reflecting on information gathered from observation, experience, or communication. It is thinking in a clear, logical, reasoned, and reflective manner to solve problems or make decisions. Basically, critical thinking is taking a hard look at something to understand what it really means.

Critical Thinkers

Critical thinkers do not simply accept all ideas, theories, and conclusions as facts. They have a mindset of questioning ideas and conclusions. They make reasoned judgments that are logical and well thought out by assessing the evidence that supports a specific theory or conclusion.

When presented with a new piece of new information, critical thinkers may ask questions such as;

“What information supports that?”

“How was this information obtained?”

“Who obtained the information?”

“How do we know the information is valid?”

“Why is it that way?”

“What makes it do that?”

“How do we know that?”

“Are there other possibilities?”

Combination of Analytical and Creative Thinking

Many people perceive critical thinking just as analytical thinking. However, critical thinking incorporates both analytical thinking and creative thinking. Critical thinking does involve breaking down information into parts and analyzing the parts in a logical, step-by-step manner. However, it also involves challenging consensus to formulate new creative ideas and generate innovative solutions. It is critical thinking that helps to evaluate and improve your creative ideas.

Elements of Critical Thinking

Critical thinking involves:

• Gathering relevant information
• Evaluating information
• Asking questions
• Assessing bias or unsubstantiated assumptions
• Making inferences from the information and filling in gaps
• Using abstract ideas to interpret information
• Formulating ideas
• Weighing opinions
• Reaching well-reasoned conclusions
• Considering alternative possibilities
• Testing conclusions
• Verifying if evidence/argument support the conclusions

Developing Critical Thinking Skills

Critical thinking is considered a higher order thinking skills, such as analysis, synthesis, deduction, inference, reason, and evaluation. In order to demonstrate critical thinking, you would need to develop skills in;

Interpreting : understanding the significance or meaning of information

Analyzing : breaking information down into its parts

Connecting : making connections between related items or pieces of information.

Integrating : connecting and combining information to better understand the relationship between the information.

Evaluating : judging the value, credibility, or strength of something

Reasoning : creating an argument through logical steps

Deducing : forming a logical opinion about something based on the information or evidence that is available

Inferring : figuring something out through reasoning based on assumptions and ideas

Generating : producing new information, ideas, products, or ways of viewing things.

Blooms Taxonomy

Bloom’s Taxonomy Revised

Mind Mapping

Chunking Information

Brainstorming

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What Is a Prototype in Design Thinking? (And Ideas To Make One)

Prototyping is a crucial step in the design thinking process. Learn all about design thinking prototypes and why they matter in this guide. 

If you want to create products that truly resonate with your users, you can’t just jump straight from ‘idea’ to ‘design’. You first need to test your ideas to make sure that they’re really worth developing. 

This is where design thinking prototypes come in. 

Prototypes enable you to visualise and communicate your ideas, and test them on real or representative users. This can help identify conceptual flaws and usability issues before you spend time and money on implementation. 

Prototypes don’t just make smart business sense. They’re essential for creating user-friendly products that actually work in the real world.

In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know, including: 

• What is a prototype in design thinking?
• What is the purpose of a prototype in design thinking?
• The different types of design thinking prototypes
• Ideas and inspiration for creating design thinking prototypes
• Prototyping best practices
• The takeaway

Let’s begin. 

1. What is a prototype in design thinking?

In design thinking, a prototype is a model that represents the idea, solution, concept, or product you want to test. Design thinking prototypes can be digital or physical, and the level of detail varies depending on how well-developed an idea is. 

We’ll explore the different types of design thinking prototypes in section three of this guide. For now, let’s recap on what design thinking is and where prototyping fits into the process.

What is design thinking? A quick recap

Design thinking is an iterative, empathy-driven approach to solving problems and coming up with solutions. 

It prioritises the end user throughout, encouraging you to understand and define the problem users need you to solve, and then to brainstorm, prototype, and test your ideas before you go ahead and develop them.

This helps to determine whether or not your proposed solutions are actually effective and feasible — before you spend time, money, and resources building and implementing them.

There are five main phases in the design thinking process :

• Empathise: This is where you get to know your target audience and understand their needs. This stage involves activities such as conducting user research, creating empathy maps , and developing user personas .
• Define: The next step is to clearly define and frame the specific user problem you want to fix. This is based on what you’ve learned about the target users and the challenges they face.
• Ideate: This is where you get creative and come up with as many different ideas as possible — that is, ideas for how to solve your end-user's problems. You’ll then narrow down a large pool of ideas to a couple that you’d like to explore further. You can learn more about ideation (and the different techniques used) in this guide .
• Prototype: At this stage, you visualise your ideas and think about how they might take shape. This involves creating prototypes: physical or digital representations of ideas that you can test and validate (or invalidate) before developing them further.
• Test: This is where you test your prototypes — ideally with real users or research participants who closely represent your target audience. Through rigorous testing, you can check whether your ideas are effective and worth continuing with, or if you need to go back to the drawing board. 

That’s design thinking in brief. For a more detailed exploration of the topic, refer to our full guide: What is Design Thinking? Everything You Need To Know .

2. What is the purpose of a prototype in design thinking?

The main purpose of a prototype in design thinking is to visualise and represent your ideas. This enables you to:

• Think, in more concrete terms, about how your ideas should take shape, taking them from abstract concepts to tangible solutions. 
• Communicate ideas and concepts to key stakeholders, allowing you to gather initial feedback. 
• Test early-stage ideas and concepts on real users or research participants — helping you decide whether to move forward with an idea and develop it further, or whether you need to return to the ideation stage and come up with a more effective solution.
• Test more advanced concepts and ideas to identify usability issues or design flaws and iterate accordingly.
• Reduce the risk (and cost) of developing and launching an untested idea that turns out to be ineffective in the real world. 

Why prototyping is so important in design thinking: A hypothetical example

Let’s say you’re designing an app to help newly retired people connect with fellow retirees and find local opportunities to socialise and get involved in the community. 

You think you know enough about your target audience to design the app without prototyping and testing. You brainstorm all the features you believe the app should include, discuss them with your team and key business stakeholders who give you the thumbs-up, and then go right ahead and design the app in its entirety. 

You’re certain you’ve created an outstanding product — but, when you launch the app, it doesn’t quite resonate with your target audience in the way you’d hoped. 

Your users report feeling overwhelmed by the vast array of features and functions available. At the same time, they point out that there are certain missing features that they would have liked the app to include. 

With prototyping and testing, this scenario could have been avoided. By creating prototypes to model how the app would look and function, and testing those prototypes on target users, you would have discovered the issues with your designs before getting them developed and launched. Based on user feedback, you could have focused on the features your users really wanted and launched a product that hit the mark. 

Ultimately, prototyping in design thinking is an important safeguard against designing and building products that fail to meet your end users’ needs. 

3. The different types of design thinking prototypes

There are several different types of design thinking prototypes, and they vary in terms of both detail and format. Prototypes can be digital or physical and can range from low-fidelity (i.e. low-detail) models to more realistic high-fidelity representations. 

Here are the main types of design thinking prototypes. 

Low-fidelity prototypes

Low-fidelity prototypes are highly simplistic representations of your ideas. They’re not concerned with the finer details; rather, they’re used to visualise the broader overall concept. 

Low-fidelity prototypes used in design thinking include:

• Hand-drawn sketches that represent, say, how an app screen might look or how a user might interact with a particular feature or product. 
• Low-fidelity wireframes , either hand-drawn with pen and paper or created digitally using dedicated wireframe tools or software . These simple, static wireframes are used to depict the overall layout of a digital screen. They don’t typically include specific details such as text or colour. 

Low-fidelity prototypes are used to capture and hash out very early-stage ideas and concepts. They can be more experimental and unformed, allowing you to explore multiple concepts before committing to a specific idea or design direction. 

Mid-fidelity prototypes

Mid-fidelity or medium-fidelity prototypes depict your ideas in more detail, but they’re still not fully functional or entirely representative of how the final product might look or behave. 

Just like their low-fidelity counterparts, mid-fidelity prototypes can also be created physically or digitally. Some common versions of mid-fidelity prototypes used in design thinking include:

• Paper models or mockups that provide a physical representation of how the product might look and function. These are a step up from low-fidelity, hand-drawn sketches. You might use paper and pens to physically model both the individual screens within an app and how those screens connect with each other. 
• Clickable digital wireframes that simulate basic interactions with a product (say, a mobile app) and depict the overall navigation and flow of the design. 
• Storyboards — a sequence of illustrations that depict how a user interacts with a product or feature, broken down into chronological steps or “scenes.” This type of design thinking prototype focuses on the user’s journey and the overall interaction. 

High-fidelity prototypes

As your ideas advance and the finer details come into focus, you’ll create high-fidelity prototypes. These closely resemble the final product in terms of visual appearance and functionality, and they’re often used for late-stage testing just before the product is developed. 

Examples of high-fidelity prototypes used in design thinking include: 

• Fully interactive clickable prototypes, created using specialist UX design software such as Figma, Sketch, and Proto.io (to name just a few). These prototypes closely resemble a real digital product (like a mobile app or a website) and simulate how it feels to navigate and interact with the product as if it were live. 
• Detailed 3D models. If you’re creating prototypes to test a physical product, you can create high-fidelity models using various materials to replicate how the real product will look, as well as to experiment with different scales and dimensions. 

Service prototypes 

While we often think of web design and mobile app design when exploring design thinking, it’s important to bear in mind that it also relates to the design of intangible solutions and services. 

Prototyping for services focuses on the user journey and their interaction with the service — at specific touchpoints, for example, or holistically across the entire service experience. 

Some common design thinking prototypes used in service design include:

• Role-playing. This involves acting out the service experience to identify pain points and areas for improvement. 
• Customer journey maps or user journey maps . These provide visual representations of the user’s experience across different touchpoints within the service, helping to highlight where and how the experience could be improved. 

As you can see, design thinking prototypes increase in detail and fidelity as your ideas and concepts evolve and become more refined. The closer you get to a final solution, the more complex and realistic your prototypes will become. 

4. Ideas and inspiration for creating design thinking prototypes

Want to get hands-on with prototyping? Here are some fun exercises to help you get creative, experiment with building different types of prototypes, and experience first-hand why prototyping is so useful. 

Create 1-minute prototypes 

Creating rapid, low-fidelity prototypes helps to prevent overthinking and encourages creativity. The goal is to sketch out a simple visualisation of an idea using just pen and paper — with the timer set for one minute. 

Give it a go:

Set a timer for one minute and sketch out the home screen layout for an app of your choice (say, a dating app, a language-learning app, or a recipe app). After the minute is up, review what you’ve created. Then repeat the same exercise four more times (creating four more prototypes, with one minute for each). At the end, you’ll have five low-fidelity prototypes to explore. 

Prototype collaboratively 

Prototyping doesn’t necessarily need to be a solo activity. If you want to leverage a variety of perspectives and ideas, try creating prototypes as a group. You might invite stakeholders from different departments, for example, to see how they each envision your idea taking shape. 

Once you’ve defined the user problem you want to solve and come up with solutions you want to explore (as per stages two and three of the design thinking process), gather a small group of team members or stakeholders and ask each person to create a simple, hand-drawn sketch of how the solution should look. 

Give each participant paper and pens/pencils, set a timer for 15 minutes, and have everybody focus on creating their prototypes. Once the 15 minutes are up, invite each member of the group to present their prototype and answer questions. 

Once everybody has presented their prototypes, work together as a group to create a single prototype that combines the best ideas from each. 

Experiment with different materials

If you want to get a feel for the prototyping process, consider building a prototype for a physical product. Experimenting with different materials is a great way to spark your creativity and explore the different forms and functions a product might take.

Gather a variety of different materials such as cardboard, tin foil, foam, clay, string, buttons — anything you can get your hands on — and choose a random physical product to prototype. You might prototype a kitchen appliance, a musical instrument, or something for your pet; anything that comes to mind. 

The goal is not to create a polished, functional product, but rather, to explore the physical properties of product design and immerse yourself in the art of prototyping. 

Try role-playing and body storming 

For a truly immersive prototyping exercise, try role-playing and bodystorming. This is where you take on the perspective of your target users and act out different scenarios relating to the product or solution you’re designing. 

This is a great way to cultivate empathy throughout the prototyping process and to have a bit of fun with prototyping away from your computer screen. 

Choose a scenario related to your design challenge — a customer trying to open a new bank account, for example, or a group of remote colleagues trying to improve the efficiency of their meetings. Assemble a small team to take part in the role-play, assign each member a specific role, and act out the scenario you want to explore. 

After the role-play, discuss the overall interaction, focusing on challenges and hurdles that came up, as well as any particularly successful or smooth moments. This will help steer you in the direction of an effective solution. 

Use digital design thinking prototyping tools

If you’re prototyping for digital products like apps and websites, experiment with a variety of digital prototyping tools to see what’s possible with each platform. 

Tools like Figma , Sketch, and Proto.io allow you to create fully interactive, high-fidelity prototypes that closely resemble how the finished product will look and function. Understanding how these tools work will elevate your prototyping process. 

Choose two or three digital design thinking prototyping tools you want to focus on — say, Figma, Sketch, and Proto.io. Set yourself a specific prototyping challenge (or focus on a real prototyping task you’ve got on your to-do list) and create a prototype in each of your chosen tools.

Explore all the different features and functionalities of each tool and see how they guide you through the prototyping process. This will not only help you to learn important industry-standard tools but will also encourage you to explore different approaches to creating high-fidelity prototypes. 

5. Prototyping best practices

Now that we’ve explored design thinking prototypes in detail, here are some best practices to bear in mind when creating your own. 

Prototype based on where you’re at in the design process

There are many different types of prototypes in design thinking, ranging from low-fidelity hand-drawn sketches to interactive digital prototypes, and everything else in between. It’s important to choose the right kind of prototype depending on where you’re at in the design process. 

If you’re in the very early stages of coming up with ideas and concepts, focus first and foremost on low-fidelity prototypes. At this stage, it doesn’t make sense to create high-fidelity prototypes as you’re not yet thinking about the finer details of your product. 

If, on the other hand, your ideas are already well-developed and you’re refining the final details, you’ll want to create more complex, realistic prototypes. 

Set clear goals and objectives 

In design thinking, creating prototypes goes hand-in-hand with testing. So, as you create your prototypes, set clear goals and objectives for what you want to test. This will enable you to establish a benchmark for deeming whether or not an idea is worth pursuing further.

Let’s say you’re designing prototypes to test a new feature for a fitness app. The new feature you’re creating should enable users to log their workouts and access key statistics such as how long they spent in each heart rate zone and how many calories they burned. 

When testing these prototypes, you might focus on one key objective: to determine whether or not the new feature is intuitive and easy to use. To measure this, you might time how long it takes for your users (or test participants) to locate the new feature, as well as how long it takes them to complete the action of tracking a new workout. 

You might also ask specific questions to gather relevant user feedback, such as “How easy was it to find the new feature?” and “How did you feel while interacting with this new feature?” 

Prototype (and test) early and often

Don’t wait until an idea is well-formed before you prototype and test it. The whole point of design thinking is to prototype and test early and often — to gather vital feedback before you invest too much time and energy into a single solution. 

Also, you shouldn’t be prototyping and testing your ideas just once. Prototype and test your initial ideas, refine them (or come up with entirely new ideas) based on what you learn, then prototype and test those new ideas or iterations, and so on. 

By continuously prototyping and testing, you can progressively work towards the most effective, user-friendly solution. This reduces the risk of costly redesigns after the product has been developed and launched. 

Test your prototypes on a diverse audience 

It’s important to make sure that you’re not just putting your prototypes in front of people who can validate your ideas or tell you what you want to hear. 

Test your prototypes on a diverse audience — including stakeholders and users who have existing knowledge of the product, as well as those who have no expectations whatsoever as to how the product should work. 

Different users will approach your product or solution with different needs, expectations, and perspectives, so diversity in testing is crucial for gathering a broad range of insights. And, of course, it also plays a critical role in designing products that are accessible and inclusive. 

6. The takeaway

Prototyping is a crucial step in the design thinking process, allowing you to visualise and test your ideas before developing them. This ensures that you’re focusing on the right solutions to your users’ problems, and designing them in a way that resonates with your target audience. 

Without prototyping and testing, you run the risk of creating products that don’t actually address a real user need — or products that require extensive (and expensive) redesigns after they’ve been launched. Not only is that bad for the user experience; it costs unnecessary time, money, and resources. 

So, prototype early and often to explore, validate, and refine your ideas, and create truly user-centric products that your audience will love. If you’d like to learn more about design thinking, check out these additional guides:

• 7 Examples of Design Thinking in Practice (And What We Can Learn From Them)
• 18 Design Thinking Books Everyone Should Read
• The 10 Best Design Thinking Courses and Certifications To Take in 2024

7. Next Steps

If you are interested in learning more about prototypes in design thinking, we highly recommend checking out this UX Design project by AND learner Abhishekh Singh. For further information, here are some additional resources you can refer to:

• Watch this session by Shiva Viswanathan, Design Head of Ogilvy Pennywise, and Naman Singh, Product Experience Designer at RED.
• Talk to a course advisor to discuss how you can transform your career with one of our courses.
• Pursue our UX UI Design courses - all courses are taught through live, interactive classes by industry experts, and some even offer a Job Guarantee.
• Take advantage of our scholarship and funding options to overcome any financial hurdle on the path of your career transformation.

Note: All information and/or data from external sources is believed to be accurate as of the date of publication .

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Systems thinking vs design thinking, what’s the difference.

JUMP TO SECTION

• Introduction
• What is Systems Thinking?
• What is Design Thinking?
• The Differences Between Systems Thinking vs. Design Thinking
• Advantages and Drawbacks of Systems Thinking
• Advantages and Drawbacks of Design Thinking
• Human-Centered Systems Thinking: Integrating Systems Thinking and Design Thinking 
• Frameworks, Tools, and Methodologies for Human-Centered Systems Thinking

1. Introduction

Systems thinking and design thinking are both approaches to problem solving and innovation. Systems thinking starts with understanding entire systems rather than individualized elements to spot opportunities for change, whereas design thinking is focused on understanding people’s real needs to create human-centered products, services, and processes. It’s important to learn the nuances of each when incorporating them into your practice.

2. What is Systems Thinking?

Systems, like healthcare and cities, are big, multifaceted, dynamic things built for a purpose. They span several services and products working together simultaneously. Some systems benefit society, but some can lead to harm too. Donella Meadows, author of Thinking in Systems , describes systems as made up of structures (institutions), relationships (stakeholders and power dynamics), and paradigms (culture and mindsets).

So what is systems thinking ? In his book The Fifth Discipline , Peter Senge gives a systems thinking definition as “A discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static ‘snapshots.’ And systems thinking is a sensibility—for the subtle interconnectedness that gives living systems their unique character."

Systems thinking has been around for a long time. If you search the history of the field, you will find your way to pioneering systems theorists like Jay W. Forrester, Russell Ackoff, Donella Meadows, Peter Senge, and more. They codified much of our modern thinking on systems theory, dynamics, and modeling. But were they the first systems thinkers? Certainly not. There are roots in Native American cultures and worldviews, early feminism, and many other examples.

The concept of wholeness is integral to a systems thinking approach. A system is more than the sum of its parts—it's defined by the interaction of its parts. To understand how a system works, you have to study not the individual elements but the linkages between them. When you start thinking in systems, you can then spot opportunities for change. By bringing more awareness to the process of designing systems, we can all be more intentional about creating equitable ones and dismantling harmful ones. 

“A system is more than the sum of its parts—it's defined by the interaction of its parts.”

3. What is Design Thinking?

Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation—anchored in understanding customer’s needs, prototyping, and generating creative ideas—to transform the way you develop products, services, processes, and organizations.

When using design thinking principles, you bring together what is desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable.

• Desirability: What makes sense to people and for people?
• Feasibility: What is technically possible within the foreseeable future?
• Viability: What is likely to become part of a sustainable business model?

We teach the phases of design thinking as linear steps, but in practice the process is not always linear. Some of these steps may happen several times, and you may even jump back and forth between them. The phases of the design thinking process include:

Frame a Question —Identify a driving question that inspires others to search for creative solutions.

Gather Inspiration —Inspire new thinking by discovering what people really need.

Generate Ideas —Push past obvious solutions to get to breakthrough ideas.

Make Ideas Tangible —Build rough prototypes to learn how to make ideas better.

Test to Learn —Refine ideas by gathering feedback and experimenting forward.

Share the Story —Craft a human story to inspire others toward action.

If you want to learn more about using a design thinking approach, you can explore design thinking examples, case studies, and activities in our free Design Thinking Resources . 

4. The Differences Between Systems Thinking vs. Design Thinking

You might be wondering: when should I use design thinking and when should I use systems thinking? Each approach has its own distinct characteristics and benefits. Here is a comparison of systems thinking and design thinking:

5. Advantages and Drawbacks of Systems Thinking

Systems thinking enables us to overcome stalled decision-making that often occurs when we’re overwhelmed by the scale of a problem and it’s hard to know where to get started. It helps us see the interconnectedness of things, spot patterns, and identify the right areas to focus our efforts. This approach is a good fit for challenges where there's a lot of stakeholders, competing incentives, or no obvious solution.

Other benefits of systems thinking include:

•  Deepening understanding of a problem by getting different perspectives from people within the system.
• Expanding the range of choices by framing the problem in new and different ways.
• Making more informed choices by understanding how things are interrelated and how choices may impact other parts of the system.
• Anticipating the impact of trade-offs to reduce the risk of unintended consequences.
• Building buy-in and support for solutions by making sure everyone's viewpoint is included.

The goal of systems thinking is ultimately to come up with solutions that are more holistic and take into account the needs of all stakeholders while also understanding the dynamics of the system. A common drawback or limitation of systems thinking is getting stuck in the ideation and thinking phase without getting tangible. When practicing systems thinking without including the prototyping mindsets of design thinking, it can be more difficult to implement the solutions that you come up with. Additionally, when you use a solely systems thinking approach, you may overlook the individual human needs and behaviors that you uncover with design thinking.

6. Advantages and Drawbacks of Design Thinking

Design thinking is valuable because it puts people at the center of problem solving. It encourages us to ask questions and find out what our customers and clients need, rather than assuming we already know all the answers. Brainstorming ideas , prototyping, and iterating allow us to learn faster and improve products and services before they go out into the real world.

Over time, the methods and mindsets of design thinking lead to something even more important—creative confidence. The subtle techniques of design thinking unlock mindset shifts that lead people (many for the first time in their lives) to see themselves as creative. Creative confidence gives people the ability to fearlessly (or with less fear) tackle complex problems in the world.

Here are some additional benefits of design thinking, and how it can help your team or organization:

• Understanding the unmet needs of the people you’re creating for.
• Reducing the risk associated with launching new ideas, products, and services.
• Generating solutions that are revolutionary, not just incremental.
• Learning and iterating faster.
• Collaborating better and tapping into the creative potential of individuals and teams. 

When it comes to drawbacks or limitations of design thinking, some teams may find it difficult to incorporate design thinking because it involves a lot of ambiguity. It’s not a linear path, and sometimes requires looping back to different parts of the process. Additionally, it takes time and practice to practice design thinking at a high level.

Some may also find it difficult to change social norms or behavior on their team. If an organization is used to doing things in a certain way, it might be resistant to a new, more creative way of working. It can be challenging when a team isn’t aligned on applying a design thinking mindset, since it’s such a collaborative approach.

7. Human-Centered Systems Thinking: Integrating Systems Thinking and Design Thinking

Human-centered systems thinking brings together the analytical, holistic tools of systems thinking with the creative human-centered process of design thinking. It’s a mindset and methodology for tackling complex systemic challenges in a human way: staying grounded in the needs of multiple stakeholders while also seeing larger dynamics at play so you can diagnose the real problem, design more effective solutions, and drive real behavior change and positive impact within systems.

Combining systems thinking and design thinking enables you to:

• Zoom in and out, and toggle back and forth between a systems lens and a human lens.
• Gain a deeper, more holistic and human understanding of the system and its stakeholders.
• Develop empathy for both the people and the system itself.
• Understand what drives human behavior and system behavior.
• Redesign the system to produce better outcomes by designing and implementing interventions that drive positive change within the system.

Today, human-centered systems thinking is needed more than ever. We have a greater awareness of the interconnected nature of our world. The challenges we face—as individuals, teams, organizations, communities, and as a society—are myriad and multifaceted. Their scale and complexity can be overwhelming. Where do we begin? How do we start to make sense of things?

So many of our complex systems today are human systems like organizations, which are made up of relationships between people. A human-centered approach to systems thinking starts with people and diagnoses the underlying causes of problems before taking action to solve them, and stays grounded in the needs of many stakeholders while also seeing the larger dynamics at play. When you approach problem solving in this way—deeply human and holistic—you will get to solutions that are more effective, connected, integrated, and ethical.

8. Frameworks, Tools, and Methodologies for Human-Centered Systems Thinking

Human-centered systems thinking isn’t just a theoretical concept—there are practical frameworks and tools that you use to bring it to life. Here are a couple of our favorites:

The Iceberg Model

In a complex system, solving problems requires considering the whole picture and surfacing the root of the problem. The iceberg model is a framework for uncovering the many layers of a system, including behaviors, structures, and mindsets. It helps you:

• Look for patterns over time, starting with what you see
• Uncover deeper structural influences
• Surface underlying mindsets

The Systems Map

A systems map is a tool commonly used by systems designers to lay out all the relationships and interactions between stakeholders in a given system, such as a local high school (shown in the image above). Mapping systems can help you spot opportunities for growth and change.

To create a systems map, follow these steps:

• Write down every stakeholder in your system on a blank piece of paper. Push yourself to think past the obvious.
• Draw arrows between the different parts of your system to identify how they’re connected.
• Reflect on what specific areas you want to examine more closely. What questions come up for you? What gaps do you see?

If you want to dive deeper into systems thinking and learn more tools and frameworks, check out our 5-week online course Human-Centered Systems Thinking.

Expand your design thinking skills and confidence with our Foundations in Design Thinking certificate.

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Difference Between Thinking and Critical Thinking

• Categorized under Nature | Difference Between Thinking and Critical Thinking

Thinking vs. Critical Thinking

The Two Think Tanks: Thinking and Critical Thinking

Every human being is capable of thinking, but some say that few are able to practice critical thinking. What’s the difference?

Thinking is the mental process, the act and the ability to produce thoughts. People think about almost everything and anything. They often think of people, things, places, and anything without a reason or as a result of a trigger of a stimulus. Meanwhile, critical thinking often means “thinking about thinking.” In a sense, it is a deeper form of thinking about a particular issue or situation before actually deciding and acting.

In any given situation, thinking is an action that requires the person to form a thought about that situation. Any thought can be formed, even without facts or evidence. When critical thinking is applied, the mind is open to all considerations, assumptions, and details before actually forming a thought or an opinion. A person who is a critical thinker regards the subject itself and all its aspects, like the methods of collecting facts or the motivation behind said facts. A person who employs critical thinking often adds the question “why” to “who, what, where, and when” in a particular situation.

To illustrate, imagine a person at a bookstore. This person can pick out a book and think that the book is good upon first impression. A critical thinking person would open the book, read some passages, and read about the author before actually deciding whether to buy the book or not. The customer might often wonder about the title or why the author chose to write this particular piece of literature.

A thinker may accept facts or realities based on faith alone and without examination and analysis of the issue. These facts or realities are often perceived as “truth” and cannot be criticized or modified. In this situation, there is no need for evidence or the effort to produce it and its examination.

Critical thinking is the opposite of all of this. It often requires a lot of time, questions, and considerations. It also involves a longer process before arriving at a conclusion or decision.

Individuals who apply critical thinking are often open-minded and mindful of alternatives. They try to be well informed and do not jump to conclusions. Critical thinkers know and identify conclusions, reasons, and assumptions. They use clarifying and probing questions in order to formulate their reasonable situations and arguments. They often try to integrate all items in the situation and then draw conclusions with reason and caution. They also have good judgment on the credibility of sources and the quality of an argument, aside from developing and defending their stand. If asked, these people can clearly articulate their argument with all its strengths and weaknesses.

Critical thinking is an on-going process and activity. This skill is learned through active practice and constant use. Exposure to controversial issues and thought-provoking situations stimulates the mind to utilize this skill, which is then applied upon careful examination of an issue or situation. Meanwhile, thinking can be done in an instant without any given proof and/or justification.

Critical thinking requires logic and accuracy, while thinking sometimes occurs in the form of faith and personal opinion. The former requires evidence and further actions of examination and analysis, while the latter does not. It’s up to you to think and decide.

• Both thinking and critical thinking are mental processes.
• Thinking can be classified as an action, while critical thinking can be said to be a skill.
• Critical thinking is used with caution, while thinking can be spontaneous.
• A critical thinker is able to identify the main contention in an issue, look for evidence that supports or opposes that contention, and assess the strength of the reasoning, while a thinker may base their belief solely on faith or personal opinion.
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Cite APA 7 Franscisco, . (2017, June 30). Difference Between Thinking and Critical Thinking. Difference Between Similar Terms and Objects. http://www.differencebetween.net/science/nature/difference-between-thinking-and-critical-thinking/. MLA 8 Franscisco, . "Difference Between Thinking and Critical Thinking." Difference Between Similar Terms and Objects, 30 June, 2017, http://www.differencebetween.net/science/nature/difference-between-thinking-and-critical-thinking/.

Thank you very, much, this was a discussion question and the information was too closly related to find a significant difference.

As I was reading this article I kind of think I’m a critical thinker. When my boyfriend tells me thing about his day I’m not going to lie I try and ask why did that happen. Or I say strange that happened in order to get him to tell me more things. Just the other day we were out with our friends and Jose one of our friends was telling us how one of there friend is different ever since he got his promotion at work and Jose was like that foo needs to chill I’m not going talk about our wild nights and I was like oh yeah like which ones. I was trying to get him to talk but then our other friend pointed it out and was like umm look at Brenda thinking we really do have wild nights. I tend to always ask why is it done that way or could it have ever crossed there mind that they can do it this way.

Thx for the article,it’s very easy to understand

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Project-Based Learning in Fostering Creative Thinking and Mathematical Problem-Solving Skills: Evidence from Primary Education in Indonesia

The interdependence between the Project-Based Learning (PjBL) Model and the growth and enhancement of Creative Thinking and Mathematical Problem Solving Skills in Elementary Schools is unquestionable nowadays. Prior studies have yet to discover concrete evidence regarding the interdependence being discussed. This study highlighted cognitive abilities related to creative thinking and mathematics problem-solving by implementing the Project-Based Learning Model. This research was a quasi-experiment with a pretest-posttest control group design involving 43 students in the sixth grade of two elementary schools; data was collected through test and classroom observation, and then the data was analyzed using Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA). Conversely, students exposed to project-based learning models exhibit higher skill levels in creative thinking and problem-solving than those instructed using conventional learning models. The project-based learning model significantly impacted elementary school children’s creative thinking and mathematics problem-solving skills. These findings suggest that the Project-Based Learning Model is acceptable for instructors seeking to foster creativity in teaching mathematics at the primary school level in Indonesia or other countries with comparable settings.

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• Volume 14, Issue 8
• Exploring the perceptions of senior medical students on gender and pain: a qualitative study of the interplay between formal and hidden curricula
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• http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9334-0922 Megan E L Brown 1 ,
• Cristina Costache 2 ,
• Stephanie Bull Parker 3 ,
• http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0219-4956 Ravi Parekh 3 ,
• William Laughey 4 , 5 ,
• Sonia Kumar 6
• 1 School of Medicine , Newcastle University , Newcastle upon Tyne , UK
• 2 School of Medical Sciences , The University of Manchester , Manchester , UK
• 3 Medical Education Innovation & Research Centre, School of Public Health , Imperial College London , London , UK
• 4 Health Professions Education Unit , Hull York Medical School , York , UK
• 5 Reckitt Benckiser Plc , Slough , UK
• 6 University of Leeds , Leeds , UK
• Correspondence to Dr Megan E L Brown; megan.brown{at}newcastle.ac.uk

Objective Explore the perceptions of senior medical students on the relationship between gender and pain and examine how formal and hidden curricula in medical education shape their experiences.

Design We conducted a cross-sectional qualitative interview study, using individual semistructured interviews and adhering to interpretative description methodology. We used Braun and Clarke’s reflexive approach to thematic analysis to analyse our data.

Setting Six medical schools across the UK. Data collection occurred between the autumn of 2022 and the spring of 2023.

Participants 14 senior (penultimate or final year) medical students.

Results We created three themes, which describe key educational forces shaping students’ experiences of the relationship between gender and pain. These are (1) the sociocultural influencer, (2) the pedagogical influencer and (3) the professorial influencer. Our findings highlight the influence of both wider societal norms and students’ own identities on their experiences. Further, we explore the nature and detrimental role of formal curricular gaps, and negative role modelling as a key mechanism by which a hidden curriculum relating to gender and pain exerts its influence.

Conclusions These findings have several educational implications, including the need for a more holistic, person-centred approach to pain management within medical school curricula. Additionally, we recommend the creation of reflective spaces to engage students in critical thinking around bias and advocacy from the early stages of their training. We present actionable insights for medical educators to address issues of gender bias and pain management.

• MEDICAL EDUCATION & TRAINING
• QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
• PAIN MANAGEMENT
• Chronic Pain

Data availability statement

No data are available. As ethical approval was not obtained to make data sharing possible outside of the listed research team, no additional data are available.

This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See:  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ .

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2023-080420

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STRENGTHS AND LIMITATIONS OF THIS STUDY

By examining the hidden curricula of gender and pain within medical education, our research builds on previous studies noting insufficient formal education by highlighting the nuanced ways in which such gaps may be perpetuated or mitigated through everyday clinical interactions and informal learning experiences.

The in-depth, qualitative approach of this study has generated rich data and allowed for the consideration of important social and cultural nuances, captured particularly by our first theme: the sociocultural influencer.

The interview questions were codeveloped with a patient community group to shape and clarify our interview focus and language.

Though students were prompted to reflect on their experiences throughout medical school, this is a cross-sectional study, so students’ perceptions may have changed on recall.

Convenience sampling may mean that bias awareness appears more prevalent among medical students than it is within the wider medical student population.

Introduction

Gender bias in healthcare kills. This bias, which can be defined as ‘prejudiced actions or thoughts based on the gender-based perception that women are not equal to men’, 1 leads to increased mortality for girls and women. 2 For example, in countries with high levels of gender inequality, girls under the age of 5 are more likely to die than boys. 3 In the UK, women often receive poor medical treatment for gynaecological conditions, 4 and poorer care in relation to men for dementia 5 and cardiovascular disease. 6

Pain—its diagnosis and its management—is an area of healthcare practice where gendered stereotyping leads to poor outcomes for patients. Research indicates that the pain of Black women, for example, is not taken seriously by healthcare professionals, leading to increased morbidity and mortality. 7 Healthcare staff routinely underestimate women’s pain, leading to undertreatment and the suggestion of psychological rather than analgesic treatment. 8 Where women are scored with low rates of perceived ‘trustworthiness’, healthcare professionals are more likely to believe that they are exaggerating their pain. 9 Not only gender, but ethnicity, age, perceived attractiveness, likeability, manner and the presence or absence of medical diagnoses influence healthcare professionals’ perceptions of pain. 9

Though we know that gender bias exists in how healthcare professionals respond to and manage, pain (eg, women are perceived as more emotional than men), what is less clear are the reasons underlying such biases. 10 One potential explanation for how doctors develop biases is that they do so through the hidden curriculum. Doctors acquire many of their perspectives and professional values during medical school 11 where students are exposed to and experience such gender biases in the clinical workplace and the curriculum. This often happens via the mechanism of the hidden curriculum—‘…the attitudes and values conveyed, most often in an implicit and tacit fashion, sometimes unintentionally, via the educational structures, practices and culture of an educational institution’. 12 Influences operating within the hidden curriculum of medicine include clinical experiences, contact with role models, the attitudes of staff and patients, as well as external influences such as family/friends, the media and personal experiences. 11 Experiences within the hidden curriculum shape medical students’ views and carry into their future practice as a practising clinician.

While there is a growing clinical body of literature on gender and pain, relatively little attention has been paid to how medical education shapes students’ perceptions of gender and pain, and how these perceptions may affect their clinical practice as they become doctors. There is some literature on the presence or absence of pain assessment and management teaching within medical school curricula—one study, 13 for example, reports that pain education in US medical schools is fragmentary, limited and fails to cover key pain topics identified by the International Association for the Study of Pain. 13 While important, this study did not explore teaching on both gender bias and pain.

Another recent international study 14 has focused on gender and chronic pain within the curricula of the 10-top global ranked medical schools (as per the QS World University Rankings 2022). This study’s search revealed that the curricula of most medical schools lack comprehensive coverage of gender bias and chronic pain. 14 Our study aims to build on these findings by examining how medical education influences students’ attitudes and beliefs about gender and pain. While we know medical education on gender and chronic pain is insufficient, we do not have a detailed picture of UK medical education (only one UK institution was included in the study’s sample), we do not have intelligence on pain education beyond chronic pain, and we do not know whether and how that education influences students’ beliefs and attitudes towards gender and pain. Developing this understanding could help us reveal the implications of these educational practices. If medical students are not adequately trained to consider gender differences in pain perception and management, they may carry these biases into their professional practice, potentially leading to disparities in patient care and outcomes.

Henceforth, in this study, we explore the perceptions of senior medical students (penultimate or final year) in the UK on gender and pain, using a qualitative approach to examine how these perceptions relate to their experiences of formal and hidden curricula in medical education. To date, and to our best knowledge, no research exists regarding how the hidden curriculum of medical education relates to perceptions of gender and pain. Exploring this has cast light on the subtle, often unspoken, lessons regarding gender and pain that medical students experience alongside their formal education. By examining these hidden curricula, our research builds on previous studies noting insufficient formal education on gender bias and pain by highlighting the nuanced ways in which such gaps may be perpetuated or mitigated through everyday clinical interactions and informal learning experiences. This approach allows us to contribute to existing literature by capturing the full spectrum of medical student experiences relating to gender and pain.

Research questions

How do senior medical students perceive the relationship between gender and pain?

How do medical students experience the formal and hidden curricula of medical education in relation to gender and pain?

What elements of formal and hidden curricula within students’ longitudinal experience of medical education have influenced the development of their views on gender and pain?

Research approach

This is a constructivist, 15 cross-sectional qualitative study. We view reality as subjective, and knowledge as constructed uniquely by each individual in response to their interactions in social settings. 16 17 This is appropriate for our study, as we are interested in exploring, through qualitative interviews, students’ individual perceptions of pain and gender bias, and the ways in which they make sense and build their understanding of social experiences during medical school.

Methodology

The study methodology is interpretative description. The focus of this methodology is a rich description of participant experiences through the lens of the study research questions. It is aligned with a constructivist approach to qualitative research. 18 To support conclusions regarding the quality of this study, we consider how we designed Lincoln and Guba’s qualitative research evaluative criteria throughout, namely: credibility, dependability, transferability and confirmability. 19 20

Patient and public involvement

We piloted our interview questions in collaboration with the charity BME (Black and Minority Ethnic) Health Forum. Through the forum, we met with a focus group of four women to shape our interview focus and clarify our interview language. Members of the forum were compensated for their time in line with National Institute of Health and Care Research (NIHR) guidance. 21 This collaboration helped to ensure that our questions were culturally sensitive and accurately captured the experiences of diverse participants, enhancing the credibility of our data collection.

Data collection

We invited senior medical students (students in their penultimate or final year of study) based at any UK medical school to participate in an individual, in-depth semistructured, virtual interview over Microsoft Teams. We employed convenience sampling based on participant interest in the study and availability, given that the medical student population can be difficult to access due to study demands. Pragmatically, we sampled until we reached 14 participants. We selected this figure based on available funding, capacity and our experience as qualitative researchers.

We recruited using social media and local email recruitment at two UK institutions. CC, SBP and MELB completed all interviews with consented volunteers, using the interview questions developed with BME Health Forum as prompts to structure the discussion. The interview schedule is available ( online supplemental material ). We conducted 1-hour interviews with 14 participants online from 6 UK medical schools. Each participant was offered a £20 food voucher as thanks for their time. The interview audio was transcribed verbatim by a professional transcription company, then anonymised for analysis.

Supplemental material

Data analysis.

We used Braun and Clarke’s reflexive approach to thematic analysis to analyse our data. 22 The six steps of the method were used as a framework for coding, sorting, classifying and describing our data. We worked with the coding software Dedoose (V.9.0) to organise our data. We maintained an audit trail of our data collection and analytical processes, including decisions made and changes implemented, to enhance the confirmability of our findings. The steps of analysis, and what we did within each, are detailed in table 1 . By following a structured and well-documented approach to thematic analysis, we ensured that our analytic procedures were systematic and transparent, which supports the dependability of our findings. Further, in providing rich, detailed descriptions of our themes and using participants' own words where possible, we aimed to offer insights that others might be able to apply to similar contexts, supporting the transferability of our findings.

• View inline

The process of reflexive thematic analysis followed in this study

Reflexivity

The authors met regularly to discuss their own positions and perspectives as researchers involved in the analysis of this study’s data. This is a critical component of Braun and Clarke’s method, 22 which recognises the active role researchers play in interpretation, how this can add depth to study findings, and the importance of reflecting transparently on these perspectives. Reflexivity statements for each member of the research team are provided in table 2 . These statements formalise some of the reflections we shared throughout this project and attuned us to our strengths as a diverse team, and areas where we may have less insight and so need to challenge ourselves to think more deeply. It is important to note that none of the research team had pre-existing educational or personal relationships with any of the study participants.

Team reflexivity statements

We interviewed 14 senior medical students and gave each participant the opportunity to select a pseudonym. Where a participant did not wish to select a pseudonym, we selected one for them from a pregenerated list of gender-neutral and non-identifiable names. The list was created to be culturally diverse—where participants disclosed their cultural background, we selected a name culturally associated with their background, given the importance of culture in discussions of pain.

The pseudonyms in use for all participants are listed in table 3 . Quotes from participants are indicated in the below discussion of themes using italic text.

Participant pseudonyms

We created three themes which capture medical students’ perceptions of gender and pain, and experiences of the hidden curriculum. We name three key educational influences students experience, and engage with, in relation to gender and pain: ‘the sociocultural influencer’; ‘the pedagogical influence’ and ‘the professorial influencer’. The sociocultural influencer is an educational force relating to societal and cultural norms; the pedagogical influencer is formed of formal educational experiences; and, finally, the professorial influencer relates to the influence of academic and clinical teachers.

Our broad themes have several analytical subthemes, which constitute subheadings within the results narrative. Our themes and subthemes are:

The sociocultural influencer: conceptualisations of the relationship between gender and pain are shaped by sociocultural norms.

Understandings of pain and gender are shaped by the replication of gendered stereotypes.

Understandings of pain and gender are shaped by students’ personal identities.

The pedagogical influencer: formal pain curricula are experienced as deficient.

Students experience tension between the clinical diagnosis and management of pain, and holistic understandings of pain.

Students are motivated to engage in learning about the relationship between gender and pain, and their role in addressing key challenges.

The professorial influencer: senior role models, particularly within clinical environments, help create a hidden curriculum of gender bias in relation to pain.

Understandings of pain and gender are shaped by the hidden curriculum’s communication of gendered stereotypes.

Senior clinicians often role model biased understandings of pain.

The sociocultural influencer: conceptualisations of the relationship between gender and pain are shaped by sociocultural norms

We asked students to define pain and elaborate on their understanding of its nature, and the relationship between gender and pain. This theme describes senior medical students’ responses to these prompts, or their thoughts and opinions regarding the relationship between gender and pain. Interestingly, students explored the sociocultural dimensions of their understanding—namely their knowledge and the impact of societal norms (such as gendered stereotypes) and the influence of their own backgrounds.

These constitute two subthemes within this theme. Taken together, they help to cast light on how sociocultural gender biases are both perpetuated and challenged by medical students when conceptualising the relationship between gender and pain. In sum, this theme provides insight into part of a complex web of sociocultural factors that seem to be influencing learners’ perceptions of pain and gender.

We present this theme first to provide a foundation for our exploration of formal and hidden medical school curricula. The thoughts and understandings voiced by students in this theme relate to their experiences of the sociocultural contexts and norms they navigate. This theme sets the stage for a deeper analysis of how formal and hidden curricula interact with broader sociocultural influences regarding pain and gender.

Understandings of pain and gender are shaped by the replication of gendered stereotypes broadly and in clinical practice

This subtheme illuminates the influence of stereotypes, assumptions and biases in this context. During data collection and analysis, it became evident that students’ perceptions were multifaceted and shaped by various factors, including societal and clinical norms, medical school teaching and personal experiences. We explore these influences in greater depth in later themes.

Personal identities shape students’ understanding of the relationship between gender and pain

In this subtheme, we explore how students’ personal experiences, backgrounds and identities play an important role in shaping their understanding of the relationship between gender and pain.

Students noted that where they shared experiences with patients in pain (either experiences of pain personally, or via family and friends’ experiences) they could better empathise with patients. M, for example, describes women in their family being dismissed when in pain–seeing the distress this causes on a personal level, has meant M aspires to take patients’ pain seriously: ‘ I’m always like, ‘oh my God no aunty, I swear I’ll take you seriously’…if [a patient] has said, ‘so and so’ and they’re visibly distressed because of it, yes, I think I take that a bit more seriously because I don’t want to be another dismissive doctor’ (M ). Students highlighted that their personal experiences of pain management influenced the recommendations they made to patients: ‘ That’s affected my suggestions for management… I’m often much more inclined to suggest physio, having been through that experience where… [I was] offered painkillers and nothing else’ (Krishna ).

Some women noted that being a woman in pain made it easier to sincerely empathise with other women experiencing pain. Andrea, for example, comments on their personal experiences of gynaecological services and pain as a source of empathy for patients with similar pain, interacting with similar services: ‘ Every single month I’m so much pain that I pass out and being like, oh my god. I’m so sorry to hear that, I’m not reading off a script and just writing, here is your mefenamic acid or whatever they give to them. So, I feel like that impacted myself in a professional way but also in a personal way, because it’s like, wow, gynaecological services across the board are bad. Whether you’re a medical student or you’re a patient yourself’ (Andrea ).

Similarly, where students shared a particular characteristic with patients, for example, ethnicity, they were more attuned to the intersectional nature of bias in relation to pain and the needs of patients who were like them for example, patients’ cultural norms and how this might influence pain presentation and management. M describes advocating for patients where language barriers are an issue, based on their own experience of this barrier within their family:

I think for anyone who cannot speak English to some degree, probably because I sometimes have to advocate for my own parents and stuff like that, that I feel like I always take what they’re saying seriously… everyone has a bit of unconscious bias when they think, “oh she’s being dramatic or he’s being dramatic”, well that’s not right. And it’s very easy to get into that mindset, but as soon as they can’t speak English I feel like I’m a bit more serious about it, because I feel like I have to be, because I don’t think anyone else is going to give them that benefit of the doubt (M).

The pedagogical influencer: formal pain curricula are experienced as deficient

Students spoke at length about gaps in their formal medical school curricula in relation to gender, pain and the relationship between them. In this theme, we discuss how gaps in medical school curricula in relation to pain and gender are experienced by medical students.

There were many gaps and curricula needs identified. Common to the suggestions made were the desire for enhanced learning about the relationship between pain and bias across all years of medical school (‘ it makes up so much of clinical practice, but so little of our teaching time’ (Jiva )), but with a particular focus on discussing bias early at medical school (‘ Bias needs to be introduced really early. We need to learn to accept it. We need to normalise talking about it. And we need to appreciate just because you had a biased action, that doesn’t make you evil. It makes you human. And you just need to try and do better next time’ (Peter )).

Students experience tension between the clinical diagnosis and management of pain, and holistic understandings of pain

Students saw existing curricula as focusing only on the pharmacological management of pain: ‘ at all stages it’s generally been focused on the [World Health Organisation] pain ladder’ (Krishna ).

This sends a hidden message to students and clinicians—that the focus of clinical practice should be the medical management of pain. This, coupled with a relative lack of holistic teaching on pain management and bias (‘ Medicine, at least the way medicine is taught at my university is very much like, if it’s not objective, it’s too difficult to try to make you conceptualise, so we’ll try to avoid that topic’ (Jiva )) leads to an uneasy tension where medical students understand pain both to be objective and physiological, but also to be subjectively experienced by each patient. This causes conflict in clinical practice (‘ we have ways of assessing patients’ pain by looking at them, by the way they move, how they act. And we quite often hear people say, ‘oh, they can’t be in that much pain because they’re doing this’… I generally try to look at pain as whatever the patient tells you it is’ (Rory )) and is implicated in previously described views regarding catching patients out who aren’t ‘actually’ in pain (‘ I’ve certainly spoken to patients and gone… They’ve said their pain is a nine out of ten. And I’ve gone, I don’t believe you. Obviously, not to the patient. But I’ve walked out the room and gone, I don’t believe you’ (Rory )).

Further, this hidden message contributes to the focus of clinicians (identified by the students) on treating the underlying cause of pain, rather than managing pain itself (‘ Doctors prioritise the particular condition or treatment over exploring the pain’ (Aarya )). This can also be connected to the unease students perceived clinicians as feeling when dealing with chronic pain (where an underlying cause may be illusive) (‘ It seems people come in for a recurrent pain and they’re just giving you medication and don’t really discuss the impact or the hows and the whys or the self-help’ (Michelle )), pain of psychological origin (‘ I think that if someone is in pain and physicians perceive that there isn’t a visible or diagnosable related physical experience that would cause them that level of pain, I don’t think that there is much sympathy for patients’ (Alex)), and subsequent poor management of such patients.

Relatedly, students recognised the need for an enhanced focus on the lived experiences of people who are/have experienced pain. They saw opportunities for an increased focus on patient perspectives (in relation to pain and gender) in case studies, as both a developing strand within spiral curricula models, and through engagement with the arts and humanities: ‘ I think it’s best to hear it from and have talked with patients themselves to name their experience. But I think the next best thing would be reading patient accounts, reading poems, reading narratives about what it’s actually like to experience these different kinds of pain’ (Alex ).

Students are motivated to engage in learning about the relationship between gender and pain, and their role in addressing key challenges

Many students who were well-informed about gender bias and pain had engaged in significant self-directed learning in their own time, without opportunity to discuss their learning formally with their peers or tutors: ‘ All those things I’ve just picked up from external sources, whether it’s on Twitter, or I read a paper on it, it’s never been formally taught to me’ (M ).

Students are motivated to learn about pain and gender in a more holistic way and expressed a desire to be part of a conversation regarding the manifestations of gender bias in relation to pain (‘ The most important thing is getting people aware of it… making young medics willing to talk about it. Because we’re all educated people. We’re all bright. We’re all, hopefully, kind and compassionate. And if we just would talk about it, we could probably get a decent way to fixing it without massive intervention’ (Peter)); and part of action to challenge identified inequalities (‘ The other thing that really is important to me, personally, is what we can do about it…. it gets quite repetitive and quite infuriating… I get the whole point of raising awareness and that it’s important that we know. But what is the point of me…going into clinical practice, knowing that women are generally discriminated against… if I can’t do anything about it?’ (Rory )).

The professorial influencer: senior role models, particularly within clinical environments, help create a hidden curriculum of gender bias in relation to pain

Students learnt about pain not only from their formal medical school teaching (which, as above, they see as limited) but also from the hidden curriculum. The hidden curriculum in relation to pain and gender bias manifests in several ways. Prominent in our data is the way in which the hidden curriculum of clinical environments communicates gendered stereotypes, and the significant influence of senior clinicians’ role modelling.

Understandings of pain and gender are shaped by the hidden curriculum’s communication of gendered stereotypes

Gendered stereotypes were present in students’ understanding of pain and were described by students as communicated through the hidden curriculum. Overall, women were perceived as ‘more anxious’ (Lucy ) than men, and more likely to ‘ moan’ about pain —‘Even the way I’ve just said it, moaning about pain, because that’s what’s ingrained to us’ (Jiva ).

Students perceived that women’s pain was more likely to be dismissed clinically: ‘ Patients are dismissed based off their pains’ (Aarya ); attributed erroneously to gynaecological causes: ‘ The amount of times I’ve had to go, ‘are you sure it’s not your period pain?’ I’m pretty sure the 30-year-old who’s been having 18 years, 12 periods a month, 18 years, she’s had over 200 of these things now. I’m pretty sure she knows it isn’t that. Why are we asking?’ (Peter ); and psychological origin: ‘ … it really saddens me that so many more women are likely to be misdiagnosed with anxiety (Krishna ). Where pain was discussed as psychological, it was sometimes associated with women ‘ over exaggerating’ (Jiva ) pain—as Akira puts it ‘ in the ward you learn how to distract the patients away from their pain… how you could divert their attention. It reveals them as well… a patient came in… they were in agony… distract them and then you can tell it’s not too bad’ .

The intersectionality of other characteristics, such as race, socioeconomic status, weight and disability status, also played a role in the students' perceptions of pain. Most students appreciated that bias was intersectional, and that individuals affected by many different types of bias would be most negatively affected in relation to diagnosis, treatment and management of pain: ‘ I think working class women of colour are probably the most affected when it comes to pain [management]’ (Jiva); ‘People of lower socioeconomic class, [there’s] a higher assumption they’re drug seeking’ (Peter ). Students were often aware of harmful bias relating to race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status and saw this manifest in their teaching and clinical experiences: ‘ We’re taught outdated science, like, oh, Black people have a higher tolerance for pain. That’s just frankly a lie that came from no science ever. But it’s still propagated and people still believe’ (Peter ).

It is important to note that not all students believed they had encountered gendered stereotypes in relation to pain in clinical practice, or in their university education: ‘ I haven’t picked up on patients being treated differently because of gender… the patient’s experiencing pain… you need to give them something to relieve that… their gender or any other specific characteristic isn’t important in that’ (Vanya ). Others recognised their lack of familiarity with gender bias may be due to their own limited awareness: ‘ Nothing I’ve seen myself… but often you read about things or hear about things other people have seen’ (Kaivalya ).

Senior clinicians often role model biased understandings of pain

Senior clinicians’ opinions and actions were greatly influential and are an aspect of the hidden curriculum that impacts student perceptions of gender and pain. Through these opinions and behaviours, students are exposed to negative stereotypes and biases regarding pain and its management in the clinical environment. Students reported witnessing a lack of empathy from clinicians that they suspected was a result of taught (‘ Medical school teaches you to dissociate, pain-wise’ (Jiva )) and necessary (‘ It’s either detach or let it affect you too much’ (Jiva )) detachment, dismissive attitudes regarding patient pain (‘ It has to be very, very severe before anyone takes it seriously’ (Shubhi )). There were many reports of instances where patient pain was inadequately managed, which students suspected to be as a result of bias—Michelle, for example, describes the following:

A young Black woman with sickle cell anaemia came in with the crises… she had a PCA [Patient Controlled Analgesia] set up… and was asking nurses again and again throughout the night and saying that she was pushing the button, she wasn’t getting pain relief… the nurses had been very dismissive and they came in the next morning and they found that the PCA wasn’t connected to the driver, so she’d been pushing this button again and again and obviously it hadn’t done anything at all…that really just shocked me, actually, that a ward that’s so pro… when given a young Black woman with a known terrible disease that needs adequate pain relief, they seemed to be just disbelieving her (Michelle).

Some students discussed bias in pain relating to disability status and weight and noted negative assumptions among senior clinicians, for example, if someone can mobilise, they are not in pain; if someone is fat, they could be doing more to improve their lifestyle and manage their pain. Akira comments on the management of pain in primary care: ‘ … they’re like, I can walk with a walking stick, and so maybe they [the General Practitioner] perceive their chronic pain less of a major thing’; whilst Alex notes bias regarding patients’ weight and doctors’ perceptions of lifestyle changes ‘ …. that culture of, well, if you hadn’t let yourself get like this then you wouldn’t be in pain’ .

For some students, witnessing the negative role modelling from their seniors motivated them to behave differently: ‘ My whole experience on that placement made me feel like I would never do that to my patients. I would never, even if I’m so busy and I’m running an hour late in my clinic, I’m never going to rush through a speculum exam. Because it can be traumatic’ (Andrea ). However, this was not echoed in all student accounts.

In this study, we set out to explore senior medical students’ perceptions of gender and pain using a qualitative approach, particularly in reference to how these perceptions relate to participants’ experiences of formal and hidden curricula within medical education. Our research identifies three key educational forces, which students experience of the relationship between gender and pain as they progress through medical education: the sociocultural influencer, the pedagogical influencer and the professorial influencer.

Our data reinforce existing literature to demonstrate the impact of social norms and diverse identities on perceptions of gender and pain; and significant gaps in formal curricula. Our data build on existing literature by revealing a nuanced hidden curriculum that sends biased messages to students regarding gender and pain. Students perceived the origin of many of these messages to be clinical environments, and the senior clinicians involved in their instruction. The output of these influencers is gendered stereotyping and a lack of focus on the holistic management of women’s pain. In this discussion, we explore in greater depth how our findings relate to wider literature and make recommendations for educators which we hope will positively influence educational strategies.

The sociocultural influencer

Our findings show that many medical students are aware of, and actively perceive, gender bias in relation to the diagnosis and management of pain. Assumptions relating to gender were influenced by social norms and learners’ own backgrounds. Interestingly, the likelihood that a student would report witnessing gender bias in patient care appeared to increase when students’ personal identities corresponded with those of the patients they were treating. This awareness is consistent with the literature on increased empathy where students and patients share experiences, 23 and literature on bias within healthcare practice more broadly 24 and adds further weight to the need for a diverse clinical workforce. 25 The creation of reflective spaces in which all students can explore their clinical experiences for instances of bias, and develop cultural competence, would be beneficial. This need aligns with a critical consciousness approach to medical education, where students are engaged in open dialogue to encourage critical thinking about personal and societal beliefs. 26

The pedagogical influencer

Our participants reported several gaps in their formal medical school curricula in relation to gender bias and pain. These gaps represent more than missing content, as curricula gaps inadvertently convey messages to students about the relative unimportance of the content that is missing— 27 for example, the importance of holistic pain management, chronic pain, the significance of patient perspectives regarding pain and the role of bias. This is an important way in which the hidden curriculum manifests in relation to gender bias and pain education. This suggestion has been reported previously in relation to chronic pain, 28 but not beyond this. Interestingly, many students noted a tension these various gaps established—between viewing pain as something which was objective (which they felt the formal curriculum emphasised through its focus on pharmacology, the assigning of numbers to rate the severity of pain and regarding treating underlying causes of pain) and viewing pain as subjectively experienced by each patient (which they had witnessed as important through personal and clinical experiences, given the patient perspective gap in their formal curricula). This tension led to confusion and conflict. To address this, we suggest formal curricula and assessments which emphasise holistic approaches to pain management and explore patients’ experiences of pain (eg, through the arts and humanities, 29 and the inclusion of patients (eg, those with chronic pain) in curricula design) 30 would be beneficial. Our data suggest that exploring bias and advocacy in relation to pain is also important and would be valued by students at an early stage of their training. Critically, the students in our study were motivated to learn about bias in relation to pain, many conducting their own self-study. It may also be useful to involve students in the cocreation of formal curricula to ensure educational material meets their learning needs.

The professorial influencer

Another impactful way in which the hidden curriculum manifested in our data was in relation to role modelling. Medical education literature documents the harmful impact of negative role modelling, 31 which our data supports in relation to perceptions of, and behaviours relating to, pain within clinical practice. Negative role modelling can be a result of poor awareness of bias, but also of system-level constraints such as a lack of time or resources. 12 Our data highlight a lack of opportunities for students to reflect on their experiences, consider their own biases and consider both possible reasons for, and how they might act when they witness poor experiences of pain management in practice. Reflection plays a critical role in student sensemaking and subsequent awareness of how to advocate for patients. 32 There is a pressing need to either create these reflective spaces (again, here, a critical consciousness approach would be beneficial), or integrate discussion regarding students’ experiences of role modelling and their own perceptions in relation to pain within existing reflective spaces. Critically, educators and practising clinicians represent a key target audience for faculty development relating to gender bias and pain, to increase awareness of the perception of their actions and develop strategies for discussing pain and bias with students, including discussing the impact of resource shortages. Perceptions and practice relating to gender bias and pain across the continuum of medical education careers is an important direction for future research.

Across our findings, we have summarised our recommendations for educational practice ( table 4 ).

Suggestions for educators and organisations based on these findings

Limitations

Though we recruited widely, our convenience sampling approach means that we are likely to have attracted students interested in the topics of gender bias and pain and so there is a risk that our findings overemphasise student awareness of bias. The comments regarding desired developments for formal medical school curricula are based on student perceptions of what is covered by their medical school curricula presently, rather than our own analysis of medical school curricula coverage and, as such, there may be disparities between these reports and actual coverage. Despite this, we believe students’ perceptions of their curricula here are important as such perceptions influence engagement and can be inferred to represent students’ take-home understandings of teaching. Some students declined to select a pseudonym, meaning that in some instances, selected pseudonyms are researcher generated. This risks some loss of participant voice in our findings, though it does not negate the value of the experiences reported.

Additionally, this cross-sectional research offers a particular, time-bound perspective on students’ experiences. Given the participants’ descriptions of how early experiences are important, and education on gender and pain is particularly lacking at early stages, future research could longitudinally explore medical students’ experiences and perceptions from an early stage of their education.

We have explored the ways in which senior medical students perceive the relationship between gender and pain, exploring their experiences of their formal medical school curricula, and the hidden curricula they are exposed to by way of their presence within university and clinical environments. As the first study, to our knowledge, to explore how the hidden curriculum of medical education shapes students’ experiences of care in relation to gender and pain, this paper offers important insight for educators and researchers regarding the varied ability of students to identify gender bias in action, the powerful messaging of curricula gaps and impact of negative role modelling. We suggest further integration of curricular content focused on bias and advocacy, patient perspectives, holistic pain management and reflective spaces which encourage critical consciousness development at early stages of medical school curricula might go some way to addressing the gender bias present in many healthcare systems globally.

Ethics statements

Patient consent for publication.

Not applicable.

Ethics approval

This study involves human participants and we received ethical approval following the Imperial College London Education Ethics Review Process (EERP) (approval number: 2223-013). Participants gave informed consent to participate in the study before taking part.

Acknowledgments

The authors affiliated with Imperial College London would like to acknowledge the support of the Applied Health Research (ARC) programme for North West London.

• ↵ European institute of gender inequality . 2023 . Available : https://eige.europa.eu/thesaurus/terms/1155 [Accessed 03 Feb 2023 ].
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X @Megan_EL_Brown, @Imperial_Medic

Contributors MELB and WL were responsible for conception of the research and MELB, WL, RP, SK were responsible for design. MELB, SBP and CC collected all study data. MELB, CC and SBP analysed all study data. MELB prepared the first draft of this paper and all other authors (CC, SBP, RP, SK and WL) revised the work. RP is the guarantor.

Funding This independent research was supported by a research grant from Reckitt. The views expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of Reckitt. Grant number: N/A.

Disclaimer The views expressed in this publication are those of those author(s) and not necessarily those of the NHS, the NIHR or the Department of Health and Social Care.

Competing interests WL is a senior medical scientist at Reckitt, the funder of this research. This research is not focused on any of Reckitt’s products, and WL participated in his capacity as an independently qualified medical education researcher.

Patient and public involvement Patients and/or the public were involved in the design, or conduct, or reporting, or dissemination plans of this research. Refer to the Methods section for further details.

Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

Supplemental material This content has been supplied by the author(s). It has not been vetted by BMJ Publishing Group Limited (BMJ) and may not have been peer-reviewed. Any opinions or recommendations discussed are solely those of the author(s) and are not endorsed by BMJ. BMJ disclaims all liability and responsibility arising from any reliance placed on the content. Where the content includes any translated material, BMJ does not warrant the accuracy and reliability of the translations (including but not limited to local regulations, clinical guidelines, terminology, drug names and drug dosages), and is not responsible for any error and/or omissions arising from translation and adaptation or otherwise.

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