In this post, Karel Vredenburg, Director of Global Academic Programs in IBM’s Design Program Office and Head of IBM Studios Canada, explains how he sees Design Thinking and User-Centred Design not as competing, but rather “integrally linked” frameworks. He goes further to claim that for Design Thinking to be used properly, elements of User-Centred Design should be included as exemplified by IBM’s Enterprise Design Thinking.
He concludes his post with the following suggestion:
I’d like to suggest that we dispense with the academic arguments about Design Thinking and User-Centered Design as well as attempts to introduce new terminology and instead just ensure we carry out the user research and evaluation methods we all know from User-Centered Design and glean the benefits of the whole person view and the highly efficient collaboration and ideation mapping methods of Design Thinking.
To read the full version of this post on Karel Vredenburg’s blog, click here.