Design Thinking Innovation and Trends Foresighting

Abstract

During the 20th Century, designers mainly focused on products’ form and function to improve their value on markets. In recent times, design has becoming a discipline more and more used to tackle more complex problems and to produce and promote strategic innovation not only inside products but on a wider scale. The systematization of the design process in the concept of Design Thinking widen the application of this methodology in a big scale of sectors and departments. In the last two decades, society has been transforming itself dramatically due to the pace of technology, demography and globalization with an accelerating speed never experienced in the recent past. It is for this reason that analyzing and foreseeing macrotrends has become a strategic key factor for their development and adaptation to a complete mutating environment. Design Thinking methodologies have common phases, patterns and key points that can be considered as a user centered creative processes that lead to an innovation of the status quo. This process emphasizes observation, collaboration, fast learning, visualization of ideas, rapid concept prototyping, and concurrent business analysis, which ultimately influences innovation and business strategy. The idea of the research paper is matching three territories of research (Design Thinking Process, Trends Foresighting and Analysis, and Visual Mapping) to justify that the foresighting and analysis of a macrotrend—together with a visual representation of a system of complex phenomena—plays a strategic role in orientating and facilitating design process methodologies aimed to produce better design driven innovation inside organizations.