Design Thinking Is…

Our assignment was to create a zine within the framework of this prompt. What is design (thinking), and why should (or shouldn’t) we use it to tackle wicked problems?

I wasn’t even sure how to make a zine, so I started there. After exploring popular formatting options, I came across the idea of folding the paper like an accordion from a zine review youtube video.

The questions of “what is design thinking” and “should we use it to tackle wicked problems” have been at the heart of our theory class for the past week, but I wanted to round out my opinion with supplemental writings. Doing secondary research on this history of design thinking, I came across Design thinking origin story plus some of the people who made it all happen by Jo Szczepanska.

The idea of creating a historical timeline of important innovations in design thinking immediately meshed with the accordion zine format. From there I was able to draft an outline of what would appear on each panel and then began designing.