What is Design Thinking?

Design Thinking is a thinking model, a toolkit with many intervention and decision methods, to provide creative and realistic input in preparation for the design or development of a product or service, in consultation with the client, experts and stakeholders and users.


Why is Design Thinking effective?

Asking questions and learning is essential in Design Thinking. Core questions are crucial when formulating a project goal. What is the higher goal, the purpose? What does the product or service add, what does it contribute? How to set the social-cultural, ecological, economic or holistic goal? How to locate missing information? Who contributes the necessary expertise? For whom is the product, the service or the app suitable? How do we involve the end user?

What. Why. How. Who. Where.

A development process always starts with questioning. It calls the status quo into question. We cannot solve a problem with the mindset it has caused, as Einstein already said.


How to organize Design Thinking?

Designers and developers automatically work through a thinking frame, a model, a checklist of information and data important for both large and small projects.

The Double Diamond model offers clients, makers, users and stakeholders insight into the decision-making and choices, lets everyone think and research from identical perspectives, with the same data, before designing or developing.

What is the exact challenge? From what perspective or assumption is the issue a problem? Which research is available? Which first idea is ready for testing? Which adjustments are needed?

The model is suitable for a company, a business model, a product, a service or an app. It serves as a checklist, and thanks to the iteration, ideas, prototypes and results are developed, adjusted en tested.


I'm Sandra van Vliet. My favorite topics to works on are urban development, fashion, circularity, architecture, education, media, culture and digitization.

After my training as a product designer (HKU) and communication, design and brandmanager (InHolland) I worked for the Netherlands Design Institute, DutchDFA, BNO, OPA, The Hague University of Applied Sciences and communication and design agencies such as Keja Donia Design and BIKKER Euro rscg for clients like Unilever, C1000 and Vrumona. In collaboration with three partners I developed mango candy in Mali. I was a research lecturer in Service design at Willem de Kooning, I led the Digital Pioneers incentive fund for Kennisland and I was commissioned the municipality The Hague, Cultuurfabriek and Vestia in the foundation of a Medialab.

For whom? I can provide in design thinking proces management for startups, scaleups, educational institutions, governmental bodies and SME's.


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