Creative Capacity-Building
Design Thinking
An umbrella term for the cognitive, strategic and practical processes by which design concepts (proposals for new products, buildings, machines, etc.) are developed around cooperative efforts in general, and likely a human-centered design process more specifically.
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Origin
The phrase was coined by Harvard architecture professor Peter Rowe in his 1987 book Design Thinking, though the intellectual groundwork had been laid two decades earlier by Herbert A. Simon in his 1969 work The Sciences of the Artificial. The term was transformed from academic concept to business methodology in the 1990s by David M. Kelley, whose consultancy IDEO codified it into a repeatable process, before Kelley co-founded Stanford's d.school in 2004.
Updated February 22, 2026