Design It!

The Four Principles of Design Thinking

Design thinking is less a process and more a way of thinking about problems and solutions from the perspective of the people affected by them. While design thinking is not a process, there are still rules to guide our design activities. In Design Thinking: Understand - Improve - Apply (Understanding Innovation) [PML10] Christoph Meinel and Larry Leifer propose four universal principles of design. These principles apply to software architecture as well as to detailed program design, user interaction design, or any other design-focused discipline.

Here are the four principles of design:

1. Human rule.

All design is social in nature.

2. Ambiguity rule.

Preserve ambiguity.

3. Redesign rule.

All design is redesign. ...