Design Thinking

📖 Why You Should Read It

Nigel Cross's Design Thinking reveals how designers think differently from engineers, scientists, or business strategists—emphasizing synthesis, creativity, and abductive reasoning. This book is essential for any UX designer or design leader who wants to better understand the cognitive habits that underpin expert design work. It equips you with language and insight to articulate what designers do when they’re solving complex, ambiguous problems—making it a powerful tool for mentoring others, improving your own craft, and defending design approaches within multidisciplinary teams.

If you’re a designer, you need to read this book. If you haven’t read it yet, put it at the top of your list. If you’ve already read it, put it on your list to re-read..it’s worth the reminder.

👉🏻 Key Takeaways

• Design thinking uses abductive reasoning, which seeks the most plausible solution—not just logical proof.
• Skilled designers focus more time on developing solutions than identifying all problem aspects upfront.
• The problem and solution co-evolve through the design process.
• Three key strategies in expert design:
  1. Take a broad systems perspective
  2. Reframe the problem in a distinctive or personal way
  3. Design from first principles rather than patterns alone
• Sketching and modeling are essential—external representations help designers think.
• Uncertainty is a feature, not a flaw; good designers are comfortable navigating it.
• Synthesis—not analysis—is the defining act of design.
• Risk-taking and bravery distinguish innovative designers from the rest.
• The designer’s role is often to produce the unexpected, not just meet expectations.
• In research successful teams spent more time developing solutions rather than identifying potential feature problems
  

💬 Favorite Quotes

The more useful concept that has been used by design researchers in explaining the reasoning processes of designers is that design thinking is abductive: a type of reasoning different from the more familiar concepts of inductive and deductive reasoning, but which is the necessary logic of design. It is this particular logic of design that provides the means to shift and transfer thought between the required purpose or function of some activity and appropriate forms for an object to satisfy that purpose.

The process of designing the problem and solution develop together.

The activity of sketching, drawing or modeling, provide some circumstances by which the designer puts him or herself into the Design situation and engages with the exploration about the problem and the solution

Design designing it seems as difficult to conduct by purely internal mental processes; The designer needs to interact with an external representation

Good designers are good at coping with uncertainty

The type of activity that is most particularly associated with design is that of synthesis

Risk taking is the difference between the innovative and non-innovative designer