Design Thinking: A Guide to Innovation

by Fred Estes

Design thinking is a six-step process used in creative problem solving to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems, and create innovative solutions. As a human-centered approach to innovation, design thinking is used in everything from corporate structure in businesses such as UberEATS, AirBnB, and Adobe XD to local and regional projects.


Design Thinking, by author and educator Fred Estes, provides a simple, clear approach to the six-step design thinking process. This easy-to-follow guide explains everything essential to design thinking projects focused on solving human-centered, social issues. Readers will learn the fundamentals of each of the six-steps in the design thinking model—notice and reflect, empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test—and discover how to collaborate with people to develop solutions to real-world problems and create better communities through creativity, inspiration, and teamwork. With true stories of real student teams and their projects, this book provides readers with the steps to effect change and create a more equitable world.

Genres: Nonfiction

176 pages, Library Binding

Published March 4, 2025

Reviews

[Alicia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I know exactly where this book is going as soon as it's published. Having attended a PD session by our phenomenal tech teachers on this very topic, I see what they do every day in their classroom "laboratories" to explore this and I can't wait to give them one more tool.

It's an instruction manual, not a definitive guide to EXPLAINING design thinking because it shows it by providing specific examples (the alignment tool for the blind or the municipal worker who figured out the attendance at a pool was due to the bus schedule not what was assumed as an outdated facility.

This is practical and sets out to guide these innovations through a set of structures to help. So useful!

[J Kromrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this eARC.

Fred Estes’ Design Thinking: A Guide to Innovation is more than a how-to manual—it’s a manifesto for young changemakers, educators, and community builders who believe that creativity and empathy can reshape the world.

Structured around a six-step process—notice and reflect, empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test—Estes distills the essence of design thinking into a format that’s accessible and actionable.

[jslsdh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Structured, simple, captures the essence of design thinking. Even though it seems written for teenagers, it is very relevant to the rest of us as well