Gerald Ajam

“Design thinking is a five-step process”

The five modes are a teaching scaffold. The work is framing the problem.

Status Position

Published September 2026

All counterpositionsDesign

Usually said

“Design thinking is a five-step process”

The shift

From: A sequence to run

To: A problem to reframe

More precisely

Design thinking is the practice of reframing a problem through repeated cycles of inquiry and making, and the five modes are one way to teach its parts.

In short

The five steps are a good way to introduce design to people new to it. They stop teams jumping straight to a solution. Experienced designers loop between the steps, though, and the move that matters most is changing what the problem is taken to be. The steps are a scaffold for learning that move.

The argument

From the claim to a better one

  1. The strongest formulation

    Empathise, define, ideate, prototype and test give novices a shared vocabulary and a sequence that stops them jumping to solutions. A named process makes design teachable and repeatable across teams.

  2. Why it is attractive

    It fits a workshop agenda. It makes an uncertain activity look manageable, and it can be run by someone who has not done design before.

  3. Where it holds

    It holds as an introduction and as a checklist of activities that should each happen at some point. For a team that habitually starts with the solution, the sequence is a useful correction.

    Where it breaks

    It breaks when the steps are run once, in order, in a day. Experienced designers move back and forth, and the decisive move is reframing the problem, which no step names. Research squeezed into a workshop becomes the team’s assumptions written on sticky notes.

  4. What evidence matters

    Dorst (2011) places the core of design thinking in frame creation. Cross’s work on how designers think and Schön (1983) on reflective practice both describe iteration between problem and solution rather than a pipeline. What matters is whether the problem statement changed as a result of what was found.

  5. So, more precisely

    Design thinking is the practice of reframing a problem through repeated cycles of inquiry and making, and the five modes are one way to teach its parts.

Reading it

The precise version, word by word

Design thinking is the practice of reframing a problem1 through repeated cycles of inquiry and making2, and the five modes are one way to teach its parts3.

  1. Reframing a problem

    Changing how the problem is stated, and so what would count as a solution. “Students miss deadlines” might become “students cannot see all their deadlines in one place”.

  2. Repeated cycles of inquiry and making

    Finding something out, making something to test it, learning from the result and going back. What was learned sets the order.

  3. One way to teach its parts

    The five modes name activities worth doing. Treating them as the method mistakes the teaching aid for the practice.

What it changes in practice

  • Write the problem statement at the start and again at the end. If it has not changed, ask whether any inquiry happened.
  • Plan for loops, with time to go back to research after the first prototype.
  • Use the five modes to check that each activity happens at some point, and let the findings set the order.

A case, in general terms

A one-day workshop runs all five steps and ends with a prototype of a new app. Nobody spoke to a user, so the empathise stage was the team’s own views on sticky notes. A slower version spends a week watching the problem, finds that its cause is a policy rather than a missing app, and changes the brief. Only the second did the work the method is meant to teach.

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