Design Thinking is a human-centred, iterative process of collaboration leading to context-specific outcomes that respond to identified challenges. Within a cycle of stages, problems or challenges are identified in collaboration with community partners or 'users' and a 'product' is designed, prototyped and tried out. The Design Thinking stages are outlined below:

1. Empathize: In this stage, work is done to understand people within the context of the design challenge. Empathizing is an important stage in any project, as it ensures that identified problems are those of a particular community, and imagined problems are not imposed onto others. A range of multimodal methods are employed in this stage such as visual methods, focus groups and interviews with those 'users' for whom one is designing.

2. Define: Building on what has been learnt about the 'users', this stage aims at being able to make sense of the challenge in its particular context, and to work towards ideas that would address this. Important in this stage is the definition of the problem through an actionable problem statement and the formation of inquiry questions that guide continued collaboration and ideation.

3. Ideate: This stage involves creative idea generation. The aim is to think in a hopeful, positive manner about several possibilities that would enable the identified challenges in the users' contexts to be addressed. No idea should be a bad idea; rather, creative and innovative thinking can in fact lead to ideas beyond the obvious, and to solutions that might not otherwise have been deemed possible.

4. Prototype: In this stage, products or artefacts are generated that respond to different guiding questions. These prototypes can be designed without much effort or cost and are meant to be something that users can engage with and provide feedback on. This prototyping enables ideas to be broken down into smaller, tangible chunks rather than be part of a seemingly large and overwhelming challenge.

5. Test: Testing out possibilities enables conversations with potential users to happen and for ideas to be re-worked and adapted. In this stage, potential users engage with a product idea and feedback is elicited from them. This interaction with users allows prototypes to be refined and for further empathy to be built up. A new iterative cycle of design is then begun

Guiding questions for project phases