So in January 2025, an article called What comes after Design Thinking? piqued my interest. As a long-term practitioner of (and educator about) Design Thinking, I was initially concerned the piece would be full of some kind of pseudo-fashionable tedium with human-centred design. But that could not be further from the approach described. Instead the Fast Company article is advocating for the human-centred approach of Design Thinking to happen at scale.

The author, Denis Donmez, refers to this scaled Design Thinking as ‘Community Thinking’. I prefer ‘Scaled Design Thinking’, because that retains the design element I think is important in the approach. But I acknowledge that Donmez has a point when it comes to his concept.

For years, Design Thinking has revolutionised innovation by putting human needs at the centre of problem-solving. Businesses, governments, and social enterprises have used it to create better products, services, and experiences by deeply understanding the user. This user-centred (or human-centred) design approach has had a profound impact in so many contexts.

But many of the challenges we face today – climate change, urban planning, healthcare access, social equity – aren’t individual problems. They are collective ones, requiring solutions that work across entire communities, systems, and networks. In other words, we need to move from user-first to community-first design.

So how do we apply Design Thinking at a collective level? How do we ensure that innovation is inclusive, sustainable, and widely adopted?

The Rationale for Scaling Up

Scaled Design Thinking recognises that people don’t exist in isolation; they interact with systems, policies, and cultural dynamics that shape how they experience a problem.

This means rethinking some of the fundamentals of Design Thinking:

• User Personas become Community Ecosystems. Personas aren’t dead, but instead of designing for a single archetypal user, it may be more useful to map out how multiple groups interact and influence each other.
• Pain Points become Shared Needs or Goals. Again this is a subtle shift but looking beyond individual frustrations, and focusing on structural or systemic challenges affecting a community is more effective in shaping solution development
• Iterative solution development that emphasises inclusion over efficiency. While efficiency is still important it’s a matter of prioritising Good Thing A (Inclusion) over Good Thing B (Efficiency).

We already see this shift in areas like urban planning, where good design considers not just commuters, but also businesses, policymakers, and environmental impact. Or in public health, where interventions aren’t just targeted at patients but also consider community health workers, cultural attitudes, and economic access.

Applying Scaled Design Thinking in Practice

If Design Thinking is to work at scale, then the way we facilitate it must change too. A standard Design Thinking workshop typically brings together a handful of participants, guiding them through problem definition, ideation, and prototyping. But if the aim is to design for entire communities, we need to engage far more voices, more perspectives, and more complexity, and without losing the participatory spirit that makes Design Thinking effective.

The key shift is in how we structure engagement. Traditional community consultation measures tend to be passive – surveys, public hearings, feedback sessions and so on. These approaches gather perspectives, but they don’t permit involvement of the community in the design process. Scaled Design Thinking, on the other hand, needs to be experiential as well as participatory – giving communities real agency in shaping solutions.

So what might this look like in practice?

A Scaled Design Thinking approach could involve:

• Open-format, multi-stage workshops held in public spaces or online, allowing for continuous participation over days or weeks, rather than a single event.
• Embedded prototyping, with solutions being designed in the context of operation rather in a lab environment
• Collective storytelling, with community members sharing their experience for understanding around inclusivity
• Layered collaboration, where initial insights from broad community participation feed into more focused working groups conduct Design Sprints to develop and refine solutions
• Performative sprint reviews, where solutions are presented to communities for feedback.

The experience itself would need to be dynamic and flexible. Instead of structured post-it note sessions with a few voices dominating, it might involve a series of pop-up design studios, community-driven prototyping, or live testing of small-scale interventions. The goal is to ensure that designing with communities isn’t just a box-ticking exercise but a genuinely interactive and evolving process.

When done well, Scaled Design Thinking doesn’t just gather perspectives, it actively builds shared ownership over solutions.

Designing with, not just for, communities

Design Thinking’s human-centred innovation remains valuable. We just need more people involved if we want to tackle systemic challenges, and not just as participants, but as co-creators.

But Scaled Design Thinking isn’t just a bigger version of what already exists. It requires a fundamental rethink of how we facilitate innovation and engagement, as well as how we structure collaboration and prototype solutions in real-world contexts. Done right, it ensures that innovation isn’t something that happens to communities, but with them.