Why brands should move from "design thinking" to "design linking"

Andrew Barraclough, from GSK, outlines how design thinking, and "design linking", can have a positive impact that outlasts the pandemic. (This is an edited excerpt from a longer Opinion piece. Click "View more" to read the full article.)

What has become evident is that the businesses and brands surviving, adapting and growing in the pandemic have done so by adopting the practices of design thinking. Whether knowingly or not, companies have gone through the specific stages of design thinking – identifying the problem, prototyping, testing, learning and iterating – to help them navigate through the challenges that 2020 has thrown their way.

Businesses have been applying design thinking all year – companies have been testing Zoom and Microsoft Teams, testing homeworking on a mass scale, exploring how to get hand sanitiser at tube stations, how to migrate sales to online, how home delivery can be scaled, how to set up COVID testing sites. Endless problem-solving. 

But the real gains are made where design thinking has been coupled with ‘design linking’ – where the problem has been solved and then executed with excellence. It is through design linking that an online purchase is smooth and can be navigated with ease – a joined-up experience that feels seamless. When design linking is missed, the experience falls short, whether that’s by not being optimised for mobile, an inability to click back a stage, or other disconnected or disparate elements.