Design Thinking in Emergency Management: On Design Thinking

Introduction

Leading up to and including my involvement with the Design Network for Emergency Management, I have been asking questions about how design can be moved into practice and what it might look like when it gets there. Of these questions, one of the earliest in need of answering is what design thinking means to the emergency management community. While design thinking has already come to mean something as a process within emergency management, the design literature suggests there is opportunity for it to take on an additional, more fundamental, meaning as a way of engaging with and understanding work. It may be easiest to term this other proposed meaning an “awareness." As an awareness, design thinking brings to the fore the connection between action taken in the present and the production of the future while opening a space for its purposeful creation. The following discusses design thinking as an awareness and offers direction for its integration into emergency management pra…