It Takes Two to Tango: Design Thinking and Design Patterns for Better System Development

Design Thinking has become a well-established approach to solving wicked problems through creative and conceptual solutions. Thus, Design Thinking approaches usually end with finding novel solutions but do not offer support in the practical implementation of these solutions. To bridge the gap between finding creative solutions and implementing them into suitable end products, we see Design Patterns as a useful approach to combine the advantages of both sides—the human-centered Design Thinking approach and the practical implementation in system development. Design Patterns offer proven solutions to recurring problems and thus provide design knowledge to solve complex design problems. In this contribution, we demonstrate how Design Patterns act as a complement to Design Thinking by using the example of designing a lawful smart personal learning assistant. We use Design Thinking to extract the design solution of the lawful learning assistant and develop it with the help of Design Patterns. We demonstrate the use of Design Patterns by using the deletion routine Design Pattern as an example of how a Design Pattern can be used for lawful design in addition to their known fields of application in system development. The evaluation results show that the combination of Design Thinking and Design Patterns lead to an approach that not only identifies novel, complex solutions but also supports their practical implementation.