Design Thinking, Creativity and Synthesis

Creativity is relational. Its practice is mostly about casting widely and connecting disparate dots of existing knowledge in new, meaningful ways. To be creative, you’ve got to mine your knowledge. You have to know your dots. – Bruce Nussbaum

One of the things that I do a lot of, at workshops or during my strategic design thinking and consulting work, is to help clients look at things from a different point of view. This often involves linking unrelated (but relevant) elements, from all over the place, together.
Design Thinking is really a methodology that inspires creativity and a creative mindset. Creativity cannot exist in vacuum, and Design Thinking’s user centered approach provides stimulation and limitation (yes you read right, limitation) that inspires creativity.
Not only that, there is another step to creativity that Bruce might have missed, and that is synthesis. You can connect, for example, a pigeon to a cucumber, but it is meaningless and out of context. This is where Design Thinking comes in again, a tool or platform to synthesize and give meaning to your creative output.
When done right, Design Thinking provides the last and most important dot of all, the central dot (in a web) that links it all.
Via: 4 ways to Amplify Your Creativity