Experimenting with the Design Thinking Methodology in Citizen Participation Contexts

When faced with complex challenges, the Design Thinking methodology is a well-established procedure that allows the creation of innovative ideas. It is widely used in the business world, and has recently appeared in the education domain. The present research work tests the capacities and opportunities that Design Thinking offers as a co-creation tool in another area, that of citizenship and urban planning, to make us reflect on its virtues as a design method. Thanks to this qualitative work, the work process followed by citizens who face the complex challenge of designing and making proposals for their urban space was studied in detail. For this study, the Design Thinking methodology was used in two participation processes in the San Antón and Diputación del Beal districts of Cartagena (Murcia, Spain) as part of the “Cartagena Think” Project. This cultural programme includes thinking, philosophy and science to form critical citizenship capable of participatively intervening in all the debates that citizens face in their day-to-day lives. The obtained results demonstrate that this work tool is very useful for co-creation, and allows empathy to be employed for analyses, creativity to solve problems and rationality to provide specific solutions.