The Design cycle

Scheer, Andrea, Christine Noweski, and Christoph Meinel. "Transforming constructivist learning into action: Design thinking in education." Design and Technology Education: an International Journal 17.3 (2012).

The Design Thinking process fosters several competences in different phases, in which expansion and consolidation take turns. This is the heartbeat of Design Thinking. The phases are as follows:

Understand and Observe (Expanding)
The first step in the design process is to build up empathy and understanding of the people and the situation the problem or challenge is set in. The goal is to get a clue of relations between the problem and its context, and to find out hidden needs. Empathy is the competence of recognising feelings, thoughts, intentions and characteristics of others.

Synthesis (Consolidating)
In order to solve a problem and generate meaningful ideas, one has to define the problem and its context. As seen in the phase of understanding, there are different perspectives on one particular problem and a lot of information is generated to describe the problem. In the synthesis phase, all this information needs to be interpreted and condensed to meaningful insights, in order to be able to generate actionable solutions. It involves critical thinking and interpretation skills to condense a lot of information into a compelling point of view and clear direction for ideation.

Ideate (Expanding)
Ideation means opening up the mind, being imaginative and generating lots of ideas for solving the problem.Brainstorming in the team helps to build on the ideas of others and collaboratively transforming the knowledge about the problem and its origins into actionable problem
solving ideas. This is what pedagogy describes as the competence of applying knowledge.

Prototype (Consolidating)
The prototype phase is all about experimentation to bring ideas alive, to make them tangible, actionable, testable.
Learning more about the ideas, its possibilities in form and function through building them. The goal of prototyping is to be able to share ideas with others, to specify your abstract imaginations and to get the mental concept of an idea into the physical world.

Test (Expanding)
Testing means bringing the idea, the solution generated through the design process into action in order to get feedback on which to build on. Feedback from other persons, from experts, from novices, from users, everyone involved in the problem context. Through testing a lot of information is gathered, in that it is similar to the observe and understand phase. However, this information is
focused on the solution, and shows how well the problem has been understood. It is important to be able to communicate the idea you want to get feedback on, and to capture and interpret that feedback in order to refine your idea.

Iteration
Basically, the process follows these six steps that build on each other while preserving a cyclical and iterative nature.
It is possible and desired to move from one phase to any other at any point of time, as well as to repeat the whole process or certain stages. The testing phase already implies a smooth transition to the observing and understand phase, as the problem context has changed with your idea. Its iterative nature unfolds the whole concept of constructivism – there is no such thing as a fixed and one dimensional reality, rather different situations apply different perspectives and new perspectives generate new situations. Knowledge is individually self-organised, and proofed in and adapted to
the context.