"Companies that want to win in the future have to understand how to make the most of design thinking." So say the editors at Fast Company in gathering an all-star panel to select Fast Company’s new Masters of Design class. Here’s a word about design from the judges:

Non-designers don’t get enough diversity in their day. Design thinking is about filtering culture.

Yves Behar
Founder, fuseproject,
San Francisco, California

• What do you do every week to expose yourself to diverse experiences, people, products and ideas?

Defer judgment. Designers tend to live with an uneasy idea longer and let them percolate to see how they settle in. Businesspeople like to say things like, "Hey, wait, woah, woah, woah!" Just like that, they’ve killed an opportunity for a breakthrough right out of gate.

Bruce Claxton
Director, Design Integration, Motorola,
Plantation, Florida

• What do you do to make sure you don’t kill a good idea before it’s fully formed?
• What do you do to make sure you don’t approve a bad idea before its flaws become obvious?

Design thinking is iterative. It’s okay to be approximate in the beginning and then narrow and narrow. But in companies today the present way of thinking doesn’t really allow that to happen. Design thinking is also empathic. Being sensitive and responsive to people at different levels and disciplines will lead to a different kind of thinking

David Kelley
Founder and chairman, Ideo,
Palo Alto, California

• What do you do to allow designs that are broad and unfocused sufficient time to narrow and sharpen into useful products, experiences and relationships?
• What do you do to enter the experience of – and design for – customers who are not like you?

Marketers might be threatened by design thinking. Traditionally, user research has been their domain. But you have to ask, what’s the definition of marketing? Is it marketing as sales, or is it marketing the way Drucker defines it — really understanding needs and serving those needs? The good marketers will become allies.

Peter Lawrence
Chairman and founder, Corporate Design Foundation,
Boston, Massachusetts

• What is your functional definition of marketing? (Hint: how do your designers and marketers get along?)

Design thinking assumes that there are alternative options, some there and some not even on the table yet. Decisions happen through a series of iterations largely based on a deep understanding of drivers. I’m not talking about economic ones, either. Instead of looking at what people buy look at how they behave.

Clement Mok
Principal, the Office of Clement Mok,
San Francisco, California

• What do you do to pay attention to what drives customers’ behavior in real life situations?

Design is a process of abstraction. If you really analyze it, you don’t reduce something. You try to get the best out of it and make it essential. In fact, the word "design" comes originally from Latin "designare," which means to draw the essence of.

Toshiko Mori
Principal, Toshiko Mori Architect,
New York, New York

• What do you do to capture the essence of your customers’ lives and turn that into authentic products, experiences and relationships?