Systems engineering methodology has expanded its application fields into creating innovations and designing societal systems. In the present age, where everything has increased in complexity, systems engineers are challenged to solve ill‐defined problems to create innovations and to design societal systems. Design thinking has attracted attention as a methodology for solving ill‐defined problems. However, design thinking cannot create innovations or design societal systems by itself. It is effective when it is applied to the systems engineering process, and embedded in its processes. This paper proposes using the advantages of both design thinking and systems engineering to build the Structured Design Thinking Framework as an extension to the DIKW model. The framework has integrated the non‐structured design thinking process and the structured systems engineering process. We used this framework to redesign a local community in Japan and to design a new concept of aquarium, and confirmed that this framework works.

Innovative system development is crucial to survive the global competition for many organizations. Engineers are turning their focus on the early phase of system development where the customers' needs and wants are defined and problems are defined. Combination of design thinking and systems thinking is considered as a beneficial prescription. And today, some kind of recipes are in great demand. This paper focuses on problem definition process in the early concept stage and introduces a framework for generating creative and innovative problem statements that would bring out more chances for innovative solutions. The framework had been developed for a project based learning program in Keio University. The framework consists of five approaches. Most of them require users to exert design thinking and systems thinking at the same time. The paper introduces step‐by‐step process for each approach and examples.

Currently where everything has increased in complexity, systems designers such as a business model designer are challenged to solve ill-defined problems by creating innovations and designing societal systems. For handling such problems, design thinking has attracted attention as a methodology for solving "ill-defined" problems. However, design thinking cannot create innovations or design societal systems by itself because design thinking cannot guarantee reproducibility in a system design.In fact, design thinking is effective when applied to the systems approach process and when embedded in its processes. This paper proposes using the advantages of both design thinking and the systems approach to build a structured design thinking framework. This framework integrates the nonstructured design thinking process and the structured systems approach process. We used this framework to redesign a local community in Japan and to design a new concept of an aquarium. We further confirmed that this framework is effective.

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