Meet Margaret Knight. Chances are, you've never heard of her, but you’ve definitely felt her impact. She wasn’t a painter, a writer, or a sculptor. She didn’t have the fame of Picasso or the allure of Hemingway. No, Margaret was something far more dangerous: a factory worker with ideas. Born in 1838, her playground wasn’t a gallery, but the mechanical guts of New England’s textile mills. And she didn't just see machines; she saw problems waiting to be solved, opportunities hiding in plain sight.
One day, as Margaret watched workers struggle with the inefficiency of packaging products, she had a moment of clarity. It wasn’t the problem that was too big—it was the way people were looking at it. So she sat down and sketched a solution, over and over, until it was perfect. Her invention? The machine that gave us the modern flat-bottomed paper bag. Simple, right? But without that bag, imagine how much harder your grocery run would be. Margaret’s brilliance wasn’t in the invention itself but in the way she approached it: with curiosity, empathy, and relentless testing.
Now, what does a 19th-century inventor have to do with Design Thinking? Everything. Margaret didn't follow a predetermined path; she carved her own. She understood that solving problems wasn’t about diving straight into solutions—it was about stepping back, empathizing with the user, and breaking the problem into pieces before putting it back together. And this is exactly what Design Thinking demands from us.
As creatives, we often get stuck in our heads, convinced we need to have the perfect idea before we can start. But what if, like Margaret, we saw every problem as an opportunity to innovate? What if we shifted our focus from the final product to the process of getting there?