Engineers become engineers because they like to figure out how things fit together, literally and figuratively. This is not always entirely true, but usually. The lines are blurring between traditional engineers who make designs real and the designers who can now “engineer.” Technology is now allowing anyone with a design mindset to engineer a solution.
Organizations are trying to embrace design thinking, or some version of it, as they look to solve problems. Stanford’s d.school draws a continuously evolving circle that starts with empathy: empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test (and keep iterating, moving around that circle).