About Design Thinker Labs
A learning tool for design thinking,
with AI as your co-facilitator.
Design thinking is one of the most effective problem-solving methodologies taught in the world today, used by design schools, product teams, and innovation labs. But for most learners it lives behind expensive workshops and dense textbooks. Design Thinker Labs makes the full six-stage process usable from your browser.
It's built for students learning the method, educators teaching it, and teams applying it to real problems: from framing the challenge, through user research and synthesis, all the way to a tested prototype.
How Design Thinker Labs began
Design Thinker Labs started as a university lecture demo. In 2025, its founder Keith Li was invited by a local university to give a guest lecture on AI-assisted design thinking. Instead of presenting a slide deck full of prompts, he decided to build a working AI-assisted design thinking tool and demonstrate it live.
The demo hit a nerve. Students and faculty could see the tool was doing something the classroom had been missing for years: not explaining the process, but walking a learner through it, stage by stage, without needing a facilitator in the room. What was meant to be a one-off lecture aid became the seed of a product.
The observation behind it came from a decade of teaching. Design thinking has always suffered from an access problem. The methodology is powerful, and it is taught at good design schools, but the moment a workshop or a course ends, most learners lose the scaffolding. Books explain the theory. They do not sit next to you while you do the work.
Design Thinker Labs was built to be that scaffolding. Six stages, in order, with an AI co-facilitator that keeps context across the whole project, so the work you do in one stage actually informs the next.
The product is built and operated by Allytic AI, founded on 16 December 2025 to build practitioner-grade AI tools for problem-solving disciplines.
What Design Thinker Labs is
Design Thinker Labs is a guided learning environment for the six-stage design thinking process: Initialize, Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. Each stage has its own workspace, its own AI tools, and its own outputs: a research summary, a journey map, a POV statement, a set of HMW questions, prototype visuals, and a test plan.
The AI acts as a co-facilitator: it does the research legwork, drafts options, surfaces patterns, and pushes back on hidden assumptions. Your project context carries across every stage, so what you learn in Empathize shapes what the AI proposes in Ideate and Prototype, the way a good workshop would.
The methodology behind the tool comes from a decade of university teaching and corporate facilitation. Keith Li, the founder, has taught design thinking and UX/UI at universities since 2014, and has run design thinking workshops for Pfizer, Dr. Kong, LH Group Ltd (HKEX: 1978), and Hong Kong Science Park. That body of practice shapes how each stage is scaffolded, what the AI is allowed to draft, and where the human is required to decide.
Who it's for
Students learning the method for the first time. Educators teaching design thinking in classrooms or workshops. Product managers, designers, and founders applying it to a real problem and needing a structured place to work.
You don't need prior training. The tool teaches the method by walking you through it.
How it works
Six stages: Initialize, Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test. Each stage has focused tools built for the work of that stage, not a generic chat window.
Your project context carries across every stage, so AI suggestions stay grounded in what you've actually gathered, not generic advice.
Our principles
Structure beats a blank page
Brainstorming without a scaffold burns time. Six stages, in order, is how good ideas survive contact with reality.
AI drafts. You decide.
The model reads, drafts, and pattern-matches. The taste, the judgement calls, and the final answer are yours.
No silent failures
When something breaks, you get the real error, in plain English. No fake success screens. No hidden state.
Pay for AI, not for locks
Start free. When you need more, pay only for the AI you actually use. No features held hostage behind a plan.
Get in touch
Feedback, questions, or workshop enquiries. We'd like to hear from you.