Design thinking is a process that uses human-centered design to match people's needs with feasible and viable solutions. It involves empathy, collaboration, ideation, experimentation and action. The design thinking process includes 5 phases - empathizing to understand user needs, defining the problem, ideating potential solutions, prototyping ideas, and testing prototypes with users. Some key principles are empathy, collaboration during ideation, experimenting through prototyping to get user feedback, and taking action. Prototyping allows for timely feedback, quick changes to save time and costs, and validating solutions before full development.