A knowledge guide for coaching all nine Design Thinking methods, with detailed techniques and examples for industries such as healthcare, manufacturing, finance, and retail.

Use it to coach a specific Design Thinking method, handle advanced facilitation needs, recover a stalled session, or adapt guidance to a covered industry.

It gives coaching advice suited to the active method and, when relevant, the team's industry. This avoids applying the same generic exercise to every situation.

dt-methods — Skill by microsoft

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods

npx agentmods add skills/microsoft/hve-core/dt-methods

Any agent

npx skills add microsoft/hve-core --skill dt-methods

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/hve-core

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 55 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 1,401 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5	$0.00055	$0.01401
Opus 5	$0.00028	$0.00700
Sonnet 5	$0.00011	$0.00280
Haiku 4.5	$0.00006	$0.00140

Measured 2d ago against content hash 19cacfd4a863, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

dt-methods scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

.github/skills/design-thinking/dt-methods/SKILL.md · 87 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 87 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Design Thinking Methods Skill

Entrypoint for Design Thinking method coaching knowledge. The dt-coach agent loads the method reference matching the active method in coaching state, the matching deep reference when advanced technique is needed, and the industry reference when an industry context applies.

How to use this skill

Read the method reference for the method currently active in coaching state to ground day-to-day coaching.
Read the matching deep reference when the conversation needs advanced facilitation, recovery techniques, or expert frameworks beyond the core method guidance.
Read the industry reference when the team has identified one of the nine covered industries as their context, and weave its vocabulary, constraints, and empathy tools into method-specific guidance.
Read dt-coach-telemetry.md when DT session artifacts need observable telemetry expectations grounded in telemetry-foundations.

Method references

Method	Name	Core reference	Deep reference
1	Scope Conversations	method-01-scope.md	method-01-deep.md
2	Design Research	method-02-research.md	method-02-deep.md
3	Input Synthesis	method-03-synthesis.md	method-03-deep.md
4	Brainstorming	method-04-brainstorming.md	method-04-deep.md
5	User Concepts	method-05-concepts.md	method-05-deep.md
6	Low-Fidelity Prototypes	method-06-lofi-prototypes.md	method-06-deep.md
7	High-Fidelity Prototypes	method-07-hifi-prototypes.md	method-07-deep.md
8	User Testing	method-08-testing.md	method-08-deep.md
9	Iteration at Scale	method-09-iteration.md	method-09-deep.md

Read the full file on GitHub · 87 lines

Files

What ships with it

28 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

2d ago First seen · 87 lines · 55 tokens per session scan A 19cacfd4a863

Subscribe to this mod's changes

dt-methods is a skill published in the GitHub repository microsoft/hve-core (1,411 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 55 tokens to every session and 1,401 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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