Environmental and sustainability problems create an ongoing need to further develop the toolbox of sustainability science. The method “design thinking”, originally applied in design engineering and business, serves as a tool to find the simplest and most likely explanation for a problem. It consists of a specific logical inference: starting from an observation, a theory which accounts for the observation is developed in a collaborative process. This abductive reasoning requires the designer to clear his mind of traditional solutions and to create a specific “working principle” that leads to new and creative problem solving.