Ask most people how good products get designed and they will describe a genius having an idea. Universities teach something far more useful: a repeatable process that ordinary people can run, badly at first and then well, that reliably turns vague ideas into things people can actually use.
The process has been drawn a dozen ways with a dozen names. The Double Diamond says: first go wide exploring the problem, then narrow to define it, then go wide exploring solutions, then narrow to deliver one. Design Thinking says: empathise, define, ideate, prototype, test. Lean UX says: build a small thing, measure it, learn, repeat. Put them side by side and a secret appears.
Understand the people. Frame the problem. Generate options. Make something rough. Test it on real humans. Fix what you learned. Repeat. Every model in every textbook is this loop wearing different clothes.
Why does this matter for you? Because it means the question "am I creative enough to study design" is the wrong question. The degree does not test whether ideas strike you like lightning. It teaches you to run the loop with discipline, and the loop generates the ideas. The students who do well are the ones who get curious about people and honest about feedback, not the ones with the best drawing hand.
Why the loop beats the genius
The loop exists because humans, including you, are terrible at guessing what other humans need. Every stage of it is a defence against a specific way designers fool themselves. Research defends against designing for an imaginary user. Prototyping defends against falling in love with your first idea. Testing defends against believing your own hype. The rest of this tutorial walks that loop one stage at a time, the same order a university module teaches it.
Take something you have already made. A school project, a video edit, a Minecraft build, a birthday plan. Map what you actually did onto the loop: where did you explore options, what was your rough version, who gave you feedback, what did you change? You have been running an unlabelled design process for years. Now it has labels.
The Design Council publishes the Double Diamond framework free online. For the whole philosophy in one readable book, Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things, is where nearly every designer started.