Design Thinking

Rachel Ivy, Rachel Ivy Clarke

• Publisher: ALA Neal-Schuman
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780838917923
• eBook ISBN:
  9780838946879
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

UNDERSTANDING DESIGN THINKING

THE PHRASE DESIGN THINKING MAY SEEM LIKE A new buzzword that’s all the rage in our current world. But despite recent popular applications, design thinking is not a new concept: it is a way of thinking as old as humans themselves. For as long as human beings have been making things, they have been designing. Everything from the earliest stone axes to today’s iPhones are products of design; that is, a process of creation with the intent of solving problems.

Those who only see the end results of this process—the axe or the iPhone—may take these acts of creation for granted. Since we don’t often see the work that goes into designing these products, we may think the design process is simple, easy, or is even a magical feat that only people born with certain talents can pull off. But just because we don’t see the work of designing doesn’t mean it’s not there. All skilled professionals make their work look easy, from a basketball player gracefully sinking a basket to an actor seamlessly transitioning into an entirely different character. Even librarians make professional services like database-searching and readers’ advisory seem like magic to people not trained in those skills. Design also requires the same amount of hard work, training, and practice to achieve a level of proficiency where the results appear magical.

Although this kind of design work has been occurring throughout human history, it is only in the second half of the twentieth century that scholars have looked at how this “magical” work occurs—the methods, processes, and perspectives that designers undertake to create products. It is out of this movement that the phrase design thinking emerged.

A BRIEF HISTORY

The phrase design thinking originated in the 1960s. Herbert Simon first proposed that design constitutes a unique way of thinking that is different from traditional scientific ways of thinking,1 but L. Bruce Archer is generally recognized as the first person to use the phrase design thinking to describe this alternative mindset.2 Archer and numerous other researchers and theorists, including Bryan Lawson,3 Peter G. Rowe,4 and Nigel Cross,5 spent a great deal of time studying designers across various settings—architecture, fashion design, graphic design, engineering, software development, and more—to understand both the thought processes and actions that underlie design work. Thus “design thinking” refers equally to what designers are thinking while they work in addition to what they are doing while they work. Many of these scholars were especially interested in understanding not just how designers create, but how they create good, innovative designs. Again and again, they found that designers work—and think about their work—in unique ways.

As with most jobs, working designers engage in this creative mindset and process automatically—design thinking is not something they consider while they’re working, it’s just what they do. But the scholarship that surfaced the concept of design thinking has enabled designers to become more intentional about their design processes, and to purposefully apply elements of designerly ways of working and thinking. One famous example is IDEO. Founded in 1991, IDEO began as a traditional design firm focused on designing consumer products like toothbrushes and chairs.6 One thing that set IDEO apart from other design firms, however, was its intentional focus on the process of design: what were designers doing and why? This led to new mindsets, like the idea that users’ reactions to design products could never be predicted, no matter how much user research the designers had conducted; and it also led to new processes, like using rapid, disposable prototypes to test and modify ideas quickly in response to user feedback. IDEO demonstrated its new approach by designing a new grocery market shopping cart in a 1999 episode of Nightline. This exposed a whole new non-design audience to the principles and processes of design thinking. David Kelley, one of IDEO’s founders, found it challenging to explain this new design approach to people, so he drew on the phrase design thinking to explain it.7 Although the phrase already existed, it is arguably Kelley’s use of the term that brought the term into popular culture.

Design thinking has gone on to be used in a variety of settings outside of traditional design work. By 2001, IDEO was increasingly engaging in projects that were outside the scope of traditional product design. Instead of designing more ergonomic chairs or more efficient shopping carts, IDEO found itself tackling less tangible outcomes, such as restructuring the organization of a health care foundation, helping a 100-year-old manufacturing company better understand its clients, and creating alternative school learning environments beyond traditional classrooms. This type of work took IDEO from designing consumer products to “designing consumer experiences”8 and demonstrated that design products extend beyond tangible, physical things. Other organizations have recognized this shift in design from a focus on the looks and usability of physical products to intangible experiences. Businesses such as Proctor and Gamble, Kaiser Permanente, and Costco have applied design thinking to their strategic planning, business models, and organizational structures and processes. Prominent books like Tim Brown and Barry Katz’s Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation (2009) and Roger Martin’s The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage (2009) have argued for the application of design thinking in corporate environments, especially in management and leadership. Those organizations that have embraced design thinking and methods have been shown to do better financially than their less design-conscious competitors. In addition to corporations, design thinking is increasingly being applied to work toward the greater social good in settings like health care, charitable foundations, social innovation start-ups, national governments, and elementary schools. Education is needed to support these wider applications of design thinking, and this need has inspired programs like Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. Founded by David Kelley and affectionately referred to as the “d.school,” the Plattner Institute helped to popularize some of IDEO’s design thinking approaches. Other schools and universities are now including design thinking as a pedagogical focus, either through formal degree programs in design thinking, such as the one at Radford University, or by pervasive application throughout the curriculum, such as at Smith College. In the contemporary world, design thinking no longer denotes just the aesthetics or usability of a physical product—it’s a worldwide movement rooted in a creative mindset.

THE DESIGN THINKING MINDSET

The phrase design thinking is used to describe two different but overlapping concepts:

1. 1. A unique way of looking at the world, and
2. 2. A process of activities and methods that reflect and support that worldview.

The worldview or mindset helps you carry out the process, and the process helps people discover and harness the mindset. Let’s talk first about the overarching themes of the design thinking mindset, and then dive into how they are applied in the design thinking process.

Design thinking is a unique way of thinking about the world. The fundamental difference between design thinking and other mindsets is its focus on problem solving. It might seem at first that other worldviews also focus on problem solving. For instance, it might seem that scientific ways of thinking, such as the scientific method, target problem solving: for example, how scientific discoveries can help solve the problem of air pollution. However, science is focused on observing and understanding with the intent of making predictions about the natural world. Science helps us understand that we have a problem with air pollution and that the problem is likely to get worse over time. Such scientific findings can contribute to problem solving, perhaps by inspiring smog regulations for vehicles. But this problem solving is a secondary outcome when compared to the attainment of predictive knowledge. Design, on the other hand, intentionally targets problem solving. The mindset of design thinking always has problem solving at its heart.

What kinds of problems does design thinking solve? Design thinking can be used to address any problem that needs a creative solution. Although traditional applications of design may have focused on aesthetic or usability problems, design is not limited to solving problems about how to make a product mor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Miguel A. Figueroa
• Understanding Design Thinking
• Design Thinking in Libraries
• Design Thinking from the Field
• For the Future
• Selected Resources