Different Perspectives in Design Thinking

Yvonne Eriksson

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781032124971
  9780367254230
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000557145
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Computer Graphics

Globalization and digitalization are buzz words in contemporary society. They affect both our private and our professional lives. Society has become more diverse with easier access to information and to virtual platforms that gives us opportunity to be in touch with colleagues, friends, family, etc. at any time. A complex environment is emerging wherein internet of things and big data are being integrated with products, production systems, healthcare, and daily activity and play an important part in decision making. This has an impact on future designs and the role of designers. Responsible designers with a holistic perspective are needed.

The book highlights several aspects of design thinking such as Information Design and Critical Design. The meaning of culture, gender and disabilities are also discussed. The functions of Information Design are changing from 'showing the way', instruction manuals and graphic design. It will affect among others, healthcare technology, smart products and Industry 4.0. Design thinking perspective that includes users from the entire chain and from the producer to the end user of the product or service, is needed. This will also require gender and culture issues to be taken into consideration in designing products and services. Design thinking methods and critical aspects of design will contribute to an inclusive society.

Chapter-1 Design Thinking between Myth and Methodology

Petra Badke-Schaub

Professor for Design Theory and Methodology, TU Deflt - Faculty Industrial Design Engineering, Department Design Organisation Strategy, Landbergstraat 15, 2628 CE Delft.

Design Thinking and design research

During the last century designing has gone through major changes, from a predominantly individual creative process to a multidisciplinary interaction process, working across different disciplines such as engineering, economics, and social sciences, but also across IT, education, and medicine.

In the late 80ies Tim Brown, the father of Design Thinking, stated in his book “Change by Design” (2009, 2017) that the problems we currently encounter in society, industry and the environment are too complex that they can be solved with the same methods we used in times gone by. This is even more true when looking into the future of mankind. Brown (2008, 2009) describes the need for change in design as the main challenge of the twenty-first century. This change should be a shift from the hierarchical and cost-efficient nature of Design Thinking to the concepts of flexibility and adaptability—which are much closer to the needs of business and management in the complex world. This statement is convincing for the designer but may not be convincing for the manager: as long as design research has not shown that the impact of Design Thinking finally leads to the desired innovation and the expected business success.

Key propositions of Design Thinking

Although there exists several different models of design thinking (see for example Efeoglu et al., 2013) here the analysis and discussion are focused on Brown (2008, 2009, 2017). Brown defines Design Thinking as “a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity” (Brown, 2008). Brown stresses four basic premises of the Design Thinking approach:

1. Design thinking is equally relevant for designing products and spaces, as to the design of systems or dealing with more abstract problems such as services. Coping with systems and services, both aspects are now gaining more relevance for the customer and thus for the designer.
2. Design Thinking is disruptive innovation to gain a competitive advantage on the global market. This statement has been claimed already decades ago and as such it does not provide new insights, nor does it point to new behavioural strategies. In fact, it has already been more than forty years when practitioners in engineering design developed the first methodologies, that aimed at supporting the design process and, consequently, the development of innovative products. Furthermore, at the same time, 1952, Alex F. Osborn, the godfather of brainstorming, published the book “Wake up your mind: 101 ways to develop creativeness.” Osborn defined three essential steps to reach a creative outcome and to arrive at a successful result: fact finding, idea finding, solution finding.
3. Design Thinking is human-/user-centred. “Design thinking is valuable not just in so-called creative industries or for people tasked with designing products. Rather, it is often a powerful tool for customers to save more, or developing a compelling narrative for public-service campaigns when applied to abstract, multifaceted problems: improving a guest experience at a hotel, encouraging bank” (Brown, 2009).

The last premise refers to the most relevant proposition of the Design Thinking approach. The focus is on the user whilst the designer seems to play the second violine. There is an assumption that designers have a kind of innate competency across different disciplines such as managerial tasks but can be done by different people other than designers. Hence Design Thinking is an activity reserved for the designer but can be, or better needs to be, done also by other people involved in the innovation of products and services development processes.

Design Thinking as thinking process

Obviously Design Thinking is an activity that cannot be observed directly but it is more than pure thinking. It needs a framework which allows to understand why certain activities occur—based on this knowledge they can be observed and interpreted.

Obviously, it is not easy to investigate such a complex and dazzling concept in a scientific way. There are almost no studies so far which have made successful forecasts of important economic developments. The same problem occurs when the impact of the use of Design Thinking should be forecasted. The expectations would be that a more creative and improved outcome (in any sense) could be assessed. These assumptions are not precise enough to end up with a clear result.

However, especially in complex situations a defined forecast would be helpful to find out what the results of the specific application are. If there is an attempt to investigate these complex, general, and partly very abstract propositions, an operationalisation of Design Thinking is necessary, which would make it applicable for thinking in if...then scenarios which usually lead to unexpected results.

Thus, the question arises: if it is not possible to formulate rules for specific situations, how can then Design Thinking be or become a (design) method? Or do we only believe in the benefits of its application? Then, the method is a myth (Norman, 2010). Against this background, Norman asks about the value of Design Thinking. Norman states that the main purpose of Design Thinking is a public relations term for good old-fashioned creative thinking. Thus, is Design Thinking a method, a strategy, a vision, an educational program, or something else?

In the remainder of this contribution an empirical study (Cardoso et al., 2014) presents components of thinking that link design research with Design Thinking and design education. This study reveals that the concept of design thinking is valid for each of the context variables but needs stronger empirical studies to understand and connect these components and to enlighten the differences in context and their implications on the outcome.

Design Thinking is question asking

The reported study here was intended to investigate design thinking as an enquiry driven process (Eris, 2004). The setting was a multidisciplinary group of seven students, tasked with designing new concepts for birthday celebrations. Questions formulated during designing are related to cognitive processes of problems solving, approaching ideas creatively and making decisions about possible design directions but also about the learned procedures on how to tackle the problem. The type of questions was assessed and categorised according to existing taxonomies when searching for and analysing questions that emerged in the existing dataset. The dataset analysed were eight sessions of 40 minutes each and one session of ten minutes of a five-day project. Finally, three types of questions could be distinguished.

The questions can be categorized in a framework that ranges from varying types of low to high-level questions. Consequently, this research aims to understand and characterise the idea generation phase of designing through an inquiry-based framework, and thus explores how inquiry might facilitate problem framing, reframing, and idea generation in such settings.

Low-level Questions (LLQ) and Direct Reasoning Questions (DRQ): The answer is known in both types of questions, which is their commonality not necessarily based on the subject of the question, but by something else. Such questions are characteristic of convergent thinking, where the questioner is attempting to converge on the facts. The answers are expected to hold truth-value since the questioner expects the answering person to believe his/her answers to be true. DRQs are different from low-level questions in the sense that the latter are used to communicate and confirm what is known, whereas the former are used to provide causal explanations of facts. For instance, “Why can’t this material be exchanged?” is a DRQ. However, questions that are raised in design situations can operate under the converse premise: that, for any given question, there exist, regardless of being true or false, multiple alternative known answers as well as multiple unknown possible answers that are yet to be created. The questioner’s intention is to disclose the alternative known answers, and to generate the unknown possible ones. Such questions are characteristic of divergent thinking, where the questioner attempts to move away from the facts to the possibilities that can be generated from them. Eris (2004) termed these types of questions generative design questions (GDQs), for instance, “How can we find out whether we can use this material?” is a GDQ (method generation category).

The analysis of the results reveals that high level questions trigger specific turning points during problem (re)framing. Prior to the acceleration of those turning points, the group seemed to arrive at a level of reflection that dissatisfaction with the current status steered their input, a situation that facilitates the formulation of high-level questions. As result a simple model can be developed showing how to capture this interplay between reflection, complexity, satisfaction, and high-level questioning.

Conclusions

Is Design Thinking the same process as the ‘normal’ thinking process? And can design methodology use the same information on how to support the designer?

Yes and no: yes, because the basic elements of human thinking are the same providing insights from psychological assumptions of how designers think. Thus, the designers’ thinking process needs to be analysed in much more detail, and for many different categories of situations.

No, because Design thinking is too much focusing on general assumptions, but there are more questions to be asked (and answered) such as: Which other cognitive, motivational, and emotional aspects may be relevant for the designers’ thinking? As an example discussed before the analysis of question-asking in design allows deeper insights into the way of thinking and allows hypotheses how Design Thinking can be steered by different design methods (Cardoso et al., 2016).

Design Thinking research should bring to life a master research program that determines the concepts of flexibility and adaptability disclosing the impact of different factors on the design process and product. As design methodology has to cope with vague concepts in complex field it will deliver only a small contribution to a better understanding of Design Thinking. If Design Thinking cannot be operationalised, the impact of this concept can hardly be tested in a scientific way. Aiming to support the designer design methodology needs information about the influencing factors and their impact on the design process and the design output. From these empirical results design research can define where and when and to which degree certain elements of flexibility are recommendable and when flexibility is a restless shifting from one situation to another. The integration of many interrelated variables might deliver a better picture of the situation at hand and allows answers to if...then situations for the future.

References

• Bhatnagar, T. and Badke-Schaub, P. 2017. Design thinking and creative problem solving. undergraduate engineering education in India: The need and relevance. International Conference on Research into Design, pp. 953–967.
• Brown, T. 2008. Design thinking. Harvard Business Review, 86(6): 84–92.
• Brown, T. 2009. Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation. HarperCollins.
• Brown, T. 2017, 2nd. Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation. HarperCollins.
• Cardoso, C., Badke-Schaub, P. and Eris, O. 2016. Inflection moments in design discourse: How questions drive problem framing during idea generation. Design Studies, 46: 59–78.
• Efeoglu, A., Moller, C., Serie, M. and Boer, H. 2013. Design Thinking: Characteristics and Promises.
• Eris, O. 2004. Effective Inquiry for Innovative Engineering Design. Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
• Flammer, A. 1981. Towards a theory of question asking. Physiological Research, 43: 407–420.
• Martin, R.L. 2009. The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage. Harvard Business School, Cambridge, MA.
• Osborn, A.F. 1952. Wake up your mind: 101 ways to develop creativeness.

Chapter-2 Critical Design and Design Thinking vs. critical design and design thinking

Gabriela Goldschmidt

Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Email: [email protected]

Introduction

Design Thinking and Critical Thinking are both terms that are used as titles for methods or approaches meant to promote innovation in the design of new products, systems or services. Design Thinking is an orderly, teachable methodology (of which there are various varieties) that is meant to be applicable to any design process; in fact, it is tailored to be applicable to solution development in general in the business world (Leifer and Meinel, 2018) and even in education (Royalty et al., 2020). Critical Design relates to cases of extreme innovation, wherein the aim is to propose a radical, awareness-changing concept without necessarily worrying about its commercial viability. Unlike Design Thinking, which is a practical guide to more innovative performance mostly in business, Critical Design is embedded...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Design Thinking between Myth and Methodology
• 2. Critical Design and Design Thinking vs. critical design and design thinking
• 3. Adding Rigor to Advance Design Thinking
• 4. Situated Design Thinking
• 5. The Challenge of Designing Meaningful Information
• 6. Gendered Design Thinking—So-called Logic of People and Things
• 7. On Design Dialogues—Their Roots, Features, and Usage
• 8. Design Thinking and Designerly Ways of Knowing in Operational Research Practice
• 9. Design Thinking and Welfare Technology: A Focus on Information Design
• 10. Raising Users’ Confidence in their own Technology Literacy as part of the Design Process
• 11. Lessons Learned: A Plea for Curricularizing Design Thinking in Engineering Education
• Index