Dear Jerry,
The issue you raise is intriguing: “a brief and concise description of what is being considered D1, 2, 3, 4, etc... And what key aspects of design thinking they have in common, since that is what I take to be design thinking, and what criteria are being used in making such distinctions.”
To answer this in a full, accurate way is the work of a serious article. Even a relatively long post can’t do it at nearly 2,000 words.
No one has yet published a rich description of the common aspects and different issues in design thinking at all four different scales of complexity in this conversation – artifact design, service and experience design, organization design, and systems design.
The first thing to say about design thinking is that design thinking is not a precise or even a particularly useful term. But it’s the term we use due to historical contingency and until someone develops a better term, that’s the term we have. That was one of the conclusions I came to at the Swinburne invitational conference on design thinking in which GK took part, and I still take that view. That said, as imprecise and unhelpful as the term is, if we take it as a marker and use it as we might use a Greek like or a variable in an equation, it stands for some genuine and useful phenomena that we have not yet described well enough. As I recall, Don Norman noted that the poor term “design thinking” is a bad label for a genuine phenomenon. So let’s start by saying I am writing here about the phenomenon that this clumsy term represents.
The second thing to say about design thinking is that not all designers practice design thinking. As the term grew in use, many people teaching and studying in design schools seemed to conclude that anyone who studies or practices design who also thinks therefore practices design thinking. This, of course, is silly. GK’s description of magical thinking is perfect. It is the case in which “a person calling himself or herself a designer inherently possesses magical power to think across and operate across all operational scales.”
Don describes this problem in his blog post, “Why Design Education Must Change” (Norman 2010). “In the early days of industrial design, the work was primarily focused upon physical products. Today, however, designers work on organizational structure and social problems, on interaction, service, and experience design. Many problems involve complex social and political issues. As a result, designers have become applied behavioral scientists. … They are woefully undereducated for the task. Designers often fail to understand the complexity of the issues and the depth of knowledge already known. They claim that fresh eyes can produce novel solutions, but then they wonder why these solutions are seldom implemented, or if implemented, why they fail. Fresh eyes can indeed produce insightful results, but the eyes must also be educated and knowledgeable. Designers often lack the requisite understanding. Design schools do not train students about these complex issues, about the interlocking complexities of human and social behavior, about the behavioral sciences, technology, and business. There is little or no training in science, the scientific method, and experimental design.”
People need the kind of training that Don describes to work across all four levels and scales of complexity. The notion that someone can leap from 3 years or 5 years of undergraduate studio training to dealing with organizations or complex adaptive systems is a real problem. And moving from an undergraduate studio degree to a PhD is equally problematic – without a foundation in research skills, and an understanding of science, the scientific method, and experimental design, doctoral students can’t understand “the interlocking complexities of human and social behavior, about the behavioral sciences, technology, and business,” let alone design for them. This accounts for the failure of programs offering the studio PhD to graduate designers capable of design thinking in research or practice.
Having stated what design thinking is not, the “is” of it is fairly simple, at least in a broad way that takes the space of a post, rather than a book.
To state it in a short way, design thinking is an approach to solving problems that rests on the iterative approaches with prototyping and trialing that typify the design professional process. But there is more. Rather than a single designer managing the entire process, design thinking typically engages stakeholders in participatory design. Designers facilitate the design process of co-creation. In design thinking, designers are not the central figures. Rather, they move designers from the heroic but imaginary central role to a supporting and coaching role. While some accounts of design thinking continue to position designers as the main actor in the design process the real shift comes as designers move to a coaching role. GK’s post describes this as a move from a “sage on the stage” model to a “guide on the side” model.
In my view, this requires a nuanced series of roles. In great part, designers bring process skills, problem-solving skills, and a repertoire of design skills that can be deployed to help the legitimate problem owners solve the problems they face. Problem owners bring specific domain knowledge in the problem area. In theory, and often in practice, problem owners have a deep understanding of the situated problem in its original context. This means that prototype solutions make a good fit between the problem and possible solutions. This is effectively what the late Jens Bernsen (1986) meant with a book title in which he described design by saying, “the problem comes first.” I discuss this and related approaches to design in a book chapter that brings up many of the problems that Don and GK both describe – and I propose, as Don does, that serious research training is one way to address these problems in educating design students (Friedman 1997).
At the same time, because skilled designers are often interdisciplinary, they may work across several domains at different scales. As a result, designers sometimes contribute to the domain knowledge of the problem owners, and they may help to develop effective solutions as well as facilitating co-creation.
Lucy Kimbell (2011, 2012) addresses several misconceptions about design thinking while proposing ways forward in a two-part article.
In the first part, she writes, “The term design thinking has gained attention over the past decade in a wide range of contexts beyond the traditional preoccupations of designers. The main idea is that the ways professional designers problem-solve is of value to firms trying to innovate and to societies trying to make change happen. This paper reviews the origins of the term design thinking in research about designers and its adoption by management educators and consultancies within a dynamic, global mediatized economy. Three main accounts are identified: design thinking as a cognitive style, as a general theory of design, and as a resource for organizations. The paper argues there are several issues that undermine the claims made for design thinking. The first is how many of these accounts rely on a dualism between thinking and knowing, and acting in the world. Second, a generalized design thinking ignores the diversity of designers’ practices and institutions which are historically situated. The third is how design thinking rests on theories of design that privilege the designer as the main agent in designing. Instead the paper proposes that attending to the situated, embodied routines of designers and others offers a useful way to rethink design thinking” (Kimbell 2011: 285-286).
Kimbell’s second article offers a valuable discussion of design thinking in practice. One key issue is that her approach moves “away from a disembodied, ahistorical design thinking to a situated, contingent set of practices carried by professional designers and those who engage with designs, which recognizes the materiality of designed things and the material and discursive practices through which they come to matter” (Kimbell 2012: 129).
Kimbell represents a valuable twin perspective. She is both an Associate Fellow at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, and a consultant working in service design for public policy.
While I agree with Kimbell’s general position, I think the time may have arrived where we are indeed moving beyond the problematic conceptions of design thinking that she critiques, to a deeper and broader range of insights. No one has yet described it, though, and that’s what I think you’re asking for.
What would help is a thorough literature review followed by an integrative proposal for ways forward.
That said, I think we do have some thinkers who are making a good start. For example, Kees Dorst has done a great deal with his “frame creation” approach, and this includes research, real-world-experiments, and serious applications to complex adaptive systems in the form of designing out crime in Sydney, Australia, and New South Wales. Relevant ideas also surface in such books as Koskinen, Zimmerman, Binder, Redstrom, and Wensveen’s (2011) Design Research Through Practice: From the Lab, Field, and Showroom. And we are about to see a new edition of a classic – Don Norman’s Design of Everyday Things.
What no one has yet done is to bring the literature together into a concise yet robust description of design at the four levels of complexity from artifacts to systems.
While some professional design firms work in this space, they are generally unwilling to explain how they do what they do. Sometimes it is because they don’t actually do what they think they do. Sometimes it is because they can’t articulate what they know or they don’t have the time or interest to do so. In some cases, it is because they see these issues as valuable proprietary knowledge. In effect, the claim of proprietary knowledge and intellectual property means that these firms don’t see themselves as physicians sharing knowledge with other physicians under the obligations of the Hippocratic Oath. Rather, they see themselves more like pharmaceutical firms, guarding their skills and knowledge behind a for-pay firewall.
Every firm has the right to take the position they prefer. My one mild dissent is that if a firm takes the stand that this knowledge is proprietary, it is not appropriate to criticize the research community for failing to understand, adopt, and apply knowledge to which we have no access. Once knowledge is made public, of course, it is subject to reflection and debate – just as researchers may review and critique a journal article that a physician may publish.
These issues are not simple or easy to resolve. But so far, no one has yet brought this together in the kind of description you’d like to see.
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> | Mobile +61 404 830 462 | Home Page http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design/people/Professor-Ken-Friedman-ID22.html<http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design> Academia Page http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman About Me Page http://about.me/ken_friedman
Guest Professor | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China
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References
Bernsen, Jens. 1986. Design. The Problem Comes First. Copenhagen: Danish Design Council.
Friedman, Ken. 1997. “Design Science and Design Education.” In The Challenge of Complexity. Peter McGrory, ed. Helsinki: University of Art and Design Helsinki, 54-72. Available at URL: http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman
Kimbell, Lucy. 2011. “Rethinking Design Thinking: Part I.” Design and Culture, Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 285–306. DOI: 10.2752/175470811X13071166525216
Kimbell, Lucy. 2012. “Rethinking Design Thinking: Part II.” Design and Culture, Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 129–148. DOI:
10.2752/175470812X13281948975413
Ilpo Koskinen, John Zimmerman, Thomas Binder, Johan Redstrom, and Stephan Wensveen. 2011. Design Research Through Practice: From the Lab, Field, and Showroom. Waltham, Massachusetts: Morgan Kaufman. Available from:
http://www.amazon.com/Design-Research-Through-Practice-Showroom/dp/0123855020
Norman, Don. 2010. Why Design Education Must Change. Core77, 2010 November 26. URL:
http://www.core77.com/blog/columns/why_design_education_must_change_17993.asp
(Accessed 2013 July 23)
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