Dear All,
This is a response occasioned by contributions to the thread titled “Re: Design Thinking Survey 2013 - participants needed.” This note is about design thinking rather than the survey. I have therefore changed the subject header.
Stephen Allard’s reply to GK VanPatter occasions thoughts on the issue of design thinking. This involves the literature and practice both. These are my views here. I don’t speak for GK or for Stephen, but I address issues that each of them brought up.
Those who are interesting in GK’s thoughts on these issues will find a good collection of his writings on Academia.edu:
http://nextd.academia.edu/GKVanPatter
After reading GK’s book on Issuu, I started to write some notes. I was thinking about GK’s book when Stephen posted, offering an opportunity to address these issues in a larger context.
As Stephen suggests, the issues in GK’s model have a rich history in literature and in practice. What GK’s model does is bring these issues together into a parsimonious and concise design framework.
As it is, these issues have history in other frameworks. Using a different vocabulary, I covered the full range of these issues in the courses I developed on strategic design at Oslo Business School in the early 1990s.
We described the issues using verbal rubrics rather than using numbers. Numbered rubrics -- Design 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 -- make design process sound a bit like software releases, but the analogy doesn’t quite work for me. Almost all of these versions of design process date back several decades, at least in business schools and social science faculties.
As GK notes, art and design schools teach artefact design. This is a legacy effect of their history and a legacy of the fields in which art and design school studio teachers work. While many such schools are trying to develop further, change is difficult.
Business and management schools teach service design, organization design, and strategic design. Nearly all business schools teach organization design, and many have done so for nearly half a century. Service design came in about a quarter century back, with experience design coming in over the past decade or so, often as an outgrowth of service design. A few business schools add strategic design and design thinking. These are schools such as Rotman School of Management in Toronto, UTS Business School in Sydney, and the Weatherhead School at Case Western Reserve. At the Norwegian School of Management, I was professor of leadership and strategic design. I worked in knowledge management and strategic design as well teaching organization theory and organization design and some aspects of systems design. These subjects are labeled Design 3.0 and Design 4.0 in GK’s model.
Schools of informatics and some business and management schools teach systems design and systems thinking. This is also the case for such schools as the Knowledge School at the Japan Advanced Institute for Science and Technology, the Haas Business School at University of California, Hitotsubashi University in Japan, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zurich. This was also the case for the department of knowledge management we had in Norway where at least half a dozen people worked with advanced areas of systems design.
These fields aren’t new. They are simply new to design schools and design consultancies. That’s why many of us have been encouraging design schools to broaden their horizons and deepen their insights.
GK is right to note that folks from design schools reflect a focus on what he labels Design 1 and Design 2 when they visit Humantific. People from ETH, JAIST, or Haas are more likely to visit IDEO, Deloitte, or Alexander Proudfoot than Humantific. Because Humantific attracts people from design schools, GK’s visitors reflect an older tradition. People from schools of business or informatics visit other kinds of professional practices.
Consultancies in professional practice have been working with large-scale systems design for years. McKinsey, IDEO, Alexander Proudfoot, Deloitte, and dozens more have this kind of practice. Some do it better, some worse, but they all do it.
Many governmental organizations, quangos, and NGOs also work in this space. At the large scale, these include such organizations as the United Nations and the World Bank. Australia has DesignGov, the Australian Centre for Excellence in Public Sector Design, Denmark has MindLab, and Finland has had Sitra and Helsinki Design Lab. Other organizations work with government from outside – Policy Lab in Boston or ThinkSpace in Canberra.
Several management consultancies have been working up and down the full scale of design frameworks for years — especially management consultancies that own branding firms and design firms. For example, Burson Marsteller bought Landor back in the late 1980s, while many design firms have merged into global consultancies spanning several disciplines that bring them from designing brands and artefacts into different areas of strategic design – they may not stretch as far as systems design, but they cover more design fields than they would have done in the 1970s and 1980s.
Systems design dates back over half a century to the work of people such as W Edwards Deming, Peter Checkland, Stafford Beer, and West Churchman. With knowledge management and the work of such thinkers as Ikujiro Nonaka, Georg von Krogh, or Hirotaka Takeuchi, systems thinking built bridges to organization design and organizational culture building.
Organization design dates back half a century farther, to such thinkers as Mary Parker Follett and Henri Fayol in the late 1800s and early 1900s, followed by such figures as W. Edwards Deming, Peter Drucker, and Herbert Simon in the 1950s and 1960s.
Richard L Daft’s textbook – Organization Theory and Design – provides an elegant, well-informed overview of the field. Daft gives a robust theoretical overview, representing the challenges, problems, and trade-offs to be considered when we design human organizations for purpose-driven goals. The book is now in its 11th edition. The latest edition of the book is always expensive, but prices for used copies drop dramatically for earlier editions with used copies easy to find at Amazon.
Design thinking is distinguished by iterative approaches to design with prototyping, trialing, and testing. While this is typical of design thinking, this approach is also visible and explicit in he work of Deming, Follett, and Drucker. In fact, this approach is central to any system or process that involves close, iterative contact with the world as the basis of robust and effective results.
This is also a key aspect for those who apply complexity theory to systems design. This is clear in the work of such thinkers and practitioners as Michael Lissack or Robert Axelrod.
In looking at Stephen’s note, I’d agree that Frederick Winslow Taylor or Alfred Sloan designed organizations, but I’d say they took an engineering design approach rather than a design thinking approach.
The dictators that Stephen mentions designed societies, and their work was systemic. Nevertheless, the dictators and tyrants in Stephen’s list imposed systems on people by force and terror. There is a difference between this approach to systems design and the kind of participatory systems design visible in a design thinking framework. That’s where the work of people such as Follett, Churchman, or Drucker come into play, or the work of organizations such as MindLab or DesignGov.
I am giving deep thought to such issues for a practical reason. I am launching a project to map design capacity in organizations across Australia and around the world. This project is funded by the Flagship Collaborative Fund of the Future Manufacturing Flagship of the CSIRO, Australia’s Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organization. While our flagship focuses on manufacturing, the project will examine design capacity of many kinds, including design thinking. We are reflecting on different models as we prepare.
GK argues that what he calls the “literature” – the ironic quotes are his – covers the history of Design 1 and Design 2. This is a narrow slice of a broad literature, and it does not include the literature of the fields I’ve mentioned here.
GK and I have argued about the research literature since he interviewed me in the NextD Journal several years ago. For me, there are better ways to proceed than to argue that the literature is flawed.
Thinkers in many fields have examined Design 3 and Design 4 for more than a century now. This began in the era of Mary Parker Follett’s work as a consultant on organization design to President Theodore Roosevelt. In those days, Max Weber and Georg Simmel were still writing, not to mention such pragmatist philosophers as John Dewey and George Herbert Mead; the next generation included Max Lerner, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict; more recently we have had Mary Catherine Bateson, Warren Bennis, Tom Peters, Ricardo Semler, and dozens more I have not yet mentioned. These people have not been writing about Design 3.0 or Design 4.0, but they have been thinking, writing, and consulting on how human beings design and build organizations, cultures, and systems.
Rather than complain that the peer-reviewed literature of design journals is obsolete, I’d like to see GK explicitly describe his models and show us how they work. For several years now, I’ve been urging GK to contribute to the peer-reviewed journal literature with articles and comments that bring his views into the larger conversation. That’s the way to improve the design practice side of the design thinking literature.
The areas of the design thinking covered in the literatures of organization design and systems design are in far better shape.
I agree with GK that we don’t address these issues well enough in design schools or art academies. We do, however, address them in research universities.
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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Stephen B Allard wrote:
—snip—
At what point do the figures of history that are involved in organizational design (i.e Ackoff, Drucker, Sloan, Taylor et al) and social design (i.e. Gallup, Freud, Bernays, Lippman, Goebbels, Goring, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Kim et al) enter your Design 3 and Design 4 matrix levels of Design?
In your view, where does the line between professional design influence/ability on progress and grand social strategy/design lie? Where do firms like Booz Allen, Mckinsey, Hill and Knowlton, Edelman et al fit into the Design 3 and Design 4 levels of your matrix? What of Google, Microsoft, Apple, Sprint, AT&T?
—snip—
GK VanPatter wrote:
—snip—
… the history of design thinking that is reflected in “literature” tends to be the history of Design 1 and Design 2. The case studies, heroes and values that are found there also reflect Design 1 and Design 2 logic. A large percentage of the threads on this list reflect this logic and orientation as well.
This has not been the furthest reach present of design thinking for at least 10-15 years. Think multiple parallel tracks moving a different speeds rather than one track. The single track history thing is dead. Design thinking today is more like a mongrel from the SPCA than a pure bread Labrador or race horse…
Regardless of that messy movement forward most academies continue to have and promote deep legacy systems in Design 1 and 2. That tends to be what the various faculties know how to do and thus many keep presenting this now narrow retro orientation as what design thinking is today. Much of that is about design thinking as product, service and experience creation. However seasoned some PhD students might be it is inherently difficult for most operating within such systems to suggest that the field is actually in a different place than where their school is. We hear this often from folks coming to visit us for conversation and advice.
On line it is not difficult to find many foreshortened Design 1 and 2 views being presented as, sold as, what design thinking is today. There are now entire design thinking movies reflective of that narrow Design 1 and 2 orientation. Seeing all of the marketing energy can also be confusing. Understand that most are seriously oversimplified reductionist pictures. The world outside is considerably more complex.
The complexity twist is that you can create a picture of design thinking to meet academic awareness and requirements that would not at all reflect what is already going on in practice. We see a lot of this kind of work being produced within the chasm so to speak. Your output can meet all academic requirements, model all the proper academic protocols and not be reflective of practice at all.
—snip—
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