PhD-Design on Design Thinking - some thoughts
Today I wrote to an online student who wished to consult me about design thinking. My thoughts on the subject are captured here with some editing to make it more general in the context of this thread.
Dear Friends
I draw your attention to a small booklet on Design Thinking which is a collection of my papers on Design thinking that explains a set of models dealing with different dimensions of Design thinking. This can be downloaded from my Academia.edu link here.
https://www.academia.edu/4028853/Design_Thinking_Workshop_for_Designers_and_Artisans_2013
More papers on Design Thinking are available here
https://ahduni.academia.edu/RanjanMP/Design-Thinking-papers
The student had made a video selfie on her understanding of Design Thinking and my comments are quoted below
I Quote
Your video selfie is a good try, but not good enough. Design, unlike design thinking is about delivering great results through a process of iterations through which you gain insights and conviction about what is a good end product, eventually. I would ask you to ponder what you can do to improve this video?
FORM
STRUCTURE
CONTENT
PERFORMANCE / IMPACT
CONTEXT
This just the beginning. FORM may have many attributes and dimensions which can be managed and manipulated by an expert producer or editor. The process of refinement means that you have to go back to the beginning and clarify the intention and then return to execute it in the new FORM, and now you have two alternatives, and you can apply your judgement to choose the best one to go forward. Seems simple, but what are the attributes that you will promote and what do you suppress? Difficult!
The same can be applied to the other major attributes of Structure, Content, Performance and Impact in a given Context, but this too could change with time and place. You will find that these attributes are not sufficient to make your decisions and the complexity of your understanding of the context will grow as you go forward and apply this new understanding and conceptualise a third version, a fourth version and with each iteration till your nth version!. Yes explore, discover and conceptualise and not realise the first impression, since there are attributes of cost, time and context that need to be addressed here.
Iterate and develop tools that can help you with each of these major attributes. Scenario sketches to determine composition of the video screen. Should you use vertical frame in a horizontal format, real estate is wasted in your first iteration. What clothes do you wear? How much of your body do you show? Face only, mid shot, long shot or extreme close up, there are infinite possibilities, but how do you decide? The answer lies in the context, and your audience, is it a bunch of school children or are you talking to a corporate leader to impress and inform? Suit and tie or casuals? What colour, what trims, what about hair styling and makeup? Hundred questions to be answered and explored if necessary.
The best way is to just do another version and then analyse it. We call these attempts prototypes or models. Try it and see if the product is improved. Assess how much it has improved! After your nth version you would have become an expert film maker, all by yourself! You can do better if you have the company and participation of mentors and critics who have qualities that can help improve the product. Try it and move forward.
I looked at your portfolio and your blog and have come to the conclusion from the available evidence that you at a novice to design and design thinking although you have a high degree of enthusiasm so you can move fast and improve from here. You can benefit from formal exposure to design education although you are a mid career professional in the IT industry and to be in the presence of mentors who can respond to your trials and bring change to your sensibilities as well as abilities, both of which need considerable refinement. In the real world the complexity is infinite but we still have to act, and designing is an action discipline which helps one find a way through a mass of complexities by framing and reframing both content and meaning of what you set out to do in the first place.
There are skill sets to be acquired and skills to be refined through practise and if guidance is available it would help a great deal in my view. The other comment that I wish to make is that your identification of design opportunities especially for ICT applications for India is informed by our reality on the ground but not informed by any particular instance of that reality. Choose a particular small shop, a small one, and try and understand its inventory, all its products and observe all the actions that the owner and the assistants will need to do and based on this evaluate your proposed app. Same thing applies to your proposed medical applications, there is so much detail that is missing in your product offering that I do not know where to begin my critique. Work in progress, but a very long way to go.
I recommend reading
Harold Nelson - The Design Way, MIT Press 2012
Jon Kolko - The Magic of Design his other papers and books
Vijay Kumar - 101 Design Methods,
This may be a beginning and you can look up my papers and books on my academia.edu web archive for my free resources on design thinking. Model building is an art that is used in the process of design thinking and visualisation skills do help here. Check out my papers on my archive, link shown below.
Good luck with your explorations and let me know how you have progressed.
End of Quote
Yes, Klaus tells us that design is about doing and that thinking part is integral and informed by the doing, and I agree. Do show us and we will believe that you think!
With warm regards
M P Ranjan
From my iPad at home
28 August 2014 at 8.10 pm IST
Prof M P Ranjan
Independent Academic, Ahmedabad
Author of blog : http://www.designforindia.com
Archive of papers : http://cept.academia.edu/RanjanMP
Sent from my iPad
> On 28-Aug-2014, at 3:25 pm, "Salisbury, Martin" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> I have followed this thread, and its various incarnations, with interest, or rather bemusement. I have found it difficult to understand how so many words can be devoted to discussing the meaning (or absence of meaning) of words. And then of course, the inevitable competing claims for ownership of those words. At last, a few words from Klaus Krippendorff has made sense of it for me-
>
> "if someone claims to have mastered "design thinking" I would say: ok, show me."
>
> This explains nicely why the kind of knowing that comes from practice-led research is so important and how it can sometimes only be fully articulated by outcomes that are not in the form of words.
>
> Regards to all from Cambridge,
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> Martin
>
> Professor Martin Salisbury
> Director, The Centre for Children's Book studies
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> The Twelve Dancing Princesses, illustrated by Sheila Robinson- now available from our online store:
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