stephanie, pedro, and other contributors to this thread
i think pedro hit the nail on its head when he suggested that "design thinking" is a popularization of what makes a designer:
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1.4 Tim Brown's/IDEO as a popular representation (in social psychology terms, a 'social representation') of what "design" stands for to a much broader audience, namely what it stands for to the many non-designers who make pragmatic use of an idea of "design thinking", along with the kind of basic ideas and native semantic links used in its ordering; looking at this as a language in itself rather than mostly through a distance, expressed in correction or in-correction, to its original sources;
1.5. To assume an idea of design research that is flexible enough to take 1.4. as an object of study, in and of itself;
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to which stephanie added:
1.6) Research involving how non designers utilize a design process (the doing), in turn, develop and apply design thinking.
1.7) Research analyzing experienced designers, inexperienced designers and non designers (looking at both doing and thinking behind the doing)
1.8) What distinguishes the thought process of designers as representative of design thinking, and how is this type of thinking unique to design (as opposed to any other kind of thinking)
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i think these additions points into the right direction. there is no doubt that designers proceed differently from, say, writers who combine words into comprehensible texts, plumbers who fix problems with available technology, natural scientific observers who theorize existing facts, unaware of creating them, and artists who create art objects that are valued culturally but avoid practical applications to the lives of their audiences.
not too long ago, one would have identified outstanding designers as geniuses, possessing aesthetic sensibilities, creativity, ability to make novel connections, talent for simplification, sense of what goes culturally, etc. all of these favorable attributes have populated public opinions about designers and been used by designers vis-a-vis their clients to claim authority on what is in fact difficult to operationalize precisely because they pertain to convenient popularizations of principally unobservable cognitive abilities.
i think it is a mistake to jump on another popularization that merely replaces now less popular attributes of designers uniqueness.
it is easy for designers to claim mastery in "design thinking," as opposed to how others think, especially when one cannot directly observe anyone's thinking.
the point is to articulate what designers can do, demonstrated by replicable methods or actual results.
there are several concepts of design activities worth refining, operationalizing, or theorizing, for example distinguishing design moves such as finding problems, making sense of complexities, framing and reframing conceptualizations; searching for generative metaphors, metonyms; contextualiziations, and systems (including ecological) perspectives; productive conversations; enrolling stakeholders, testing in human populations, playing with representations of ideas, combinatorial techniques; applying critical perspectives to oneself; etc.
surely, designers think but so does everyone else. the only access to anyone else's thinking goes through intelligible articulations, observable enactments of that thinking whether in the form of step-wise accounts, rationalizations, demonstrations, prototypes, or realizable plans of actions.
if design thinking cannot be enacted in collaborations in design teams, be communicated in the form of education, ways to enroll stakeholders in designers' projects, executable specifications, or demonstrated by concrete accomplishments, i suggest that we better drop that concept for its epistemological inaccessibility and to avoid future ridicule by competing approaches.
klaus
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