Hi all
Apologies, I haven’t read all the messages in this thread, but I do have an alternative perspective on the question of Design Thinking, and I think it gets closer to its real value.
Think of Design Thinking as an event as much as a concept, but certainly not as a business process or magic bullet.
I argue that Design Thinking marks a “designerly turn” in how organisations work. And the historical phenomena of Design Thinking being an encouragement to think in a designerly way - but of course designers think with all their senses and instruments of agency, especially their hands. Design Thinking as a designerly turn is much closer to Tim Brown’s arguments in Change by Design. He is very clear about that. And he is very clear about why he wants to illustrate how his design teams work. The aim is unclog the messy, unproductive habits that many organisations have become stuck with. The aim is to rebalance openness and clarity (often enemies) in the ways in which we collectively decide on what we do, make, service etc - and most importantly, why we do those things. The designerly turn should at the very least encourage us to think through our design values, strive for better values and ways of implementing them in practice.
In that way Design Thinking is not design. But it is a lot more than just a fad. And it is deeply rooted in the practices of real designers. As the world becomes ever more designable, and as we come across the imperative to design more often in everyday life, our habits need to be suited to designing effectively. If Design Thinking helps to spread those habits further and wider, as Brown hopes (but that doesn’t mean replacing professional designers), then we have a good chance of achieving a better world through design.
Personally, and this is the reason why I struggle to keep up with the great conversations on this list, I work in an organisation that hasn’t made the designerly turn, that is clogged up with bad meetings that lead nowhere. We desperately need to get things in hand (literally) with the hands of a designer. We urgently need senior managers to stop thinking they can deploy slogans and Powerpoint shows to change the place for the better. We need to make the designerly turn. And if I can deploy the concept of Design Thinking to encourage that, I will.
Those ideas are taken from my recent PhD thesis.
You can read more about my research at: http://www.inspireslearning.com - there are links to my thesis on that site (which includes much more detail on this reading of Brown et al.
Thanks for listening!
Robert
_________________________________
Dr Robert O’Toole NTF
Senior Academic Technologist
University of Warwick
BA Philosophy Warwick, MSc Knowledge Based Systems Sussex, PGCE ICT Warwick
PhD “Fit, Stick, Spread & Grow: Transdisciplinary Studies of Design Thinking for the Remaking of Higher Education”
QTS, WATE, NTF, FHEA, MoOoJ
http://www.warwick.ac.uk/extendedclassroom
http://www.inspireslearning.com
07876 876960
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From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of CHUA Soo Meng Jude (GPL, PLS) <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 23 November 2015 07:00
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Design Thinking is not design article
Personally I quite like what Nigel Cross once suggested - which is that rather than speak of Design Science (which may suggest that design ought to be governed by the cultures of science, or a kind of scientistic study of design), we can speak of a "Science of Design" where science here means more broadly some form of rigorous study. I think this is a good way to proceed -- remember that science has never always meant what it means now (assuming it does mean something stably positivist, even though this is not always uncontroversial). Until just before the enlightenment there was still the notion of a science, a scientia, which was governed by deductive, inferential logic (rather than by abduction/induction). Hence even theology could be a science (you can read Aquinas' Catena Aurena, his commentaries on scripture or his commentary on the book of Job and you'll see him making syllogistic inferences on passages of scripture - not the usual way you would read the bible!), or say proofs of God's existence, these were also scientific demonstrations.
Maybet the way to put it is this - if we are dissatisfied with DT, then the task for DT is for it to develop in the direction of a science of design. But then, as you might expect, what a science of design in turn means would be the subject of some tussle: what should belong to it, and what would count as focal or peripheral etc. But I think it's a very important question to answer, even if not always an easy one. What also is interesting perhaps is the diagnosis of the epistemological cultures that sometimes prevent us from answering that question well.
J
-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Filippo Salustri
Sent: Sunday, 22 November, 2015 10:19 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: ***SPAM*** Re: Design Thinking is not design article
Interesting...
On Nov 22, 2015 1:52 AM, "Francois Nsenga" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Klaus, you wrote:
>
> "any science explains how things work. designing means proposing
> something that changes how things work."
>
> Could/should the proposed 'design science' be aiming at explaining how
> 'design' activity proposes things (theories, methods, artifacts) that
> change how things work?
I've thought for decades that that's what design science was, as have many of my colleagues in engineering....
National Institute of Education (Singapore) http://www.nie.edu.sg
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