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Friends, As I see it, there are several core issues in design thinking. Buckminster Fuller's (1969: 319) model of the design process incorporates the necessary steps in any design process. "Design thinking" must occur before the process begins, along the way, and during it. The subjective process of search and research, Fuller outlines a series of steps: teleology -- > intuition -- > conception -- > apprehension -- > comprehension -- > experiment -- > feedback -- > Under generalization and objective development leading to practice, he lists: prototyping #1 -- > prototyping #2 -- > prototyping #3 -- > production design -- > production modification -- > tooling -- > production -- > distribution -- > installation -- > maintenance -- > service -- > reinstallation -- > replacement -- > removal -- > scrapping -- > recirculation Fuller used industrial language, but the steps in his model cover design processes of all kinds, industrial or not. How we "think" our way through this process is, of course, the object of much study. I tend to agree with Chris that the challenge of what Rittel (1972) and Rittel and Webber (1973) identified as wicked problems plays a key role, since certain kinds of problems distinguish design activities from other kinds of activities. Dick Buchanan's (1992) key article serves as an excellent introduction. Like Chris, I am puzzled by the frequent tendency to note wicked problems with a quick reference to this seminal article but no deeper reflection on the ten or eleven issues that make a wicked problem wicked, and no recourse to the original Rittel and Webber papers. Despite the importance of wicked problems in design, I'd argue that many design problems are not wicked problems. One of the important reasons for understanding wicked problems is that this understanding allows us to sort out tame and tractable problems within design process precisely so that we can address wicked problems in different ways. Because many wicked problems involve normative questions -- taste, politics, values -- there are also ways to manage wicked problems through dialogue, negotiation, and ethics. In this sense we do not "solve" wicked problems because wicked problems have not solution. What we do is manage them through different kinds of processes, understanding management itself as a design process. This issue that has emerged as an important research theme in recent years, now the subject of a book (Boland and Collopy 2004) and a rich web site at http://design.case.edu/. Managing, of course, fits Simon's (1969, 1998) seminal definition of design, and many of us treat management as one of the several design sciences. In my view, other issues come into play. Much of the interesting research of recent years has been part of the effort to ask what happens when we think as designers. Chris points to one of my favorites, the late Henryk Gedenryd's (1998) doctoral thesis. Louis Bucciarelli (1994), and Henry Petroski (1994, 1997) also address these issues. So does Nigel Cross's (2006) new book. Chris Rust does the field a great service by maintain a copy of Henryk's thesis on his web site at: http://www.chrisrust.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/academic/resources/gedenryd.htm While the post that launched this thread conflated philosophy of design with design thinking, I'd suggest that these are not identical. Philosophy of design covers more than epistemology and ontology of design, and the question of how designers think. I've considered this larger range of issues in several articles (Friedman 2001, 2002, 2003), but I won't attempt to address them in a post that is already too long. At the risk of irking those who don't like referenced notes on PhD-Design, I've given reference to the documents I discuss here to allow people to find and read them directly. Best regards, Ken References Boland, Richard, and Fred Collopy. 2004. Managing as Designing. Stanford University Press. Bucciarelli, Louis L. 1994. Designing Engineers. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Buchanan, Richard. 1992. "Wicked Problems in Design Thinking." Design Issues, vol. 8, no. 2 (Spring), pp. 5-21. Cross, Nigel. 2006. Designerly Ways of Knowing. London: Springer Verlag. Friedman, Ken. 2001. "Creating Design Knowledge: From Research into Practice." Design and Technology Educational Research and Development: The Emerging International Research Agenda. E. W. L. Norman and P. H. Roberts, eds. Loughborough, UK: Department of Design and Technology, Loughborough University, 31-69. Friedman, Ken. 2002. "Theory Construction in Design Research. Criteria, Approaches, and Methods." Common Ground. Proceedings of the Design Research Society International Conference at Brunel University, September 5-7, 2002. David Durling and John Shackleton, Editors. Stoke on Trent, UK: Staffordshire University Press. Friedman, Ken. 2003. "Theory construction in design research: criteria: approaches, and methods." Design Studies, 24 (2003), 507-522. Fuller, Buckminster. 1969. Utopia or Oblivion. The Prospects for Humanity. New York: Bantam Books. Gedenryd, Henrik. 1998. How Designers Work. Making Sense of Authentic Cognitive Activities. Lund University Cognitive Studies [No.] 75. Lund, Sweden: Lund University. Petroski, Henry. 1994. Design Paradigms: Case Histories of Error and Judgment in Engineering. New York: Cambridge University Press. Petroski, Henry. 1997. Invention by Design. How Engineers Get from Thought to Thing. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Rittel, H. 1972. On the planning crisis: Systems analysis of the "first and second generations." Bedrifts Okonomen, 8, 390-396. Rittel, Horst .W. J. and Webber, Melvin M. "Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning," Policy Sciences, 1973, 4:155-169. Simon, Herbert. 1969. The Sciences of the Artificial. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Simon, Herbert. 1998. The Sciences of the Artificial. 3rd ed. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. -- Prof. Ken Friedman Institute for Communication, Culture, and Language Norwegian School of Management Oslo Center for Design Research Denmark's Design School Copenhagen +47 46.41.06.76 Tlf NSM +47 33.40.10.95 Tlf Privat email: [log in to unmask]