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

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