Friends,

The current thread -- "How 'Design Thinking Research' and 'Design Thinking' are related (or not)?” -- occasions two quick thoughts.

1) The thread involves somewhat unclear language. While it is difficult to use specific, common terms for all conversations and every purpose, it would help to define what the terms mean for the current thread. Or, perhaps, it would help if those who post define what they mean when they use these terms. While I appreciate Stephane Vial’s question and the issues that come from it, the initial post seems to use the term “design thinking research” with three different meanings. These different meanings are: 

1.1) research specifically involving the process labeled design thinking, as for example, the Design Thinking Research Symposium, 

1.2) research involving design practice or design process, and 

1.3) research involving how designers know, think, or work, which may not in most cases involve the specific process labeled design thinking.

These issues are not mutually exclusive. Nevertheless, they overlap or intersect in different ways, and these can be very different depending on context. Most forms of design practice and design education involve traditional approaches based on direct iterative action. These resemble the design approach of the artisan craft guild tradition. In the context of this thread, Terry Love used the term intuition to describe this approach. Without attempting to define intuition closely, I take this in the common meaning defined by Merriam-Webster’s  "a natural ability or power that makes it possible to know something without any proof or evidence, a feeling that guides a person to act a certain way without fully understanding why, something that is known or understood without proof or evidence.” It is problematic to infer that research in design process involves research in design thinking.

Some research in design thinking involves studying the thought processes of expert designers. Even so, relatively few designers among all design practitioners demonstrate the level of expertise that we see in serious case studies of the kind for which Nigel Cross is known.  

While all designers think, relatively few designers among all working design firms practice the method labeled design thinking. Rather, the majority of designers use the different traditional design processes that they learned as students and junior designers. Even so, many people in many fields do practice design thinking. This includes designers, and it includes people in many different professions, notably people in different design-related branches of management consulting, product development, problem solving, and engineering.

The kind of design thinking practice that is related to design thinking research is primarily the kind that one might study when one specifically studies design thinking. This would be a tautology if design thinking meant the same thing to everyone, but ambiguity means that there are at least three meanings, as I noted.

2) Design thinking is only one label for a process of strategic problem solving used in many fields. One of the issues of design thinking that make it both fruitful and difficult to define is the fact that there exist many labels and descriptions for relatively similar processes. This involves two separate challenges:

2.1) One challenge involves labels and nomenclature. Within the fields of professional design practice, various versions of the process that some label “design thinking” are labeled as “design-led innovation,” “integrative thinking,” and “design integration.” Where design practice intersects with management, we see “strategic design” (the label for my courses at Oslo Business School in the late 1980s and early 1990s) and “frame creation” (Kees Dorst’s approach, and the title of his forthcoming book). “Strategic design” is also the label the Helsinki Design Lab used for projects taking a design approach to urban planning and public service assignments in education, government, and other fields. Various processes developed names simply because the people who developed those systems were the first to use them in a specific industry — for example, some segments of the airline industry use the term “interaction method” for a form of design thinking developed by Anders Skoe. One of the oldest methods I know of is Buckminster Fuller’s “design science event flow.” Fuller published one version of it in his 1969 book Utopia or Oblivion, but there are earlier versions. 

2.2) The other challenge involves understanding the process steps in slightly differing models that actually align quite closely. That is, different design thinking models with different names can often be mapped onto one another quite effectively. There are grey zones and overlaps, but the big picture issues are quite similar. Fuller’s “design science event flow” can be mapped onto Skoe’s “interaction method,” and both of these can be mapped onto different design process models. Maria Camacho is undertaking research to align and synthesise several models. I hope that her work will clarify and resolve this challenge.

Greater clarity in using and defining terms would be a real help in the conversation about design thinking. While it is my view that there are some genuine and substantive challenges and problems here, I suspect that careful attention to the way we describe and address these challenges would go a long way to moving us from minor problems arising from ambiguity to the more interesting and substantive challenges we face.

With best wishes,

Ken

Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Elsevier in Cooperation with Tongji University | Launching in 2015 

Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Swinburne University of Technology ||| Adjunct Professor | School of Creative Arts | James Cook University | Townsville, Australia 

Email [log in to unmask] | Academia http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn 

Telephone: International +46 727 003 218 — In Sweden (0) 727 003 218


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