Dear Stephan et al.,
I think we are all discussing many matters
at the same time, though all related to design thinking. In my view, some
things depend on your end aim: what are you trying to achieve with your
communication?: Inform?, Sell design thinking?, Make a best-seller?, Contribute
knowledge for the growth of the discipline?. Your audience’s needs, as in any
design endeavour, are important to acknowledge in order to decide how to
present a topic.
I’d categorize the matters in stake in the
following way:
A. Contemporary design thinking for the
public
B. Research on design thinking, within a
research audience
C. Origins of design thinking
D. Proprietorship of the term design
thinking
I will build only a bit on each item as
time is short. Only enough to (hopefully) make the matters understandable and
debatable.
A. Contemporary design thinking for the
public:
Stephane, the information needs of your
general audience are probably quite basic, if compared to the needs of design
thinking researchers. Still, I sense there is a need from design thinking
researchers here too: If you generalize design thinking to the general public
as an IDEO construct or similar full stop, then people will stick with this
definition and disregard the whole background, richness and complexity of
design thinking, for good. You can communicate the most widespread concepts on
design thinking as such, and hopefully also make the case for ‘the other side
of the coin’. You’d have to be a great communicator and communication designer;
as you say, “I believe
that strong concepts can be clearly and simply defined, in a few words”… maybe
also through infodesign J. Nonetheless, design thinking is still to
become a robust, unique and unified concept.
B. Research on design thinking, within a
research audience:
The debates of the design thinking research
community can be made available to the public if simplified. Still,
researchers’ audience is mainly other researchers. In this domain, design
thinking is something like a teenager… we still don’t know exactly what it is,
and it tries to be one thing and the other and we can’t stop it. We are all
working on building it as a field of knowledge. It’s unstable for now. There
are the cognitive issues on the way designers think, which for obvious
linguistic reasons end up being called design thinking. Also, then there are
the developments of entities like IDEO and Stanford who are broadly using the
term: the former, as a practising entity, and the latter as a research,
education and practice entity. IDEO and Stanford practice “their” design
thinking, and Stanford does much research about it too.
C. Origins of design thinking
Point B leads me to this next matter.
Lately some colleagues and I have been concluding that there is no single
origin for design thinking. Designers and design engineers have been somewhat separately
and simultaneously developing design thinking which finds itself in a juncture.
In Spanish, we have a word that I have discovered does not exist in English:
‘coyuntura’. Discussing it with colleagues in Australia and the US I have got
two nice interpretations: ‘the alignment of the stars’ and ‘synchronicity’. I
believe this is the time in history in which it all has to come together, for
many global reasons. It is important to know the origins for historical
constructs, but we could all benefit from being more open and less apprehensive
as to who, which discipline, and where created design thinking.
All for today!
Hope to continue getting thoughts.
As Stefanie, I am working on my PhD thesis
at Swinburne University, focusing on design thinking matters. All these
discussions are helpful.
Best,
Maria F. CamachoDoctoral Design Research FellowPart-Time lecturer – Swinburne Design FactorySchool of DesignSwinburne University of TechnologyMelbourne – Australia
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