Erik
I like your approach, but would argue for a natural merger between the
first & third schools of thought,  except for the business part, and with
this amendment: Design thinking is in many ways a highly complex version of
the first school of thought.

I would, wouldn't I, since the whole of my thesis of gramma/topology is
based on my version of "design thinking" ....

I totally agree with the first school of thought, especially for design
education, but then ... I start asking questions (which is what I did in
class, to destabilise the students' cosy knowledge of design, even what
they thought I had written in my articles).

"... design as an activity that is defined by such thinkers as Schon,
Rittel, Cross, Krippendorf, Nelson & Stolterman,
etc. It is a school of thought that sees designing as an open, complex
and highly
non-linear process determined by the particular situation and
governed by the designer's judgment."

Proposal: see design as this activity - of the mind, first and formost,
before any action is contemplated.
How is this activity defined, how can we begin to understand? - start with
examining and questioning the work of design thinkers ... BUT, how can a
proto-designer thinker such as a student begin to think like they do? We
often end up with massive plagiarism (a topic discussed just this morning
on our radio).
For design to be open - it is a conversation with the "other", and the
first "other" are these design thinking authors. So, how do we have a
design conversation? Here I shall shamelessly plug my own work: Cybernetic
conversations @  https://www.academia.edu/474855/Cybernetic_conversations

To get at the heart of what design (as the above activity, as conversation)
can be, one must begin to realise just how complex and non-linear the
process is / can be. What on earth is a complex and non-linear
conversation? My answer? Design thinking. And here we start again, with me
helping the students learn how to learn (another version of learning how to
think), and having them take apart terms such as complexity & non-linear.

Of course this is a highly dense topic of discussion, but thank you for
starting this thread. Below is a small sliver of my own thought processes:

"My (main research) argument will lead inevitably towards an argument for
abduction (discussed chiefly in the last two chapters), being the only
humanly and socially acceptable form of argumentation for design thinking.
I shall be working with the theories of Charles Sanders Peirce,
specifically, and in resistance to (not the exclusion of) both induction
and deduction, as I believe Peirce uses his notion of a final abductive
logic. The original Latin root seems quite significant for design thinking,
in that *abducere* means to lead away. Design is a reciprocal conversation
with the other, an ongoing developmental dialogue with people and objects,
and as such design is always elsewhere, meaning that „design‟ itself is not
the object, nor even just the process, but fully the person doing the
„designing‟ in conjunction with the people (and objects, events) that are
being designed for. This means that design is a leading away from so-called
reality, or the material forms of life, towards design as the symbolic
forms of life and living. No argument for induction nor for deduction can
be adequate to encompass what we cannot see but that we all understand: the
objectivation of human subjectivity, or, the social construction of reality
seen only in its traces of the real, mere indicators of the intention of
human action, a difficult route to take at best in terms of explaining
human communicative processes.

An argument for abduction has to be combined with Barthes‟ explanation of
how signifiers and the signified operate through traces, and Eco‟s
(1976:249-250) work that asks, how is it possible to visually represent,
not the unknown, but the known? (cf. Chapter 1:27). To visually represent
the known, as Norretranders (1998:75) has shown, is very difficult, because
we are trying to express the complex and not the surface narratives behind
appearances, and for that we need to get rid of a lot of information,
indeed, get rid of a lot of what we can label knowledge (:25), because what
we need to express complexity is exformation (:92), the information that we
discard not because it is not used, on the contrary, as traces of the
so-called real (that is so difficult to express in the first place) this
„discarded‟ information is very much present-in-absence (discussed below).
The „content‟ of our narratives does not depend on the visible (only), but
depend for the most part on the „invisible‟14, the traces that fill
Barthes‟ empty signifiers: Just as we are about to declare this is design
or this is research they dissolve and appear elsewhere (or worse, as
something else), leaving the indexical nature of the work, or the trace of
the real, behind. The structures of both design and of research involve the
deliberate construction of 'empty signifiers' that cannot be seen outside
their respective contexts.

As I write below, the real differences, the ones that matter and that can
be put to use (the traces that we look for and can learn to „see‟) for
interpretation and understanding, are not present, at the start, except in
absence, since they are probabilities and variables only, building blocks
for myths and narratives, and not defined elements for metanarratives that
allow no participation but only a consumptive conformity. To speak to the
human condition, as myth does, we need to draw borders(15) around our
visible constructions (narratives, designed objects), but, as Merleau-Ponty
stated, in his phenomenological book *The Visible and the Invisible*
(1968), very much along the lines taken by Heidegger himself, the essence
of the visible does not lie with what we can see, now, but with the effects
of the „empty signifiers‟ of exformation, the invisible, i.e., the effects
of the phenomenon of emergence.

(15) Drawing borders as a term is meant to refer to, not our bounded ways
of thought, but to the notion of our natural performance of the framing
action, an action that denotes not a fixed border, but the exformation the
framing action refers to."

Johann




-- 
Dr. Johann van der Merwe
Independent Design Researcher


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