The Nature of Design Thinking

In the last few years, 'Design Thinking' has gained popularity - it is now seen as an exciting new paradigm for dealing with problems in sectors as a far afield as IT, Business, Education and Medicine. This potential success challenges the design research community to provide clear and unambiguous answers to two key questions: 'What is the nature of design think- ing?' and 'What could it bring to other professions?'. In this paper we sketch a provisional answer to these questions by first considering the reasoning pattern behind design thinking, and then enriching this picture by linking in key concepts from models of design activity and design thinking that have emerged over the last twenty years of design research

Design problems and design paradoxes

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Design beyond Design

© 2019 Tongji University and Tongji University Press As organizations struggle to respond to a world in which problems are becoming more open, complex and increasingly networked, many have turned to design thinking as a way to obtain solutions and achieve innovation. In this article, I will focus on the question of whether the current design paradigm is capable of delivering on these expectations, or whether design is overextended when dealing with areas of great complexity, such as in the social realm. The fact that at its core, design reasoning or design abduction requires the consideration of two unknowns more or less simultaneously (the “what” and the “how”) puts a heavy strain on our human cognitive limitations in the best of times—and doubly so in highly complex problem situations. Over the years, expert designers have developed an elaborate array of coping strategies to contend with this issue. All of these help to a degree, but the fundamental issue remains. Design might be limiting itself by approaching complex problem situations through a ‘problem solving’ perspective. In this article, a radically different approach is explored, which takes the complex nature of the problem situation as its starting point, and reframes the task of design as system transformation, rather than the creation of a solution. An example from practice illustrates this new design paradigm

The integration of design parameters and the establishment of constraint and priority for innovation

This paper presents a new model for setting constraints and priority for contextualising innovation and iteration events during the course of new design development. It achieves this by establishing and dynamically integrating three parameter fields deemed critical to project success, setting the scope of innovation opportunity more broadly yet more strategically to enable productive re-framing of open-ended design tasks. It is proposed that contemporary design practice requires a means of establishing criteria and enabling short feedback loops for high quality innovations to result. The integrated parameter model presented in this paper seeks to support these objectives by rationalising the context of the innovation developed, determining the impact of pursuit of that innovation on associated parameters and providing a focus for connecting with various support for productive and timely feedback on ideas

Briefing and Reframing

The ability to reframe a problematic situation in new and interesting ways is widely seen as one of the key characteristics of design thinking, and as one that would lend itself to application beyond the traditional design professions. In this paper we study how experienced designers have professionalised the crucial art of frame communication and new frame adoption with their clients. During briefing, professional designers elicit a client's frame, re- frame it to be more workable and desirable, and reflect it back. The iterative exchange at the start of a project is loaded with framing and reframing episodes. In this study fifteen highly experienced visual communications designers were interviewed and asked about briefing activities for what they deemed to be 'typical' and 'innovative' projects. This yielded rich descriptions of strategies that these professional designers used to enable reframing of the situation with non-designers, insights into possible difficulties and patterns of briefing practices. The paper concludes with an overview of activities and strategies that help with framing and reframing, as well as modes of communication that assist with sharing frames

Comparing Frame Creation and TRIZ: from model to methodology

In this paper we discuss a core quality of expert design practice, the ability to create new approaches to problems. If design can be seen as connecting Humanity to Technology, then the Frame Creation model we will introduce here focuses on the Human side of the problem, while an Engineering Design methodology like Theory of Inventive Problem Solving [TRIZ] does the same for the technical side of the equation. We will first illustrate such a complex Frame Creation project, using an example to establish an informal proof-of-concept. This raises the question how may we move from such a proof-of-concept to critically develop and validate a complete methodology. To answer this question we will draw parallels between the evolution of the well-developed and accepted TRIZ in Engineering Design, and the continuing evolutionary trajectory of “Frame Creation”

Applying Design Thinking Elsewhere: Organizational context matters

In this contribution design thinking is taken as a transfer of design methods from product development to other domains. It is argued that the success of this transfer depends on the organisational context offered to design thinking in these other domains. We describe the application of design methods in product development and in two new domains by what we have called the IDER model, where D refers to design and I, E and R to the organisational context. Then we show that characteristics of the contexts in the new domains may determine the success of applying design thinking in these domains. Finally we focus on the transitions among design and the other contextual elements as another source that can ‘make or break’ the success of applying design thinking. We support our arguments with two cases of design thinking: social design and business-innovation design

Framing in design: A formal analysis and failure modes

This contribution presents a formal description of the design practice of framing and identifies two general modes in which framing can lead to failure in design projects. The first is called the goal reformulation failure mode and occurs when designers reformulate the goal of the client in a design task and give design solutions that solve the reformulated goal but not the original goal. The second is called the frame failure mode and occurs when designers propose a frame for the design task that cannot be accepted by the client. The analysis of framing and its failure modes is aimed at better understanding this design practice and provides a first step towards arriving at criteria that successful applications of framing should meet. The description and the failure modes are illustrated by critically considering an initially successful case of framing, namely the redesign of the Kings Cross entertainment district in Sydney

How deep is deep? A four-layer model of insights into human needs for design innovation

It is generally acknowledged that knowledge about the people that are affected by a design proposal, supports successful design and innovation processes. In this paper we explore the question: what needs to be known about involved people to be able to innovate through design? Based on a literature analysis of human-centred design we propose a model with four levels of human insights: 1) the desired solutions; 2) the desired scenarios; 3) which goal drives this need; and 4) which human value or theme underlies these goals. We argue that radical innovation-which involves a reframe of the problem-can be supported by an investigation of the deepest level of this human insights framework: the thematic level. We show how themes are explored through a hermeneutic phenomenological exercise. This approach is illustrated with a design case in the context of social housing

Can existing usability techniques prevent tomorrow's usability problems?

Product usability is a product quality that ensures efficient and effective products which satisfy users. In spite of the many usability techniques that are available many users still experience usability problems when using electronic products. In this paper we present two studies that explore the (mis)match between the types of uncertainty addressed by existing usability techniques and the types of uncertainty in the product development process that can eventually result in usability problems. To explore this (mis)match, two studies are presented. The first study is to discover which usability techniques are used in practice to retrieve usability information to address the different types of uncertainty. The second study is a case study in product development practice which explores the types of uncertainty that causes the usability problems of a specific product. The overall contribution of this paper is that it offers greater insight into how usability techniques (do not) address uncertainty in the product development process