Design Thinking sits squarely in a Cartesian world of divided minds and bodies in spite of the fact that recent advances in evolutionary theory and cognitive science point to the inseparability of what is called the "hand-brain complex."
Anne Burdick, Design Without Designers
I grow more bothered by the week with the phrase "design thinking." I know full well that I am fighting a losing battle, but I think it is an unfortunate term for describing what designers have to offer to other disciplines, which seems the most common reason for using the term. As is a way of talking about what designers can contribute to areas beyond the domains in which they have traditionally worked, about how they can improve the tasks of structuring interactions, organizations, strategies and societies, it is a weak term.
The phrase has gained currency in part because it suggests that there are multiple kinds of thinking. Design thinking serves as a complement to analytic thinking, critical thinking, conceptual thinking, and other forms or modes of thought. Most often it is the first of these "analytic thinking" that is the target concern of design thinking's advocates. They argue that analysis does not provide everything that is needed to cope with the complexities that face us. Deduction (the logic of necessity) and induction (the logic of probability) need to be supported by abduction (the logic of possibilities). The former two logics are in wide use by analysts, but the latter one has been the province of designers. And there are other aspects to the designer's way of thinking that would benefit organizations and society as well.
I am in agreement with these observations. But they stop short of the real contribution that could be made. For it is not in the modes of thought that designers most distinguish themselves, but in their actions. Designers act differently than analysts or decision-makers. Design is an extreme activity. It tends to call on all of the faculties of those engaged in it. It is contextual. It is embodied. It uses the whole person's mind and body, left brain and right, hand and heart, analysis and taste. And it never gets enough of any of them.
I think that the reason we find ourselves here is because so many who have created and nurtured the design thinking notion have as a principal point of departure Rittel's ideas of design as a means for attacking wicked problems. In Rittel's view design is essentially a planning process. It is understandable that much design is best conceived in this way, since the costs associated with making changes can often be exceedingly great once the execution of a project gets underway. It is probably no accident that the original use of the phrase design thinking was as the title for a book written by an architect (Peter Rowe). But there are other theories of design, and many design domains, where the separation between the designing phase and the implementation phase is not so extreme. In those types of design there is less distinction between thinking and acting. Many of the problems being explored by those interested in moving design into other arenas are of this variety.
Another unfortunate problem with the phrase design thinking is linguistic. By making design into an adjective we relegate it to the role of a moderator. One of the things that Dick Boland and I enthusiastically commented on in our early writing about design was the vitality of the very word itself, given its noun and verb forms. I think it is so much more powerful, demanding, and relevant to invite lawyers, doctors, politicians and business people to design rather than to engage in design thinking. I think that the product of the former is more likely to be perceived as — and to be — an actual design, rather than a plan, a report, an idea, or some other conceptual or intellectual byproduct.
The relationship of action and thought, of hand and brain, is captured nicely by Maya Lin in her book Boundaries where she declares: "I think with my hands." And in Sketching User Experiences Bill Buxton puts the act of sketching at the very center of design. For him, design "gets down and dirty" and its archetypal activity is sketching. "I am not asserting that the activity of sketching is design. Rather, I am just making the point that any place that I have seen design, in the sense that I want to discuss it in this book, it has been accompanied by sketching."
So if thinking is at the center of the activity that we want to encourage, it is not the kind of thinking that doctors and lawyers, professors and business people already do. It is not a feet up, data spread across the desk to be absorbed kind of thinking. It is a pencil in hand, scribbling on the board sort of thinking. And while that may be obvious to those close to the process already, I am afraid it is not what folks conjure up when they first hear the phrase design thinking.
Language matters. I cannot help thinking that we are selling our ideas short given the momentum behind the current choice of language. And I wonder, how much designing and/or thinking has actually gone into "design thinking."
Related Stories: | Topics:Innovation, Leadership, Management, Design, design thinking, wicked problems, design as a verb, Anne Burdick, Maya Lin, Dick Boland, Peter Rowe |
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Recent Comments | 16 Total
July 9, 2009 at 10:14am by Fergus Bisset
Really enjoyed this Fred! It's the word thinking, that causes the problem. As you say Design is a process, an activity, thought but also action. I'm being deliberately provocative here but was "Design Thinking" not just a term designed to appeal to those managers and business school types that do a lot of "thinking" but not much "action". Design is too important to be left to the thinkers. Thanks for helping us recognise and understand that it's the infectious quality of 'what's possible' that we are really selling as designers.
July 9, 2009 at 12:25pm by Youngjin Yoo
Fred, this is a very good article. One of the things I found in teaching design "thinking" to MBA students is that they sometimes find it hard to get out to the field to see what is happening out there. They want to stay in classrooms and meeting rooms, brainstorming and generating ideas. So many times, I had to confront them, pointing out that their problems are not the lack of ideas, but the lack of data (real data) from the field.
Also, this is in part why the use of Post-Its and other tools are so powerful. They get students out of their seats and "work" on the ideas, physically seeing how their ideas are being shaped and morphed.
July 9, 2009 at 12:40pm by Arne van Oosterom
Hi Fred,
As always I like your thinking.
The term design thinking is being used in so many different ways that it is hard to keep up.
What's in a name? Apparently a lot. I've just been involved in a lengthy discussion about the meaning of innovation and social innovation... after hours of talking I had to leave the room to get some air. People like to overcomplicated things and dig in don't they.
I think the rise of design thinking is a signal that there is a shift taking place. And this shift is creating open spaces for other ways of thinking. It should function as a sign to marketeers, business people, governments and educators. People are changing their behavior, go outside your corporate cocoon and take a look. If you dare.
On a practical level, to me design thinking means being capable of lateral thinking, making new combinations and connections, and having strong empathic abilities.
These qualities happen to be very important tools for designers. Specially emphatic abilities. Without developing and using these a designer becomes an artist.
But you don't have to be a designer to be a design thinker. I know many design thinkers who would never call themselves a designer. This is what I like about it. Not another group of experts, but something we can and should all develop and learn to use.
And I am certainly not looking for the one and only definition. I think that we should never settle for a definition. We should always disagree and have discussions. This is when we grow and learn. And I have so much learning to do.
--
Arne Van Oosterom
Owner and Strategic Design Director DesignThinkers
Chairman Service Design Network Netherlands
July 9, 2009 at 2:27pm by Hans Gärtner
Fred,
As always I enjoyed your post and I can include your thoughts in teaching management thinking and(!) acting (whatever that is…) to my design students.
From my practical project experience in working with designers – for instance in Corporate Design processes – I just wanted to add that designers and managers do follow different approaches (thinking and acting) in addressing a given project, problem or issue. Selecting a profession means being influenced by special interests, and these interests include typical ways of thinking and acting. This particular way of thinking is enforced and strengthened in the course of professional education resulting in a specific language, methodology, peer group a.s.o. (The result is that members of the same profession working in different organizations -be it controllers, designers, engineers, marketers- are often closer to each other than a mixed team of different professions within the same organization.)
Professional education and socialization do have an impact: it starts with (1) selection for a particular professional field and is enforced by (2) socialization processes. The effect: people with different approaches to problem solving, tasks and projects.
For me collaboration and bringing together people with different professional backgrounds in a joint process is essential for good design results - of products, services, organizations, communication tools and the like.
July 9, 2009 at 2:28pm by bob roan
Maya Lin's comment about hand and brain reminds me of Gaston Bachelard's ideas about the poetics of matter in which he describes two axes along with the imagination develops. The formal imagination is concerned with putting something into form and the material imagination engages the subject matter in an unstructured way.
July 9, 2009 at 3:59pm by Nicolae Halmaghi
Fred,
You hit the right nerve.
To answer your last question…”how much designing / thinking has gone in "design thinking"?
Thousands and thousands of hours; just ask (I wish we could) Bucky Fuller or Charles and Ray Eames, from the old guard, or maybe Dieter Rams and Hartmut Esslinger. (FYI Esslingers book “A fine Line” was just released)
I believe Design Thinking is a highly evolved form of design. Only a few mastered design thinking, and even fewer even understood what those guys were talking about. Design Thinking was covered underneath traditional design until Bruce Mau, in his amazing work “Massive Change”, exposed design thinking with all its potential. There it was, on a plate, in front of our eyes: think about it, explore it, use it, do good. All we needed to do was to find a nice, elegant, clear “design-worthy” definition of this new exiting design field.
Today, most descriptions of Design Thinking sound something like this: Throw in some abductive logic, suppress as much as possible deductive logic, add some rapid prototyping sprinkle a healthy amount of human centered research, mix in some generic design knowledge, put it in the blender and out comes “Design Thinking”. What a crock of s…t.
In design, there is an eloquent term that describes this phenomenon: Garbage In – Garbage Out. Design Thinking has been suffering from this malaise ever since articles in reputable publications recognized it’s potential and all of a sudden every Tom, Dick and Harry became a design thinker over night. Very similar to the emergence of the Internet sites where everybody became instantly a designer, sorry a “user experience specialist”
Design Thinking without Design Doing is worthless. WORTHLESS. Actually it is detrimental to the business world. It confuses because the word “design” itself insinuates something tactile and tangible to most left-brain anchored enterprises. So my advice: leave “design” out…call it “creative thinking” and I promise everybody will jump on the innovation bandwagon.
You don’t need to be a designer to practice Design Thinking, but you need to know and understand more about design than designers do.
That’s the reason why Design Thinking can be taught in business schools and in Design Schools. The focus shifts but the core structure of Design Thinking stays the same. They both speak the same language. In-sync they are more powerful than the sum of all of their parts.
OPTIMAL Design Thinking operates parallel, simultaneously and in sync with design doing. It is tightly interwoven. You break the bond and Design Thinking becomes nothing more than “generic-customized-creative thinking”, which is better than zero creative thinking, but has little to do with the potential of DT.
“Design Thinking:” was, and still is the right term to describe a process, a methodology a way of thinking and solving that is inherent ONLY to the design disciplines.
It is a field, within the domain of design, whose overall potential was exposed by Bruce Mau, coined as Design Thinking by Tom Kelly, hijacked by the business intelligentia, diluted by Tom Dick and Harry and is in need of a serious strategic overhaul by expert DT practitioners, informed and DT critics and writers, enlightened DT adopters and TD educated teachers.
Cheers
Nicolae
July 9, 2009 at 4:00pm by Lucy Kimbell
Fred
Good that you are initiating a move away from this unfortunate term. To paraphrase Bruno Latour talking about Actor-Network-Theory, the problem with the phrase Design Thinking is the word design and the word thinking. I agree with some of your points but would make some slightly different ones:
- If we attend to descriptions of designers' activities that are rooted in say ethnography, rather than cognitive science, then we will find that there is more of an emphasis on the practices or doings of designers. Albena Yaneva's ethnography of architect Rem Koolhaas's firm, for example, makes clear quite how much fiddling around with things is essential to their 'thinking'.
- I am yet to be convinced that designers have some special claim to abductive thinking, more than scientists, say, and as if they do not do so much deduction and induction. Think of a prototype or sketch. Depending on the particular context in which it is created and engaged with, it could be used to generate ideas and open up new possibilities, give form to a generalisation, or test a hypothesis.
- I resist the idea that designers do not do analytical thinking and that Design Thinking is somehow a different (better?) way of looking at the world. Designers do analyse, but what they analyse are sets of relations between people and people and people and things and other forms of life. All researchers do analysis, and designers, in their practices, are at some points required to analyse what we might call their data. Likewise for critical and conceptual thinking.
- Borja de Mozota (2003) draws attention to the etymology of the English word design and its basis in drawing and intention, which underpins what Buxton and others point out about the importance of sketching to design practice. But the word design (in English) is so linked to one institutionalised aspect of design - the industrial and product design profession - it may not be a useful word in the longer term.
July 9, 2009 at 4:00pm by Lucy Kimbell
Fred
Good that you are initiating a move away from this unfortunate term. To paraphrase Bruno Latour talking about Actor-Network-Theory, the problem with the phrase Design Thinking is the word design and the word thinking. I agree with some of your points but would make some slightly different ones:
- If we attend to descriptions of designers' activities that are rooted in say ethnography, rather than cognitive science, then we will find that there is more of an emphasis on the practices or doings of designers. Albena Yaneva's ethnography of architect Rem Koolhaas's firm, for example, makes clear quite how much fiddling around with things is essential to their 'thinking'.
- I am yet to be convinced that designers have some special claim to abductive thinking, more than scientists, say, and as if they do not do so much deduction and induction. Think of a prototype or sketch. Depending on the particular context in which it is created and engaged with, it could be used to generate ideas and open up new possibilities, give form to a generalisation, or test a hypothesis.
- I resist the idea that designers do not do analytical thinking and that Design Thinking is somehow a different (better?) way of looking at the world. Designers do analyse, but what they analyse are sets of relations between people and people and people and things and other forms of life. All researchers do analysis, and designers, in their practices, are at some points required to analyse what we might call their data. Likewise for critical and conceptual thinking.
- Borja de Mozota (2003) draws attention to the etymology of the English word design and its basis in drawing and intention, which underpins what Buxton and others point out about the importance of sketching to design practice. But the word design (in English) is so linked to one institutionalised aspect of design - the industrial and product design profession - it may not be a useful word in the longer term.
lk
July 9, 2009 at 4:20pm by Chris Barnes
Great article, Fred!
You make a compelling point that design is not simply a way of thinking, but a way of doing: a holistic practice that engages multiple ways of thinking.
Unfortunately, the phrase “design thinking” also suggests that designers cannot be capable analytic thinkers, and it gives implicit permission to designers to stay within an equally narrow (abductive) logic. Some in the design community voice complaints about how business people view design as a shallow aesthetic endeavor, but there are examples of design all around us that betray shockingly little analytical thought.
July 9, 2009 at 4:22pm by Howard Johnson
Thanks Fred;
I think this embodied or action orientation is important and clarifies "Design Thinking". After thinking for awhile I wrote this on my blog.
. . . the Cartesian Mind - Body problem, which is frequently being rejected today. One form of rejection is found in the idea, “thought” has it’s genesis in “action”, like how you learn to walk and then you learn to think about where you want to go. A similar idea (attributed to Bakhtin) is that Cartesian thinking unnecessarily divides being from becoming, where the abstractions of disembodied thought never fully capture the actions of our lives or the moral aspects of those actions.
This is important for education that often has it backwards, trying to teach you how to think in order to go out into the world to act. Education would be so much more valuable if there were no dichotomous walls. (i.e. classroom/world, schooling/working, or even the idea that education = a 4 year quest for certification instead of an ongoing quest for knowledge.
July 9, 2009 at 5:11pm by erik roscam abbing
Thanks for being critical and constructive Fred!
As others pointed out in comments before me, design thinking without design action isn't of much value. However, there is a relevant difference between having a design attitude and the actual act designing.
I believe it might be this difference that we are trying to capture when we use the phrase 'design thinking'. Where thinking is passive and largely individual, attitude is more active and social. So I will start to use this term more often. And to add a little linguistic spice to the discussion I will call it 'designerly attitude' since I fully agree with you that we don't want to find design itself at the adjective end of things ;-)
Erik Roscam Abbing
July 9, 2009 at 5:18pm by Raymond Pirouz
Hi Fred,
I wish the term Design Thinking wasn't about 'describing what designers have to offer to other disciplines' but rather about:
1. Learning what design is, and...
2. Learning how the design approach applies to other fields.
In the above two points, I don't use the words "Learning" lightly. I am suggesting that design thinking should -- literally -- have us thinking and openly discussing/debating before jumping to any formal conclusions (after all, that's what we designers do -- we spend lots of time thinking and weighing -- we don't just jump to solutions).
As to the role of design thinking relative to other forms of thinking, I actually don't see design thinking (such that it were) as a separate type of thinking at all, but rather a holistic approach that inherently consists of:
Critical Thinking + Analytical Thinking + Strategic Thinking + Empathetic Thinking + Conceptual Thinking + Creative Thinking + Iterative Thinking
This is why -- to me -- design is relevant to so many fields (with business being one of the many). And this is why I've suggested we take time to understand fully what we're talking about before we limit our thinking with regard to a very fundamental issue.
In that regard, I applaud you on your position.
July 9, 2009 at 5:21pm by Paula Thornton
Everyone can engage in Design Thinking. Not everyone can design everything. We all are required to design every day -- a plan for the day is a design. Design is informed by a variety of activities -- for which Design Thinking, as a discipline, frames.
There is WAY too much baggage on the word "design" that prevents it from being the word of choice to engage in a conversation about gathering people together and/or engaging in related activities. A 'reframing' is needed. Design Thinking might not be the ideal term -- but I for one, have not found a better one.
July 9, 2009 at 8:27pm by anne burdick
Fred,
I can't help but get stuck on the word "thinking" and I appreciate Howard Johnson's comments about embodiment. For me, I'm still concerned about bending design to fit inherited cultural values that place thinking over making. The moment we try to define design's contribution by terms that implicitly devalue defining characteristics of our field, we are headed for trouble.
Is it thinking that we want to encourage? Isn't it about generating more creative responses, innovative solutions, propositions, ideas, cultural stuff, etc.? Generating. Creating new. Producing. Acting. Building. That's what design is good at. And that's exactly what is needed to address not only new business opportunities but the larger wicked problems that you mention. The Obama Administration could put designing to use to address global warming, health care, etc. We don't need more/mere thinking, we need more designing--creative action and ideation.
On the other hand, this catchy now-branded term has caught on to the extent that it allows designers to address a room full of executives and be taken seriously... there is something to be said for assuming the posture that brings about the least resistance. I'm just afraid that we do design-designers a disservice in the process.
--
Anne Burdick
Chair, Graduate Media Design Program
Art Center College of Design
July 10, 2009 at 11:15am by Cathy Clift
I am someone who is trying to move design into other arenas and I'm intrigued by your observation: "here are other theories of design, and many design domains, where the separation between the designing phase and the implementation phase is not so extreme. In those types of design there is less distinction between thinking and acting."
Can anyone give me some examples of this blurring of thinking and acting please? Or tell me where to look?
July 10, 2009 at 12:51pm by Fergus Bisset
Cathy - As Fred indicates sketching is probably the primary example of the blurring between design perception as the root of design thinking and action, this video also makes this point very nicely:
http://www.fergusbisset.com/blog/2009/07/10/steve-stott-talks-about-sket...