Design Thinking: doing, feeling, connecting, thinking and doing, and...

Now that Design Thinking has reached the general newspapers (have a look at the New York Times on Design Thinking), and that the "Design Thinking" term has spiked in Goggle Trends, I just want to compare the popular way of understanding this activity and how it is thought and talked about by people that do really practice it.

On the one hand, the NYT article gives a fast overview including well known success cases. The usual suspects appear as well: IDEO, Stanford's D.school and so on. From the journalist point of view,  Design Thinking would be a methods used to created new objects and services that has much more interaction with users than was usual previously. She sketches a very linear picture of the whole process:

While definitions vary, design thinking usually involves a period of field research — usually close observation of people — to generate inspiration and a better understanding of what is needed, followed by open, nonjudgmental generation of ideas. After a brief analysis, a number of the more promising ideas are combined and expanded to go into “rapid prototyping,” which can vary from a simple drawing or text description to a three-dimensional mock-up. Feedback on the prototypes helps hone the ideas so that a select few can be used.

The sequence would be:

(1)  Field research

(2) Observation

(3) Analysis

(4) Prototype creation

(5) Selection of the final idea

Sounds familiar, doesn't it?. It should because, as one of the interviewed people says :

“It’s the designers’ version of the scientific method”

So, here we have a first reduction of Design Thinking to something already known.  A final sentence from the Executive Director of Stanford's D.School contributes a second reduction:

"“It would be overreaching to say that design thinking solves everything. That’s putting it too high on a pedestal,” [...]

“Business thinking plus design thinking ends up being far more powerful.”"

So, with the help of the New York Times, one can get the idea that design Thinking is another ability of designers that interact with users as passive objects of study, much in the same vein that Science works in the subject/object dichotomy. Moreover, only after the acquisition by designers of some managing abilities or with the collaborative help of MBAs, does Design Thinking amount to something of real value. 

To put if very briefly, designers have to become scientists and need MBAs to have any impact. 

Sorry but I don't buy it. And it might very well be that Design Thinking is much more than that.

Let's start by saying that there is a long tradition that starts with Herbert Simon and others that takes this argument and turns it upside down, i.e., it considers that, to start with, sscientific method is a form of design thinking, not the other way around as the popular media has it. Besides that, another strand of thinking in organization and managing studies stresses the fact that management is by itself a process of design and that good managers excel at design thinking. Just have a look at "Managing as Designing" edited by Karl Weick in order to get a hint of this way of conceptualizing the management practice. It is not a matter of creating artist or design managers but to get people (managers or other) to use the same cognitive strategies as (typical) designers and other creatives use.

But what is this way of thinking like?

No one better to answer the question than a "Master of Design" who has reflected, and quite a lot, about how he thinks when he designs. Here Arnold Wasserman answers the questions posed by   Taxi Design Network. He shows a very different vision from the other sources about what Design Thinking is and about who can use and develop it.

Having been named one of “20 Masters of Design” by Fast Company magazine and being one of the pioneers in the practice of user-centered, multidisciplinary product development as a competitive business strategy, how do you envision this entire regime to evolve within the next generation of fully Internet-savvy users?

Arnold Wasserman>>I want to answer this question by talking about how designers think and how we need to think about design now.

What most people understand as ‘design’ has to do with familiar material objects - from Arne Jacobson chairs to iPhones, from H&M fashion to the Swatch Smart Car, from Frank Gehry museums to sustainable green communities. Design today is evolving along new paths and at an accelerating pace, blurring the traditional boundaries of design and compounding the ambiguity between ‘design as product’ - physical, tangible stuff - and ‘design as process’ - a way of thinking, a set of cognitive skills, methods, tools and techniques having intrinsic value in their own right. Those of us who were trained in design schools and who work every day in a design studio - industrial designers, architects, communications designers, digital media designers - know tacitly what design thinking is. We do it every day (although it must be said that few designers are self-reflective about the process itself or know the epistemology of the field.) What we don’t realize is how alien our way of thinking is to non-designers and how powerful it can be as a cognitive methodology applicable to fields far beyond the traditional scope of design, such as health care, educational transformation and sustainable development — and at larger scales of strategic planning, organizational transformation and public policy.

[...]

Three tenets of design thinking guide my own practice. The first is that designers should apply design thinking to improve life widely beyond the traditional boundaries of design. The second is that everybody can learn design thinking and that designers should disseminate design thinking by collaborating, not only with practitioners from other disciplines but with non-designers - the practice known as ‘co-design’. Finally, design thinking should be embedded in K-12 curricula both as a subject domain in its own right and as a pedagogical structure for teaching academic subject matter.

This interaction with "non-experts" and our profound belief that design can be learned is what drives our philosophy at Citilab. Moreover, we believe that one way to infuse Design Thinking in schools is   vía the ability to design that is brought about by digital technology and digital culture (in Spanish)

Wasserman expands his views and remarks how good designing is a reflective practice, how it creates a state of connection with what is being designed. He recalls this feeling when he describes his memories about an old motorbike, in the spirit of  "Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance".

He also points to the changing role to the designer figure (from star to facilitator) that the Internet has brought about with it. F:

As to internet-savvy users, the emergence of a “Digital Native” culture shifts power from producers to users in ways that challenge what it means “to design.” The shift is from a "Create-and-producer-push" model of design to a "Co-create-and-user-pull" model of design, as exemplified by the explosion of user-generated content in Web 2.0 sites -- games, 3-D virtual worlds, blogs, vlogs and social networks. We are sitting in the middle of a design transformation wherein the designer delivers not the finished product, but the platform, algorithms, objects, scripts and tools for users to create the content themselves. The customer as co-designer is a new and unprecedented design genre that is affecting how all design -- of material as well as virtual artifacts -- will be conceived, executed and experienced from now on.

This, in particular, reminds me of what I learned with Massimo during UrbanLabs, that is: how to design communities that can make emerge groups ... that are able to design.

The rest of the interview wit Wassermann is worth having a reading too. It deals deeper with subjects that have to do with design as a tool to change the world and its implications for developing countries.

I can't finish this (longish) post without stressing the relationship between passion, the activity of doing design itself and the reflective step. It is another case of how reflective thinking is a vital ability. Unfortunately it is an ability that is seldom learned how to practice in schools. It is neither taught onr learned at individual level and much less at the group level. Schools, companies and other organizations are not flagships of reflective practice.

The results are disheartening sometimes. In my experience more often than not, when you try to invite a group into reflective practice what happens is that (a) if anything is done, then there is little grou reflection about what has been learned in doing it or (b) people do reflect a lot about what to do and how to do it but the whole group never gets it done. In opposition to the exploratory and creative aspects that type of reflective practice that Design Thinking is what prevails is argumentative, discursive and defensive talking both individually and colletive. Design Thinking practice is a much needed ability given the challenges that as individuals, organizations and societies we have to confront.  Or so it seems.