About "design thinking"

Personally, I like Dev Patnaik's suggestion that what is involved is hybrid thinking. It isn't just about how designers do what they do. "The secret isn't design thinking, it's "hybrid thinking": the conscious blending of different fields of thought to discover and develop opportunities that were previously unseen by the status quo."

http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/dev-patnaik/innovation/forget-design-thinking-and-try-hybrid-thinking

I've had this exact topic in the back of my mind for the last few days.

I'm reading "Understanding Design" by Kees Dorst and he makes a distinction between "design" and "problem solving". Unfortunately, I cannot quote the passage right now. But it seems design, to him, is about solving open ended problems where the designer has to do more research, synthesis, and "design" than for "easier" problems.

The difference between design and design thinking is that people are advocating design processes for non-designers. It's perhaps a bit easier to get an engineer to go through a design process (customer insights, don't be afraid to fail often, etc) by essentially giving them a method to use.

It's sort of like saying "Design for non-designers". For those who are afraid to get their feet wet and/or those who think of designers as "those wierdos".

But yeah, at the end of the day, it's just design.

For anyone who doesn't know how to think, I'm going to teach a new class on "thinking thinking."

Here's my take on this question, posted a couple of months ago on the Fast Company site: http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/fred-collopy/manage-designing/thinking-about-design-thinking

I think Glen Mehn has it right. To nondesigners, "design" is a creative behavior performed by art-school grads who make intuitive and inexplicable decisions. It makes them uncomfortable.

In Fred Collopy's quite reasonable article, he says: "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." And here's where I disagree: "design" still has connotations that purely analytic thinkers have difficulty overcoming. You may as well invite them to perform interpretive dance.

That said, I don't know that design thinking is the right phrase, and I still feel the need to define it, or use air quotes, or otherwise work to make sure my audience understands the term.

The only one that comes close for me is (a la Dan Pink) "whole-brain thinking," which unfortunately implies that lawyers, doctors, politicians and business people are only using half a brain now.

Which might be true, but it's not a way to influence people.

Mark, like many designers I had the same initial confused reaction to the concept of "design thinking". Once you understand that it has nothing to do with design and is not intended for designers, you might also share my fear that designers will waste years of their time trying to understand a concept that they already practice every single day.

Design thinking to me is two-step mental discipline. The first step is to understand the needs/problem without thinking about any solutions. This is very hard for anyone to do. We all like to show to others and even to ourselves that we already have the solution for every problem we see. The *problem* with that is that with our hammers, we tend to morph everything we see into nails. We don't *really* take the time to understand the *real* problems, as soon as we see something that we can hit with our hammers, we think we understand it and that is most of the time wrong. Well, it is good enough to fix what is broken but not good enough for coming up with true innovations.

The second part is, once the first part has been done, to start thinking about solutions whether or not the technology exists or not. And then once that ideal solution is clear, the constraints are gradually dealt with one by one keeping in mind the original needs/problems.

Quick fixes, quick wins, grabbing low-hanging fruits, tweaking or usability testing as a research activity are the antithesis of design thinking. I am of the opinion that a lot of designers do little design thinking.

This triggered a memory about a book I read a long long time ago. Balancing the "romantic" (aesthetic) with the "classic" (measurable/rational) perceptions of the world, argues the author, is the only way to reconcile quality, and bring a higher quality to life...Good book if you haven't read it!

Summary below lifted from Wikipedia:

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig explores the meaning and concepts of "quality" (a term which he deems to be undefinable).

… Yet Pirsig departs from Eastern thinking by arguing that Western rationality is just as important in seeking understanding. Pirsig's thesis is that to truly experience quality one must embrace both and apply them as befits the requirements of the situation. According to Pirsig, this would avoid a great deal of frustration and dissatisfaction common to modern life.

In the book, the Narrator explains his friend John Sutherland's "romantic" approach to life, whereby he refuses to study and learn how to maintain his own expensive new BMW motorcycle. John simply hopes for the best with his bike, and when problems do occur he becomes extremely frustrated and is forced to rely on professional mechanics to repair it. In contrast, the Narrator has an older motorcycle which he is mostly able to diagnose and repair himself through the use of rational problem solving skills. The Narrator exemplifies the "classical" approach to life.

…With this, the book details two types of personalities: those who are interested mostly in gestalts (romantic viewpoints, such as Zen, focused on being "in the moment", and not on rational analysis), and those who need to know details, the inner workings, mechanics (classic viewpoints with application of rational analysis, vis-a-vis motorcycle maintenance) and so on.

The Sutherlands represent an exclusively romantic attitude toward the world. The Narrator initially appears to prefer the classic approach. It later becomes apparent that he understands both viewpoints and is aiming, not for the middle ground, but for the necessary ground that includes both. …

Pirsig aims towards a perception of the world that embraces both sides, the rational and the romantic. This means encompassing "irrational" sources of wisdom and understanding as well as science, reason and technology. In particular, this must include bursts of creativity and intuition that seemingly come from nowhere and are not (in his view) rationally explicable. Pirsig seeks to demonstrate that rationality and Zen-like "being in the moment" can harmoniously coexist.

He suggests such a combination of rationality and romanticism can potentially bring a higher quality of life.

In my work as a design and strategy consultant in Sydney, I have to fully agree with the folks who have said that 'design thinking' is a term meant for non-designers. I can testify that it does help in making the inner workings of design more approachable for non-designers. We have to remember that in the world of business, designers occupy a relatively small sphere, and if we want to get non-designer to understand the value of what we do, we need to remove some of the mystique and make things accessible.

In my work with "design thinking", I've found it helpful to introduce a (somewhat artificial) twin to "design thinking" with "design doing". Since many high level managers will never actually get into the nitty gritty of the developing, building, and testing newly designed products/services/experiences, creating a space of design work outside of that realm of "design doing" provides a way for the organisational decision-makers to have a hand in the design process.

Additionally, it is helpful to consider the earlier design activities of problem finding, ethnographic and other initial-user research, and initial concept development to be qualitatively different from the prototype development and testing aspects of design work. This also creates, for non-designers, a sensible break between "thinking" and "doing" (yes, yes, you don't need to tell me that user research consists of a hell of a lot of 'doing', I strictly speaking here of ways to make the processes of design more approachable for business people/non-designers) and creates the opportunity for many people in business to contribute to the "design thinking" side of a project without having to commit to the "doing".

In the end of it, getting non-designers to see that there is a viable alternative to business analytics in the quest for innovation, ie. design, makes introducing a seemingly inessential term like "design thinking" extremely valuable.