Thinking through Design Thinking

IDEO /Tim Brown, Bruce Nussbaum and Stanford d.school call it Design Thinking.

Michael Speaks, Michael Shamiyeh, Bruce Mau talk about Design Intelligence,

Nigel Cross writes about Designerly ways of knowing (one of the best books i’ve read so far on design thinking).

All these ideas deal with design as process rather than object. They all articulate and confirm the idea that there is a ’specific way of thinking that is unique to design’ and ‘that this way of thinking is applicable on any problem’ It is a way of seeing, understanding and making the world, and the ‘design way’ is a universal way, there is no problem that can not be solved, … or so it seems (this is one of the claims of Bruce Mau’s Massive change exhibit and book anyway).

Although one has to acknowledge a certain naivety behind this idea, it is non the less very appealing, especially for a designer, or well … an architect like myself.

Thinking about design as a universal problem solving method radically enlarges the arena for design and provides the design discipline with a sense of authority. It provides a credibility to the discipline that is instrumental in getting designer involved in projects at a point where the fundamental decisions are made, instead of calling designers in to only deal with the cosmetics of a project. One has to read the efforts of IDEO and Bruce Nussbaum in this light, as advocating for a design discipline that is more involved at the moments and places where it matters and where it can make a significant impact.

Beside propagating design thinking to businesses, selling the design way of thinking as universally applicable, provides design with a legitimization for engaging with fields that are normally well beyond their reach, beyond the confines of the design discipline. This is something also propagated in the Volume’s opening issue (#1) under the term ‘Architectural Intelligence’ and there is also some of this attitude present in the “Office for Unsolicited Architecture” issue (#14). I think these ideas bear fruit, but suffer from overestimation, but that’s what usally happens when one advocates something, it quickly turns into a one dimensional argument.

I would like to point out a few problems I have with the current discourse around design thinking:

Design as problem-solving
The underlying paradigm of what “design” actually is in the “Design Thinking” school, is that it is synonymous with problem-solving. This is a limited view of design, and a problematic one. First of all what does it mean to solve a problem? In design there is not one possible answer to a certain question, there are a lot, see the architectural competition as example.

Also one can always question whether any problem is permanently solvable, especially when its problems have a socio-economical dimension, these are known as wicked problems. (see Rittel, Webber – “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning”) The term problem solving sounds too absolutist. How many solutions from 50 years ago are regarded as the root of today’s problems?

The more design becomes technical and a from engineering in which the criteria are technical as well, where the margins of error are so small that solutions can be measured in absolute dimensions, in this sense there is a relation between problem and solution that becomes traceable. Design has a huge cultural component, often the problem is artificial, or invented by the designer themselves and is connected more to a cultural zeitgeist than anything else. In what way can we talk about the brief for a project in terms of a problem?

A problem is something undesired that needs to be resolved, but the brief is defined as a wish-list not a problem definition. The brief inspires a projection of the future, and over the course of a design process there surely is problem-solving going on, but it’s mainly a problem-solving cycle that deals with ones own invented or perceived problems, which is legitimate, but one has to acknowledge that problems are not absolute.

Design is a discipline but not a scientific one!

Design as innovation
Another paradigm underlying “design” in design thinking is the one of progress, that design is instrumental in improving our lives, society and the whole world basically. The term “innovation” embodies the believe that the new is better, that technology will improve our lives, its propelled by the assumptions that science, rationality and efficiency will move the world to a better place. It’s a very technocratic conception of design, one that fits perfectly in our capitalist society. Innovation and problem-solving are two branches that grow from the same tree.

Design thinking doesn’t tell us much about thinking.
The “thinking” in design thinking, doesn’t really deal with explaining the thinking in design, it only scratches the surface of what design thinking is really about. Design thinking as propagated by IDEO and Nussbaum is mostly deals with methodology, process, ‘how-to,’ it doesn’t deal with how design thinking actually works. Usually cases are brought forward of how a typical design approach has been successful in tackling a problem, but from this we don’t learn how thoughts unfold in the design process, how thinking unfolds.

Thus design thinking currently deals with describing behavior, symptoms, the consequence of thoughts but not what design thinking consists of itself. It is much like how the Turning Test for testing if a machine is intelligent or not doesn’t tell us anything about what intelligence itself actually is, it only shows that a machine can behave as a human does! But this tells us nothing about the nature of intelligence itself (John Searle’s ‘Chinese Room‘ thought experiment effectively exposes this flaw of the Turing Test)

Especially this last part intrigues me, i’m interested in how designer have their own rationality, how a design can have its own rationality. Just like a mathematician can say this equation is false, an architects can say, this detail doesn’t make sense in the overall concept of the building. Apparently design choices can be more or less right or wrong, within the network of choices made during the design process, while at the same time all most of the choices are more or less arbitrary! intriguing isn’t it!? What is this kind of logic that is operative in design? What is this intelligence that seems irrational but gives enough foundation for making a choice? What mode of reasoning is at work here?

I researched these questions in my graduation work, which consisted of a comparative literature research of three perspective on “reasoning in architecture“, although the findings are relevant to all design disciplines> The three perspectives come from three authors, from three different fields:

Donald A. Schön (1930-1997) a design researcher, but trained as philosopher who succeeded in describing ‘how designers think’ in a way that designers actually recognize themselves. Shön’s work is interesting because of the categories he introduces. These are fundamental descriptions of how a designer engages in the design activity. His categories are open but still defined enough for designers to recognise the fundamental process they are involved in. It describes an iterative process, but does not specify tasks, design phases or steps from beginning to end. It’s not a method for how-to think, it’s provides insight in how thinking works in design. Schön theory is presented in his book The Reflective Practitioner (1983)

Jeff Hawkins (1957) is a computer architect turned neurologist. He is interested in making truly intelligent machines, but believes one can only do so when we understand how the brain produces intelligence. He states that in the cognitive sciences intelligence is judged by the wrong parameter: behaviour. According to Hawkins this is only a manifestation of what intelligence really is, behaviour is but the surface. Hawkins puts forward a theory that intelligence is determined by prediction. According to him the brain makes continuous predictions about the world it ’sees’ through its senses. It makes this predictions by analogy to the past, to what is already stored in our memory. Hawkins theory in presented in his book On Intelligence (2004) You can watch a lecture by Hawkins on TED and here if you want to get in a bit deeper.

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) was a philosopher, logician and mathematician. Peirce was interested in where new ideas came from, how the mind was able to put forward fruitful ideas, and in that way it was instrumental in the development of knowledge. Peirce believed that deductive and inductive reasoning were not adequate in describing how this worked, thus Peirce developed a third mode of reasoning, abduction, with which he tried to clarify processes of invention and discovery. Another theory of Peirce is also of importance more specifically for the work of architects, that of diagrammatic reasoning.

He developed the concept of diagrammatic reasoning in the context of explaining creativity in mathematics, but it also gives us a deeper insight in how architects reason through making drawings and models. Because like mathematics also architectural design is mediated activity. Peirce’s theories were developed over his entire career, publishing many papers and articles. For this research the explanation of Peirce’s theories is based on the readings of Michael H. G. Hoffmann and Sami Paavola.

Besides these main protagonists, Aristotle’s Rhetoric plays a significant role in describing the nature of reasoning in architectural design.

What all these authors have in common is that they deal with developing a framework for the fundamental elements and processes of creative thought, by naming them, formalizing and theorizing these they open up a possibility of discourse on these ideas. I’ll elaborate the theories these men have put forward later, for now I’ll leave you with a quote:

“. . . in speaking of logic, we do not need to be concerned with processes of inference at all. While it is true that a great deal of what is generally understood to be logic is concerned with deduction, logic in the widest sense, refers to something far more general. It is concerned with the form of abstract structures, and is involved the moment we make pictures of reality and then seek to manipulate these pictures so that we may look further into the reality itself. It is the business of logic to invent purely artificial structures of elements and relations.” (Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form, 1964)”

Overview of Post: This one goes back a few years and reminds us of the early understanding of what Design Thinking was all about.

Thoughts on Post: Some great  references to the early foundational works and thoughts that got this field going.  It would be good to recapture some of this clarity.

Original Post Here at BusinessWeek

By Bruce Nussbaum

“Design thinking” can create rewarding experiences for consumers — the key to earnings growth and an edge that outsourcing can’t beat.

You can’t Six Sigma your way to high-impact innovation, but you can design your company to generate products and services that provide great consumer experiences, top-line revenue growth, and fat profit margins. That’s the sometimes-painful message CEOs in America are learning today.

Quality-management programs can’t give you the kind of empathetic connection to consumers that increasingly is the key to opening up new business opportunities. All the B-school-educated managers you hire won’t automatically get you the outside-the-box thinking you need to build new brands — or create new experiences for old brands. The truth is we’re moving from a knowledge economy that was dominated by technology into an experience economy controlled by consumers and the corporations who empathize with them.

“MASTERS OF HEURISTICS.” Indian and Chinese engineers and manufacturers are doing more and more of the old cost- and quality-control Six-Sigma stuff (you haven’t seen anything yet in outsourcing), leaving U.S. corporations to build new business models around customer culture. America’s customer culture is a divide that foreigners have a hard time penetrating — which gives U.S. companies their best, and perhaps only, shot for growth. And design thinking is increasingly the discipline managers are embracing to penetrate this culture.

Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, is reshaping his entire MBA program around the principle that “businesspeople will have to become more ‘masters of heuristics’ than ‘managers of algorithms,’” that “design skills and business skills are converging,” as he said in the Winter, 2004, edition of the school’s alumni publication. It’s time to embrace a new value proposition based on creating — indeed, often co-creating — new products and services with customers that fill their needs, make them happy, and make companies and shareholders rich.

Understanding, empathy, problem-solving — these are the heuristic managerial skills needed today, argues Martin, who advises Procter & Gamble (PG ) CEO A.G. Lafley. That should tell you a lot. Lafley is using design thinking to transform P&G into an innovation powerhouse. Managers who want to “get” the new innovation paradigm should check out Martin’s MBA and exec-ed programs.

RIGHT-BRAIN GAINS. Martin isn’t the only one who understands this major shift in the economy and why CEOs must respond. In his new book, A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age, Daniel Pink argues that left-brain linear, analytical, and computer-like thinking are being replaced by right-brain empathy, inventiveness, and understanding as skills most needed by business.

Pink points to Asia, automation, and abundance as the reasons behind the shift. What does this mean for future jobs? Winners are designers, inventors, counselors, ethnographers, social psychologists, and other right-brain folks, while losers will be lawyers, engineers, accountants, and other left-brainers who will see their jobs migrate across the Pacific. There’s also, of course, C.K. Prahalad’s terrific book The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers.

If you still harbor doubts about what’s happening, check out the job boards of two of my favorite design sites: idsa.org and core77.com. The Industrial Designers Society of America runs one of the best design contests in the world (which BusinessWeek supports and publishes the results of every June) and core77 is one of the coolest, most informative design sites around.

RISING TO THE TOP. In December of last year, ZIBA Design in Portland, Ore., a top design consultancy, ran an ad for a “visualization specialist.” ZIBA advertised itself as “an international design consultancy that helps companies create meaningful ideas, designs, and experiences that customers crave.” It says it’s a company driven by an obsession “for understanding people, brands and technology.” “ZIBA innovates with soul.” Is that heuristic enough for you?

That same month, Palo Alto (Calif.)-based IDEO (see BW, 5/17/04, “The Power of Design”) ran an ad for a conceptual designer. It read: “You bring…a holistic approach to process: Formulating cultural and user insights, mapping opportunity spaces through strategic frameworks, and expressing compelling solutions.” Ask yourself this: Who in your company at this moment is mapping out opportunity spaces through strategic frameworks?

Smart CEOs are turning to this kind of design thinking to guide them to the new land. ZIBA, IDEO, and other design firms are in great demand. Increasingly, design thinking is making its way up to “C” suite levels inside corporations, with chief creative officer, chief innovation officer, or even chief customer officer joining the organization table. Sometimes, design thinking goes all the way to the top.

SHAPING CONSUMER EXPERIENCE. Think about what GE Healthcare Technologies (GE ) CEO Joseph M. Hogan has to say about the future of his business. Hogan wrote in @issue: The Journal of Business & Design: “Today, when we think about designing, say, a new MRI system, we don’t just think about designing the product, we think about designing the whole radiology suite. Design in the next 10 years will move beyond the product. It will move beyond workflow. Hospitals in the future…will have different ways of interacting with the patient. We have to think about setting the course for how design can affect the whole health-care experience.”

Patient experience. Consumer experience. Take Hogan’s template and apply it to the U.S. economy, and you can see where we’re going. Now, how many of you have looked up the word “heuristic” yet?

Overview of this Atricle: There is an ongoing debate about exactly what “design thinking” is and specifically about the term “design thinking”.  This article brings up a few of the perspectives.

Thoughts on this Article: Bruce does a good job of getting to the point:  Stop focusing on what it is called and go do it!

Posted by: Bruce Nussbaum on July 10 on BusinessWeek

Fred Collopy has a great blog item up at Fast Company on why he dislikes the “Thinking” part of the term “Design Thinking.” In essence, Fred argues that the best part of design is the “doing,” not the thinking and the focus on Design Thinking short-changes what designers can really do in education, health and other spaces outside their traditional consumer-oriented activities.

As an early proponent and major supporter of Design Thinking, I can only say “Amen” to Fred. I totally agree. It is the ability to create new options and build new products, services and experiences that gives design so much power. It is the ability to understand deeply cultures from digital social media networks to small villages in southern India that gives design its power.

And finally, it is the evolution of design into Design (with or without the “Thinking” term) to redesign large scale social systems in business and civic society that has folks moving to embrace it. In this era of melting models and flaming careers, of economic uncertainty and social volatility, Design has a set of tools and methods that can guide people to new solutions.

Which is why MIT, Harvard, Rotman, McKinsey and dozens of corporations are moving to Design to help navigate the present and the future. It is why in Britain and the Continental governments are embracing Design to help redesign basic social services.

And it is why the World Economic Forum has invited me to join a new GAC–Global Agenda Council on Designing Large Scale Social Systems.

The truth is that despite the clumsiness of the term Design Thinking, there is no limitation to the Doing in the Design Thinking. It is a way of thinking about doing on a strategically big scale–a new learning experience for all children, a better health-care experience for older people, a more honest political system for voters.

The very best analysis of the failure of business schools and the new for management to embrace design principles is Shoshana Zuboff’s remarkable essay on the failure of business school education. A professor at Harvard Business School for 25 years, Zuboff says that the focus on the company and how to make it more efficient is being replaced by a focus on the consumer, the learner, the patient, the individual.

Transaction is being replaced by relationship as the source of value in business. Design’s anthropological focus (its “user-focus”) and its ability to iterate and generate new things off the knowledge about from that anthropological perspective are the powerful tools attracting CEOs, NGOs, and Politicos.

It would be tragic for designers to turn their back on Design just when society is embracing it just because of a dispute over terminology. So Fred, forget the nomenclature. Call it a a banana and let’s get on with helping our society redesign itself.