Design thinking

Design thinking refers to the cognitive, strategic and practical processes by which design concepts (proposals for new products, buildings, machines, etc.) are developed by designers and/or design teams. Many of the key concepts and aspects of design thinking have been identified through studies, across different design domains, of design cognition and design activity in both laboratory and natural contexts.It is rather interesting to look over the developmental history of any product or family of products and try to classify the changes into one of the four areas ... Your group, too, might have gotten into a rut and is inadvertently doing all of your design thinking in one area and is missing good bets in other areas.The 1962 Conference on Systematic and Intuitive Methods in Engineering, Industrial Design, Architecture and Communications, London, UK, started interest in studying design processes and developing new design methods.Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber publish 'Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning' showing that design and planning problems are wicked problems as opposed to 'tame', single disciplinary, problems of science.Donald Schön publishes The Reflective Practitioner in which he sought to establish 'an epistemology of practice implicit in the artistic, intuitive processes that practitioners bring to situations of uncertainty, instability, uniqueness and value conflict.' IDEO design consultancy formed by combining three industrial design companies. They are one of the first design companies to showcase their design process, based on design methods and design thinking.The design approach also becomes extended and adapted to tackle the design of services, marking the beginning of the service design movement.2018: In the Harvard Business Review Jeanne Liedtka claimed 'design thinking works' in business. Design thinking refers to the cognitive, strategic and practical processes by which design concepts (proposals for new products, buildings, machines, etc.) are developed by designers and/or design teams. Many of the key concepts and aspects of design thinking have been identified through studies, across different design domains, of design cognition and design activity in both laboratory and natural contexts. Design thinking is also associated with prescriptions for the innovation of products and services within business and social contexts. Some of these prescriptions have been criticized for oversimplifying the design process and trivializing the role of technical knowledge and skills. Design thinking encompasses processes such as context analysis, problem finding and framing, ideation and solution generating, creative thinking, sketching and drawing, modelling and prototyping, testing and evaluating. Core features of design thinking include abilities to: Design thinking is especially useful when addressing what Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber referred to as wicked problems, which are ill-defined or tricky (as opposed to wicked in the sense of malicious). Whereas for 'tame' or 'well-defined' problems the problem is clear, and the solution is available through applying rules or technical knowledge. Rather than accept the problem as given, designers explore the given problem and its context and may re-interpret or restructure the given problem in order to reach a particular framing of the problem that suggests a route to a solution. In empirical studies of three-dimensional problem solving, Bryan Lawson found architects employed solution-focused cognitive strategies, distinct from the problem-focused strategies of scientists. Nigel Cross suggests that 'Designers tend to use solution conjectures as the means of developing their understanding of the problem'. The creative mode of reasoning in design thinking is abductive reasoning, rather than the more familiar forms of inductive and deductive reasoning. In the process of designing the designer's attention typically oscillates between their understanding of the problematic context and their ideas for a solution in a process of co-evolution of problem and solution. New solution ideas can lead to a deeper or alternative understanding of the problematic context, which in turn triggers more solution ideas. Conventionally, designers communicate mostly in visual or object languages to translate abstract requirements into concrete objects. These 'languages' include traditional sketches and drawings but also extend to computer models and physical prototypes. The use of representations and models is closely associated with features of design thinking such as the generation and exploration of tentative solution concepts, the identification of what needs to be known about the developing concept, and the recognition of emergent features and properties within the representations.