GRAP 2030 // Week 03 // Reading // Kimbell (2011)

Discusses the origins of design thinking through three main accounts.

1. design thinking as a cognitive style
2. general thinking of design
3. resource for organisations

Counter claims undermining design thinking

1. dualism between thinking and knowing and acting
2. ignores diversity of designers' practices and institutions historically situated
3. privileges the designer as the main design agent

This paper "... proposes that attending to the situated, embodied routines of designers and others offers a useful way to rethink design thinking."

"Concepts and language that used to be associated with designers now enter the specialist areas: policymakers are told that public services shoudl be more user-centered (Parker and Heapy 2006); businesses engage with customers by offering new meanings for things (Verganti 2009); the US Army is considering the role of design in warfare (School of Advanced Military Studies n.d.). Professional design, in particular design as practiced withint eh sutdio-based tradition of many art shcools, is taking a new place on the world stage."

She states there's a shift in design as design to design as design thinking. A shift from product to process, "design itself is being remade (Tonkinwise 2010). Design as design thinking should provide more than mere design."

She states that "design thinking may have failed" but doesn't provide much support for this assertation other than a quick and dismissive "not brought about a happy synthesis...some of its [design thinking] key proponents are beginning to question design thinking, even calling it a 'failed experiment' (Nussbaum 2011)." Providing a single reference is not a supported position.

Designer as Cultural Interpreter

Design thinking provided "a response to the ebbs and flows of a global, mediatized economy of signs and artifacts; in this context, professional designers play increasingly important roles, less as makers of forms and more as cultural intermediaries (Julier 2008) or as the “glue” in multidisciplinary teams (Kelley and VanPatter 2005)."

"They are interpters of changes inc ulture who then create new kinds of cultural form."

What is a designer?

They are seen as using an iterative process that moves from generating insights about end users, to idea generation and testing, to implementation. Their visual artifacts and prototypes help multidisciplinary teams work together. They ask “what if?” questions to imagine future scenarios rather than accepting the way things are done now. With their creative ways of solving problems, the argument goes, designers can turn their hands to nearly anything.

1. 'new spirit' of capitalism "captures some of the energy in the shift from hierarchies to networks and from bureaucratic discipline to team-work and multi-skilling, as capitalism absorbed its critiques and remade itself as offering managers both autonomy and security."
2. importance of the economy of signs that ignore state borders and in which the value of a commodity cannot be separated from its symbolic value (Lash and Urry 1994). A sophisticated effort to engage diverse audiences or stakeholders in establishing the meaning of these signs marks
3. rise of the 'creative class' — you might also now refer to this as the gig economy, which is not necessarily considered a fantastic thing for the creatives themselves. Here, "work and professional identities are caught up in creating meaningful new forms. For Florida the word “creative” is not just reserved for designers, musicians, and visual artists but also computer programmers and opinion-makers such as columnists. These professionals find meaning in work which is characterized by flexibility, autonomy, and creativity and which blurs their professional and personal lives, as they move across national borders without being anchored to industrial modes of production and consumption."
4. the role of business schools as centers of resarch and education.

Kimbell criticises the focus of design thinking as centering on a single design consultancy, IDEA, which negates the breadth of design practice.

Two contradictory pereceptions of design thinking:

1. Alexander's thesis states 'designers give form to things; they are privileged makers whose work is centrally concerned with materiality. This is the tradition of craft and professional design fields that create specific kinds of objects, from furniture, to buildings, to clothing.'
2. Simon suggests 'designers' work is abstract; their job is to create a desired state of affairs. This way of thinking baout deisng is the core of all professions, not just hte work of engineers and designers of artifacts.'

Neither emphasises design thikning.

• Peter Rowe (1987) argues 'design professionals have an episodic way of approaching their work, they rely on hunches and presuppoitions, not just facts...the nature of problem-solving process itself shapes the solution.'
• Nigel Cross prefers 'designerly ways of knowing' with 'problem solving as solution-focused as they tackle ill-defined problems and situates this within a larger argument about design as a coherent discipline of study distinct form the sciences and the humanities.'
• Bryan Lawson (1997) ' the practice of designing ina  context of multiple restraints'.
• Nigel Cross and Kees Dorst (2001) say 'problems and solutions co-evolve'.
• Cross (2006) 'designers treat all problems as ill-defined, even if they are not.'
• Cross (1982) and Dorst (2010) suggest 'abductive reasoning' (develop a set of possible solutions and propose which might be most suitable) and 'designers construct designs that transcend or connect paradoxes.

Buchanan (1992) shifts theory from craft and production to design thinking which 'could be applied to nearly anything, whether a tangible object or intangible system.' He defines four orders of design which designers address and is less concerned 'with individual designers and how they design, but rather seeks to define design's role in the world':

1. signs
2. things
3. actions
4. thoughts

Design Thinking: De-politicizing Manegerial Practice

Sam Ladner (2009) 'design is attractice to management because it is a de-politicized version of the well known socio-cultural critique of managerial practices'.

• Tim Brown (IDEO)
• Roger Martin (Dean of Rotman School of Managemet in Toronto)

Both present 'a way to balance organiszational tensions between exploration and exploitation or as a loosley-structured organizational process that stimulates inonoveation' but which 'do not draw extensively on research in either design studies or management and organization studies.' Kimbell is critical of their lack of research-based writing.

According to Kimbell, Brown claims that 'design thinkers know there is no right answer to a problem. Rather, he argues, through following non-linear, iterative design process he calls inspiration, ideation, and implementation, the design process can convert problems into opportunities.'

How do inspiration, ideation and implementation tie into our concepts of design process?

Brown suggestions successful design exists between three concerns but which introduce a paradox:

1. what is desireably from the users perspective?
2. what is technically feasible?
3. what is commercially viable for the organization?

Paradoxically, designers interpret what users "need" by drawing on ethnographically-inspired techniques but which are not drawn directly from social science theory and politics to shape their findings. Kimbell says, 'design thinking fails to reference wider theories of the social and misses opportunities to illuminate the contextinto which the designer is intervening'.

Lime scooters.

Martin says design thinking helps management 'to shift from choosing between alternatives to helping them generate entirely new concepts...combining abductive, as well as inductive and deductive, reasoning.'

Finding a better balance between exploration and exploitation, and betwen abductive as well as inductive and deductive reasoning, is...design thinking.

Summary

 ...design thinking has been used to characterize what individual designers know, and how they approac and make sense of their own work, as well as how they actually do it.

Definitions have shifted from the design of things to concerning action and systems then to an approach for business and social innovation. However, 'there is still no clear description of design thinking.'

• On what principles is it based?
• How different is it to other kinds of professional knowledge?
• Do all designers exhibit it?
• What are its effects within the worlds where design takes place?
• How can it be taught? 

Dualism of approach to research

1. focus on individual designer ignores the world within which the designer works
2. study of a process describes what happened while designing a particular object but do not 'share the close attentiveness paid ot the role of artifacts found in material culture approaches influenced by anthropology, nor do they situate their accounts of design within larger historical frameworks.'

Restraints

In class we discussed the concept of restraints within a design context through the use of localisation examples using the Star Wars: The Force Awakens posters between US and Chinese markets and Ratchet and Clank between the US and Japanese markets. Also see the Italian posters for Twelve Years a Slave, where the lead actor Chiwetel Ejiofor, who is black, was replaced by two white actors in minor roles, Brad Pitt and Michael Fassbender.

To discuss the differences and need for designers to solve problems specific to a culture, we discussed Lime Scooters and Ofo within Australian markets. Lime Scooters help solve a range of transportation issues including:

• faster pedestrian navigation
• park anywhere
• cheap cost of rental
• mobility for those who may have issues with it
• fun

However, the scooters also cause issues such as:

• taking up space on the side walk when parked
• challenging the idea of ownership to rental
• poor education and use by local population
• use of previously existing pedestrian spaces
• tech issues (such as braking)