As our concept of design expands beyond its traditional boundaries there has emerged an intriguing notion of design as way of thinking. Stanford’s Institute of Design is a notable example of one such emergent place, where design thinking is promoted as a means to “drive multidisciplinary innovation,†believing that “great innovators and leaders need to be great design thinkers†(“Standford University Institute of Design,” 2007). The idea that design as a way of thinking could be used as a common method of co-creation across disciplines such as “engineering, business, medicine, the humanities and education†is a compelling idea to me. However, as I have started to explore this notion of “design thinking†in a more rigorous manner, it’s not all that clear what design thinking might in fact be and if it’s actually distinctive from other methods of thinking (i.e. the scientific method)?
In an attempt to make the concept more concrete, design thinking is often described as the a sequence of stages that describe a generalized design process. This design process might include stages, such as, define, research, ideate, prototype, choose, implement and learn. It should be noted that while there does seem to be some degree of common consensus, this does not appear to be a very rigorous theory predictive of actual design practices. While these discrete steps make design thinking easy to explain, I think it’s insufficient as a definition.
Perhaps, a more meaningful way to describe design thinking is as the opposite of “critical thinking.†Whereas critical thinking is seen as the breaking down of things (ideas), design thinking is thought to be concerned with the building up of things (ideas). Historically, critical thinking emerges as a practical expression of a scientific worldview, wherein the whole is understood by means of reducing it into its component parts. Contrariwise, design thinking is not merely an understanding of the whole achieved by building up its component parts, but an understanding of the whole as a whole. This notion of “whole” is a bit problematic of course, as there are a mix of metaphors in play within contemporary design theory/practice — the modernist concept of the whole as a “machine†is still commonly in use and a more recent (and ancient) “ecological†conception is growing in popularity. Consequently, both critical thinking and design thinking are influenced by this metaphorical shift paradigm and neither form of thinking is the exclusive domain of either metaphor. Moreover, the simplistic dichotomy between breaking down and building up is an inconclusive distinction, for both “critical†and “design†thinking engage analysis/synthesis, problem-posing/problem-solving, exploration/ideation, and reflection/formation. All that to say, it’s not all that clear to me how opposing “critical thinking†to “design thinking†actually helps define the latter.
The most promising place to start an exploration of “design thinking†seems to be with Herbert Simon’s book The Sciences of the Artificial published in 1969. His central thesis was that “everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones†(Simon, 1996 p111). A proposition which he supported by demonstrating that “the intellectual activity that produces material artifacts is no different from the one that prescribes remedies for a sick patient or the one that devises a new sales plan or a social welfare policy for a state†(1996). Design, so construed, emancipated itself from a narrow determination of production and implied an underlying abstraction of thinking — design thinking. Simon went on to argue, that this “design thinking†is core to most, if not all, professional training, and that “schools of engineering, as well as schools of architecture, business, education, law, and medicine, are all concerned with the process of design†(1996). And thus, by extension all thought (as one of my readers noted).
Design thinking, in the sense argued by Simon is a twofold activity: predicting a “course of action†that will initiate a “change of conditions†and judging if such new conditions would indeed be preferred. So, while “design thinking†necessarily concerns itself with the determination of production, it’s a general, and not specific, kind of determination. This makes design thinking, as a theory of thinking, transferable across the various forms of production to which it might be applied. For Simon, it’s the sciences of the artificial (the human made world), a true theory of artificial phenomena sufficient to explain this phenomena in a predictive way, not unlike how the theory of gravity is predictive of how a projectile moves through space. While seemingly a revolutionary idea and forgotten (or at least largely ignored) for a time, the realm of activity that is design thinking is not new, in my opinion. It’s what the ancients called determination, the “bringing forth into visible presence something envisioned in advance by what is sometimes called, in a later idiom, the mind’s eye. In other words, production requires prior vision of the essential look and determining limits of that which is to be produced, a vision that is precedent to and directive for the bringing forth of something made to look like what will have been seen in advance†(Sallis, 2000 p138).
I wonder if design thinking (as it relates to determination) acts within the realm of imagination, which “is not so much the mind’s eye as, rather — if one insists on retaining this metaphorical idiom — what would have to be called the mind’s hand, since its operation is to draw the horizons forth, to withdraw them and in its drafts to span the expanse of the interplay†(Sallis, 2000 p138)? It seems that it’s this faculty, power of the soul, or elemental force that we have named imagination allows designers to engage with the world in such a way that something new is made known, something that we might otherwise not have noticed. By way of the imagination designers are able to think of the possible, to “extrapolate from past behavior, in the presence of existing designs, to future behavior, in the presence of new ones†(Jones, 1992 p9). It’s imagination’s role, in design thinking, that enables designers to avoid incompatibility between complex (and often distant) dependencies in a design, “by changing [his or her] original aims to others that are more compatible but equally satisfactory in the long or short run. This sensitivity of aims to detailed decisions makes it difficult to impossible to solve design problems in a wholly logical way but does not prevent their solution within the adaptable apparatus of the human brain†(Jones, 1992 p10). This “adaptable apparatus†of which Jones speaks is that which we name imagination.
In conclusion, I think there is a case to be made for the role of imagination in the process of design thinking — a possibility fruitful line of inquiry asking for further exploration .