Design and Design Thinking Seminar (original) (raw)
Related papers
Introduction to This Special Issue on Understanding Design Thinking
The design of artifacts and how designers make them have garnered renewed societal interest as interactive technologies create new opportunities and challenges. The world we experience has never before been as diverse, socially and materially, or as malleable as it now. Increased computation and interactivity are changing the appearance, evolution, and interactions of the personal and collective artifacts that shape our everyday experiences, family and community life, and learning and work activity. These digital artifacts increasingly leverage sensing and physical interaction to provide information at our fingertips and connect us to people around the globe. This new generation of digital technologies gives people a great deal of discretion as to what artifacts and services they use and how they use them (Grudin, 2005). Adoption and appropriation of new digital artifacts is increasingly part of everyday life, and this change draws our attention-and sense of curiosity-to how these artifacts are designed. When we talk about designing, we share Herbert Simon's (1969) broad view that ''everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones'' (p. 129). The articles in this special issue can usefully be read with that broad view of design. That said, we and the authors focus on design professionals, students, and researchers as canonical instances. As computational artifacts take on new shapes and play new roles, so do designers (Moggridge, 2007). Designers of digital artifacts face more complex constraints than, say, furniture designers a century ago. Their work must integrate diverse considerations, physical and mechanical engineering, software engineering, user interface design and user experience, and aesthetics, as well as diverse culture and human values (Dreyfuss, 1955). The position of design and designers at the nexus of so many complex
Design thinking - crossing disciplinary borders
2009
Design is known to be an interdisciplinary field, and design activities and outcomes are developed in conjunction with (as well as used in) many other disciplines, including management, marketing and entertainment. Moving the concept of design beyond the design discipline itself creates exciting new challenges and opportunities, not only for the various other disciplines involved, but also for design education. The idea for this paper was incubated in a post-graduate classroom environment during an interdisciplinary design elective. Within the current academic environment, it is not strange to have students from diverse disciplines such as management, theology, engineering and publishing studying the same subject matter (and sitting in the same class). This paper therefore finds it fitting to explore conceptually the potential of design thinking in the (seemingly) unrelated discipline of Operations Research / Management Science (OR/MS).
Studying Design: Exploring the drivers of design theory and practice
In Time for Change: Building a Design Discipline, design educator Sharon Poggenpohl argues “that design practice and education are changing, particularly in relation to…research and collaboration. If design is to develop as a discipline, it must necessarily develop further based on these themes.”(1) At the center of this development, Poggenpohl continues, is the transformation of the tacit knowledge that designers traditionally employ, to explicit knowledge that is a core asset to cross-disciplinary communication and collaboration. “This is the shortcoming that makes design appear elusive, special, inarticulate, and even unknowable. As long as designers consider themselves to be first and foremost aesthetic finishers of ideas that are well advanced in the development process, they will be trapped by the tacit and unable to provide a clear explanation.”(5) Since Poggenpohl’s call, design discourse has been increasingly focused on this building of explicit, critical knowledge. Designers are no longer comfortable or willing to be the “aesthetic finishers” that Poggenpohl aptly names. But as Richard Buchanan and Victor Margolin have argued, much of the evaluation of design has been dictated by those outside of design practice—and in doing so, the focus has leaned to the artifacts that are a result of design practice, rather than the practice itself. In The Idea of Design, Margolin and Buchanan call for an integration of the liberal arts into the evaluation of design — to both broaden the discussion of design evaluation to include that which is focused on the human experience, but also to connect design philosophy and practice (x). This call is in part a response to designs focus on “wicked” problems, and a necessary shift in motivation from what we (as designers) can do, to what we should do. As architectural practice dips into urbanism and visual communication; and as graphic design expands into strategies that involve spaces, places and environments, the ability for students to see across disciplines to find patterns and commonalities as well as differences is increasingly critical. This paper will look at how a cross-disciplinary design studies course for sophomore students at NC State University evaluates design artifacts, environments, experiences and impacts through a series of common, contemporary and critical themes that sit above any specific discipline. By looking at design through its technology, usability, morality, economy, sustainability, and cultural context and impacts, students focus on how design shapes, and is shaped by, the human experience. As a course for non-studio majors, the work in this course can provide insight for studio instructors into how the language and evaluation of design might evolve to include more cross-disciplinary, systems-based perspectives, to help young designers see the work that they do as part of a larger design theory and practice.
Design Thinking: Past, Present and Possible Futures
Creativity and Innovation Management, 2013
This paper takes a critical look at the design thinking discourse, one that has different meanings depending on its context. Within the managerial realm, design thinking has been described as the best way to be creative and innovate, while within the design realm, design thinking may be partly ignored and taken for granted, despite a long history of academic development and debate. In the design area, we find five different discourses of 'designerly thinking', or ways to describe what designers do in practice, that have distinctly different epistemological roots. These different discourses do not stand in competition with each other but could be developed in parallel. We also observe that the management discourse has three distinct origins, but in general has a more superficial and popular character and is less academically anchored than the designerly one. Also, the management design thinking discourse seldom refers to designerly thinking and thereby hinders cumulative knowledge construction. We suggest further research to link the discourses.
Design today has become an extremely wide area of expertise, overlapping with many other disciplines. Knowledge of the classics of modern design has almost become a common cultural property. Design objects today are presented in a similar manner as art. This book is my interpretation of the design process, covering all disciplines. In the book, I will be occasionally shifting from one discipline to another, but this is because, in reality, disciplines are overlapping themselves. I think it is important to provide as much as possible a holistic overview. There are many different interpretations of design and according to me, as long as the designer can explain and communicate his work in a rational matter, there are no wrong or right design interpretations. I make no attempt here to create an encyclopedic enumeration of some kind; rather this book is designed, to present a survey of the main lines of the design development, and influential factors that may and will determine the future of the design process. This book represents a contemporary overview of that process and relates to the tendencies of the integrated design approaches in industry and the knowledge that lies behind. This book has been written and designed as a Masters Project at the Bergen National Academy of Arts (2004 - 2006). I would like to thank this institution for choosing me to become a part of the first generation of the Master students in Design and Visual Communication in Norway. Having American, German, French, British, and Norwegian professors, made the work on this book a valuable international experience.
“DESIGN THINKING” – A CRITICAL ANALYSIS
The latest buzz phrase to enter the world of design research is “Design Thinking”. But is this anything new and does it really have any practical or theoretical relevance to the design world? Many sceptics believe the term has more to do with business strategy and little to do with the complex process of designing products, services and systems. Moreover, many view the term as misleading and a cheap attempt to piggyback the world of business management onto design. This paper seeks to ask is design thinking anything new? Several authors have explicitly or implicitly articulated the term “Design Thinking” before, such as Peter Rowe’s seminal book “Design Thinking” [1] first published in 1987 and Herbert Simon’s “The Sciences of the Artificial” [2] first published in 1969. In Tim Brown’s “Change by Design” [3], design thinking is thought of as a system of three overlapping spaces rather than a sequence of orderly steps namely inspiration – the problem or opportunity that motivates the search for solutions; ideation – the process of generating, developing and testing ideas; and implementation – the path that leads from the design studio, lab and factory to the market. This paper seeks to examine and critically analyse the tenets of this new design thinking manifesto set against three case studies of modern design practice. As such, the paper will compare design thinking theory with the reality of design in practice.
In the last few years, "Design Thinking" has gained popularity-it is now seen as an exciting new paradigm for dealing with problems in sectors as a far afield as IT, Business, Education and Medicine. This potential success challenges the design research community to provide clear and unambiguous answers to two key questions: "What is the nature of design thinking?" and "What could it bring to other professions?". In this paper we sketch a provisional answer to these questions by first considering the reasoning pattern behind design thinking, and then enriching this picture by linking in key concepts from models of design activity and design thinking that have emerged over the last twenty years of design research.