Design Thinking under Fire!

Not only recently, with the dismissal of some IDEO collaborators, but Design Thinking is under scrutiny! There's a lot of criticism, especially from the designer's side. Nevertheless, DT has made its way into Design Education and design methodology teaching. Since there's a lot of uncertainty there, I recently wrote a paper with my colleague Violeta Clemente , titled "Design Methodology on Fire! Open exchange of emails on Design Methodology vs Design Thinking in Design Education”.

In this paper, which will be published soon (by LearnXDesign2023_The DRS Education Special Interest Group unConference), we will reproduce this timeline that I called “A Century of Design Thinking”. I created this diagram in the context of my work with Design Thinking in organizational projects and in DT education to explain that DT is not a recent concept/method. It is a visual representation depicting the century-long evolution of Design Methodology and the Creative Problem Solving movement, leading up to the contemporary concept of Design Thinking.

I have distinguished between four discourses related to the Design/DT concept:

• one within the Design Research Community,
• influenced by the discourse originating from Creativity Research;
• another within the field of Management, Business, and Innovation;
• and a fourth emerging discourse in HEI Education/Research and academia as a whole.

In a concise overview, the timeline unfolds with Henri Poincaré's creative process insights in 1908, leading to Graham Wallas' phase model (as presented in The Art of Thought, 1926) and the subsequent emergence of Creative Problem Solving (CPS) in the 1960s. The Osborn-Parnes Method, CPS version 1.0, initially comprised seven steps, later streamlined to five stages in version 2.0. CPS continued to evolve, with version 4.0, outlined in Treffinger & Isaksen's book (1992), gaining widespread adoption. Various models, such as Simplex (Basadur, 1995) and the Double Diamond (British Design Council, 2005) surfaced, rooted in CPS and were influenced by the visual representation of divergent and convergent thinking. In the 1990s, CPS adopted a more systemic and non-linear perspective of the creative process, introduced elements like people, task context, results, and methods (see Isaaksen, Puccio & Treffinger, 1993).

As depicted, Design Thinking found its roots in the international academic Design discourse during the 1960s, whereas the management discourse only gained momentum in the early 21st century.

The academic design discourse emerged in the '60s, addressing 'wicked problems' in the '70s (Rittel, 1970). Two pivotal publications in design methodology that greatly influenced me were the published Ph.D. thesis by Kees Dorst (1997) and the paper co-authored by Dorst and Nigel Cross on the Co-Evolution of the Problem-Solution Space (Dorst & Cross, 2001). These perspectives, coupled with the anticipated paradigm shift in design methodology, led me to perceive the design process as an iterative negotiation, where reframing a problem or initial challenge is inherent—a viewpoint now echoed in the contemporary Design Thinking concept.

Fueled by the American Design agency IDEO and seminal books like Brown's Change by Design (2009) or Martin’s The Design of Business (2009), Design Thinking gained traction in management during the 2000s and is now recognized as a method for business innovation and organizational change. Since 2006, it has progressively integrated into business schools' curricula.

Another pivotal moment occurred in 2005 with the establishment of the d.school, a dedicated hub for Design Thinking, initially founded at Stanford University as the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, later expanding to Potsdam, Berlin, in 2007. In 2020, Uli Weinberg, director of the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, and a strong advocate for Design Thinking, initiated the Global Design Thinking Alliance (GDTA). This alliance is a network of institutions dedicated to teaching, researching, and advancing the methods and mindsets of Design Thinking (https://gdta.org).

Recently we can identify a emphasis among HPI educators and other authors on bridging the gap between research and practice in Design Thinking, demonstrated through diverse real-world examples (Meinel & Leifer, 2022).

As a conclusion of this century-old evolution, which I explained here very shortly, I think it is clear that Design Thinking is not dead, as some negators defend. It will continue, the same way that change, evolution, creative processes, innovation, transformation, etc., will continue. Probably just under a new name.