All entries for Wednesday 10 February 2010

February 10, 2010

First thoughts on Bauer and Eagen – design thinking as epistemic plurality

I am reading and considering Bauer and Eagen's ambitious and wide ranging article on "Design Thinking - Epistemic Plurality in Management and Organization". Starting with the differentiation of analytical problem solving/optimizing design from paradigm-altering, market-shifting design thinking. This is familiar ground from my studies in artificial intelligence and cognitive science (at Sussex), as well as Deleuzian conceptions of society as inherently disequilibrious.


In the 1960s [Herbert] Simon made it clear [in The Sciences of the Artificial] that analytical thinking is best suited for evaluating given alternatives and choosing the best one. Hence, analytical thinking is the tool of choice for managers and organizations that face more opportunities than they can seize. (Bauer and Eagen 2008: 71)

This sounds like the kind of process/product/feature optimisation within scope for methodologies like Design for Six Sigma. That, in turn, derives its authority from a model of intelligence as an optimising search for a definitive solution to a well-defined problem (familiar from early work in artificial intelligence), dependent upon metrics and clear-cut classifications of phenomena.

It might be that such optimisation problems are in fact relatively rare outside of mass production engineering. In nature, society and human cognition, such conditions are the very rare end product of more complex, dynamic and evolutionary processes. In cognition, it may even be the case that the experience of continuity and uniformity is merely a simulacra unconsciously produced in memory after the actual genuine experience of the messy buzzing world.

In many cases, however, we are forced to operate explicitly within the complex:

By contrast businesses under pressure to innovate must adopt a creative approach that generates and seizes new possibilities. (Bauer and Eagen 2008: 72)

Why? In what ways might a business be under pressure to innovate? There are many reasons: obsolescence of products, commoditization of previously valuable services, scarcity of resources, disruption of the route to market - and perhaps most challenging: an un-anticipated and inexplicable change in consumer habits and interests (produced by complex and non-terminating dynamics). Often, many of these factors combine. Consumer attitudes amplify other movements, in a kind of positive-feedback-driven butterfly effect: rapidly experiencing, learning, adapting, modifying and tiring of new products. A market is, after all, the virtual construction of inter-subjective interactions: minds forming theories about matter and other minds (forming theories etc). In such conditions, the search is on to generate relatively stable new values, new products, new markets, and new concentrations of consumers that cannot be captured easily by a competitor. This is both a challenge and an opportunity. In other cases, the market remains locked into a stagnant and mutually unsatisfying equilibrium serving no party particularly well. A little disruption might act to shift habits and territories that are blocking progress.

Design thinking is the appropriate approach for such businesses engaging actively in the creation of new value propositions. (Bauer and Eagen 2008: 72)

So design thinking is a strategy (or a set of techniques) for engaging positively with the complex. This echoes the move made in artificial intelligence when attention shifted to creating systems that could operate effectively outside of the laboratory or the computer simulation, evolutionary and adaptive systems more like biological lifeforms. In their essay on design thinking, Bauer and Eagen approach the matter with just such an appreciation of complexity (mentioning Bergson amongst a rich mix of other references).


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Bauer R. M. and Eagen W. M "Design Thinking - Epistemic Plurality in Management and Organization" in Aesthesis: the International Journal of Art and Aesthetics in Management and Organizational Life, Volume 2, 3, 2008, p. 64-73


Robert O'Toole : 10 Feb 2010 00:48 |  Tags:    |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem