An essay written as part of my PhD research process. The aim is to sketch-out a philosophically and historically positioned "design thinking", as the basis for teaching experiments that instantiate "design thinking" approaches. The essay is in part inspired by the Design Thinking methodology of the IDEO design company, but only touches on it lightly. Rather than exploring the methodology in detail, it aims to get at some underlying aspects of design thinking as an ethos. I will soon be writing a second essay on "performance-thinking-learning", looking at the Open-space Learning approach as a distinct ethos. I will then use these two essays as the basis for a longer essay establishing a more extensive "ethos" and "tool-set" from which new teaching practice can be derived and evaluated.

Introduction

In a recent (undocumented) experiment, a group of successful historians were (to their horror) asked to perform a creative thinking task under uncertain and temporally pressurised conditions. Divided into small groups, they were given five A4 sheets of paper, each containing either an image or a text. The images included a 1950’s ticker-tape parade, a US newspaper from the day of the Wall Street Crash, a selection of quotes from The Crucible, a section from the Constitution defining the extents of Federal government financial powers, and the front cover of an edition of the Wall Street Journal from May 2008. Their task was simply stated as: create an interesting narrative from the resources, try to avoid the obvious – in ten minutes (reinforced by a count down to the deadline).

We might contend that people, even clever people, spend much of their time responding to events without thinking too deeply: reverting to ingrained habits, applying best-guess patterns that are sufficiently reliable. We can learn a lot about people and their favoured patterns by observing their behaviour under time-sensitive pressurised conditions. In this case, each of the groups (to varying degrees) responded by applying patterns of interpretive problem solving behaviour based upon a false assumption: that the task was a test, and that the correct answer could be ascertained by divining some hidden connection between the resources. This pattern (as it appeared from the perspective of the observer) was applied without question.

Design-thinkers are intrigued by patterns of behaviour, by the arrangements of connections, disjunctions, flows, attention and intensities that schematise our responses to situations dynamically over time (whether they pose well stated problems, or are more-open calls to discover new equilibria in mind and matter). Design-thinkers encounter such situations, and pause. The reflective intermission is the key (even when time is against them). Just enough time to avoid falling for the cliché. Ezio Manzini emphasises the pause:

“Because everything moves so fast, and we cannot stop it, we have to create some islands of slowness. Design, in all its history, but especially in more recent years, has been an agent of acceleration. Is it possible to conceive of solutions combining real-time interactions with the possibility of taking time for thinking and contemplation?” (Manzini, E, 2002)

They then design a solution, and more importantly they design a route to a solution. The route might include trial and error exploration. It will always involve managed risk. It may employ seemingly unorthodox techniques (for example, theatre). But experience tells them in which direction to travel and what to do when they come across a blockage. Design thinkers are masters of patterns and improvisation.

In his keynote address to the Re-inventing Design Education in the University conference in 2000, Clive Dilnot (School of the Art Institute, Chicago) made an audacious call:

“Design is, therefore, potentially the ‘unknown continent’ on which liberal education adequate to the demands and needs of the present can be built. That liberal education would have a unique form. Rather than occurring through the teaching of what is and what has been, this would be an education grounded in possibility.” (in Niederhelman, 2001: 84)

Looking back through two centuries of industrial growth, scientific innovation, and unanticipated ecological, social and psychological effects, the usefulness of an education capable of imagining, prototyping and implementing new worlds is obvious. The design-philosopher Bruce Mau makes it clear:

“Many of the challenges we face as a global society are problems of success not failure.” (Mau, 2009: 40)

We have perhaps been too good at certain types of solution, responding to certain types of problem, without the reflective intermission of design-thinking. Now we must learn to stop, observe, think and design, and (iteratively) to design to learn:

“This is about our collective ability to invent the future. To imagine solutions for a new world, to design our collective culture, to forge our new agenda, to address the challenges we share and shape the future we demand.” (Mau, 2009: 31-32)

Design-thinking is rapidly emerging as an attitude and a methodology that equips us (collectively) with the capability to imagine viable differences, to translate them into designs, evaluate options and move to implementation (but avoiding lock-in). It applies on varying scales. But perhaps is most significant when used by many individuals to make many small local changes. The international design company IDEO have been instrumental in developing this approach (see Kelley, 2004 for a detailed account), and applying it to all kinds of issues and locations – giving developments in rural India an equal footing to projects with major corporations. For GE Healthcare, working with IDEO, getting out of their US based R&D labs and into a different environment (India) proved to be just the trick. As CEO Jeffrey Immelt explained in a recent Harvard Business Review article (Immelt, Govindarajan and Trimble, 2009), their smoothly tuned processes were delivering high quality and sophistication, but crushing innovation and diversification – creating hi-tech products but missing out on where the greatest needs lay. Products designed in India are now being exported back to the USA. Such deliberate acts of disruption, forcing new thinking, are key components of design-thinking and the IDEO approach.

This brief essay will examine some aspects of what it is to think design, to design the activity of thinking, to undertake design-thinking. It is a rapidly evolving field, accelerated by new developments in information technology, manufacturing, architecture and aesthetics, as well as remarkable discoveries in cognitive science. Sadly, thoughtless manufacturing-biased design techniques are becoming popular amongst education policy makers (simplify, quantify, measure, reduce variability). There is then also, in the background and not completely within scope, a deeper investigation into how learning can best benefit from design-thinking, which techniques are most suitable and when, and how we can teach design-thinking to non-designers.

Now, let us think design.

Design, aestheticising the everyday, un-locking potentials

A key realisation of design-thinking is that we experience the world aesthetically, and that aesthetic qualities are not a luxurious and superfluous addition. Rather, they express an intuitive grasp of how things function (or dysfunction). As such, the aesthetic is not opposed to the intellect, it is a vital faculty mediating between the intellect and the world.

The emergence of the term “design” early in the Seventeenth Century, along with “designer” (and “architect”), marked a differentiation between proto-industrial craft working and a schematising creative vision. An un-precedented degree of artifice, with its origins in the baroque, brought to the commonplace objects that were more than just adequate adaptions of naturally occurring materials. This was, of course, nothing new. But the phenomena achieved much greater degrees of intensity and a new ubiquity. Identifiable styles spanned across many varied types of objects, regardless of craft demarcations. Individual “designers” worked in several distinct media. For example, Alfonso Parigi the younger (1606-1656) designed buildings, stage sets for the opera, illustrations, weddings and funerals[i]. Objects, even those of the every-day, attained a new kind of function, a new elevation: to engage our sensibilities beyond the immediate task in hand and the matter of their execution, to surprise, to delight, to complicate, to open-out perspective, to uplift. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze traced these flowing, materially transversal design motifs in his book on the baroque:

“…the horizontal extension of the bottom sections, the lowering of the pediment, the forward movement of the low, curved steps; the treatment of matter by masses of aggregates…the elaboration of a whorl that feeds endlessly on new turbulences and ends only in the way a horse’s mane or wavefroth does; the tendency of matter to overflow space…” (Deleuze, 1991: 229)

For Deleuze, baroque design is all about matter overflowing the limitations of space – design adds ideas, ideals to matter; folding, connecting and animating matter into flows that are more than their constituent material parts, the organisation of which is richly loaded with potential. An ingenious kind of design (like modern wonders of miniaturisation conquering spatial limitations through clever mechanical and electronic devices).

This is perhaps the first systematic “design thinking”, and one whose method remains with us today. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, for example, has re-invigorated the design motif of flow with his work on the “psychology of optimal experience”. This is sometimes misinterpreted as a call for simplicity, a disengagement from complexity and granularity. It is in fact precisely the opposite. Csikszentmihalyi calls for us to design our concepts, our artefacts, our world, ourselves to cope robustly with difficulties and complexities, such that our state of flow is preserved across technical, social and cognitive discontinuities – without eliminating them (for the world is constituted by flows and breaks). In searching for design inspiration, he repeats the old baroque trick: observing how in nature, certain structures dissipate chaos, and seem to reach beyond densely packed immobile and entropic matter:

“The Nobel prize-winning chemist Ilya Prigogine calls physical systems that harness energy which otherwise would be dispersed and lost in random motion “dissipative structures”. (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990: 201)

This, it should be acknowledged, is not an easy idea. We are perhaps more comfortable with a conception of aesthetic experience founded upon a disjunction of order and chaos, simplicity and complexity, beauty and the sublime. Immanuel Kant, for example, in the Critique of Judgement (Kant, 1991) claims an a-priori opposition between beauty and the sublime: a free-beauty independent of human purpose, against an overwhelming chaos experienced as sublime and to which we can only respond by schematizing to our own ends.

Against Kant and conceptions of art founded in abstract beauty, design is both pragmatic and aesthetic. Furthermore, it is reflective and thoughtful – conceiving of its own intellectual and emotional flows and discontinuities: design thinking for an aestheticised and intelligent everyday.

In painting, Paul Cézanne experimented with these ideas. He strove to give us an enhanced, intensified encounter with the ordinary: the “appleyness of the apple” (Lawrence, 1990, 70) – to force us to experience afresh, to abandon preconceptions, to discover new sensations and thoughts in a commonplace object. An encounter that “unlocks areas of sensation” as Francis Bacon would later say (in Deleuze, 2004: 102). In an essay on painting, D.H. Lawrence accurately pin-pointed Cézanne’s problem:

“Cézanne was a realist, and he wanted to be true to life. But he would not be content with the optical cliché.” (Lawrence, 1990: 70)

However:

“…once you have got photography, it is a very, very difficult thing to get representation more true-to-life: which it has to be.” (Lawrence, 1990: 70)

It is as if our experience of the apple is too full of images, too locked-in by our closeness to the apple. As Walter Benjamin argued “mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual” (Benjamin, 2006 :118) - bringing the work closer to the masses, but this also means that “the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.” (ibid: 118) – resulting in a blockage between ourselves and the flow of aesthetic encounters and discoveries.

Design thinking will save us! To unblock the potential in our engagement with the world, we must get hold of it directly, start experimenting, build prototypes, take risks, learn from failures, get our hands dirty. Tom Kelley has described how IDEO use “unfocus groups” (Kelley, 2008: 120), “lo-fidelity prototyping” (ibid: 46) and child-like play to open up this discovery and experimentation process - often getting children to join in (ibid: 62). Cézanne was a one-man lo-fi prototyping unfocus group:

“Cézanne spoke of the need to no longer see the wheat field, to be too close to it, to lose oneself without landmarks in smooth space. Afterward, striation can emerge: drawing, strata, the earth, “stubborn geometry,” the “measure of the world,” “geological foundations,” …The striated itself may in turn disappear in a “catastrophe,” opening the way for a new smooth space, and another striated space..” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 493)

In “smooth space” we tend towards the intensive and immersive flow of runaway improvisation, temporarily forgetting the indexes and measures that might hold back our audacity in exploring possibilities. This might seem more akin to play than work. In “striated space” we stand back from the various flows and discover indexes and values, divining measures and discriminating choices. Cézanne was a master of these methods. But there are many others, working in all media and disciplines. In creative writing, for example, David Morley has explored and documented similar methods to be used to make the writing of a text flow:

“If you find that some of the writing seems flat, shift sentences and paragraphs around to see what sounds more true to character, what order of words makes characters more emotionally honest, and what intensifies description…Ensure that the narrative moves forwards, and that you excise cliché words and clichés of feeling.” (Morley, 2008)

But surely, we may object: Cézanne was an artist not a designer. What does that opposition mean? Walter Benjamin claimed that art (as opposed to design) could only make sense when art is rarefied and access to art remains ritualised (Benjamin, 2006 :118). However, his claim that “the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility” is contested by design-thinking. Design-thinking dissolves the opposition so as to mobilize the aesthetic in the everyday, helping us to unlock new potentials. We must all be, to some degree, like Cézanne: using creative practices to engage, dissolve, side-step, dissipate problems, but with the wisdom that is added through the reflective pause, the informed selection of methods and the design of the solution and the process of reaching the solution. In his essay on Design Thinking, Tim Brown of IDEO describes how:

“The design process is best described metaphorically as a system of spaces rather than a pre-defined process of orderly steps. The spaces demarcate different sorts of related activities that together form the continuum of innovation.” (Brown, 2008: 88)

The spaces (which turn out in fact to be real spaces), he goes on to say, are “inspiration spaces” (for disruptive encounters with complexity), “ideation spaces” (for organising, indexing, prototyping, testing) and “implementation spaces” – the first two act as a kind of creative stirring and sieving, the later is where the cake finally gets baked: smooth spaces, striated spaces, mixed together iteratively to head in the right direction, as with Cézanne.

We could even go as far as to claim that thinking like Cézanne is essential to all thinking: how do we approach difficult new ideas? Ideas that seem counter-intuitive from our current perspective? The so called “threshold concepts”? Be like Cézanne, play with the space, find flows, follow them, then step back and evaluate:

“A threshold concept can be considered akin to a portal, opening up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something” (Meyer and Land, 2003: 1)

In architecture, a design discipline, Daniel Libeskind has explored the smooth space of theatrical performance, in which audience, actors, words and the outside are interconnected in a journey (as described in Artaud,1993) as a counterpoint to the sometimes massively discontinuous and striated space of architecture:

“Acting is the breakdown of space. So to act is the break of space, the dissolution of space. Acting is continual breakdown of distance, which brings spacing or acting back into architecture, since architects are increasingly realizing that their interventions are really of a negative sort. The utopias, ironically, turned out to be nightmares.” (Libeskind, 2001: 68).

As with Cézanne, Libeskind’s method of design is founded upon a highly differentiated and precise mastery of spaces, their design, capabilities, intellectual and aesthetic effects. To what end? His design-thinking flows across engineering and culture, history and invention, to the most tangible and extraordinarily audacious of constructions.

Emotional durability, sustaining design, sustaining thought

A second key realisation of design-thinking is that successful, durable design-thinking involves an incremental co-evolution and inter-adaption of objects, people and ideas towards states of near-equilibrium, always open to change.

Recent years have seen a shift away from programmatic, statistics-driven industrial design approaches. There has been an acceptance that quality assurance and impact metrics cannot ever guarantee that we are inventing the right future. For example, consider Design for Six Sigma (DFSS), popular with large scale manufacturing industries. The Six Sigma management methodology aims to reduce errors to the absolute minimum. DFSS goes further, designing products to eliminate the possibility of error:

“Six sigma is considered reactive because it involves finding and fixing problems in existing processes. DFSS involves designing processes capable of reaching six-sigma levels, thus it is considered a more aggressive quality approach.” (Antony and Banuelas, 2003: 335)

Methodologies like DFSS may have given us lean error-free manufacturing processes, having privileged simplicity and eliminated variability, but they have made little progress in addressing the basic failure: building the wrong product, or creating a product that locks consumers into inefficient, unhealthy and damaging behaviours. Users and designers (or users who are designers) need to be given time-out to discover, imagine and experiment.

In his book Emotionally Durable Design, Jonathan Chapman diagnoses the problem accurately:

“Aesthetic fallout from technocentric design includes the stagnation of product typologies. Although an object’s functional array may be incrementally tweaked with finite technological developments, the nature and complexity of the relationships most products hold with users remain unchanged.” (Chapman, 2002: 12)

The result is familiar: we churn through new products, un-loved possessions without ever achieving an equilibrium with our world, our designs. As a recent investigation into “feature fatigue” demonstrated:

“Do you have any phones that make phone calls?” Too often, in their eagerness to layer on additional functionality, developers lose sight of the product’s basic function—the one thing it must do extremely well.” (Rust, Viana Thompson, Hamilton, 2006)

Chapman argues that the aim of design should be to create emotionally durable products, designs that fit and for which we feel a sense of belonging. As has been argued, design-thinking aims to open up new possibilities through rapid experimentation and creativity. Superficially this might seem to contradict the need for “emotional durability”. However, consider how in the activities described above we iterate rapidly and repeatedly through “inspiration” and “ideation” to create and sieve out possibilities, arriving at an “implementation” that fits more accurately, with which we can live. The IDEO approach emphasises the collective aspect of this journey, bringing together diverse but connected people on an equal footing - for example doctors, nurses and patients (Kelley, 2008: 217).

This second key aspect of design-thinking opposes Six Sigma’s aversion to variability. It treats design as a kind of co-evolution of a narrative: the design, the user and the designer:

“Users must be designed into object narratives as co-producers and not simply as inert, passive witnesses. A process that enables the nature of user interaction to shape the emergent narrative.” (Chapman, 2002: 135)

…and the emergent narrative to shape the user. And again we can ask whether in fact this describes the nature of thinking and learning. The cognitive scientist Andy Clark has described human intelligence in just such terms, a co-evolution in which we produce our environment, the framework of our thinking and being, and in turn that framework produces us (Clark, 1997). Canny design-thinkers, as with canny learners, are able to steer this co-evolution, to design thinking, to sustain thought.

Concluding speculations

Design-thinking is taking shape as an attitude, as a methodology, as a philosophy. And perhaps also as an approach to learning and designing learning. Certainly if it’s methods are able to deliver on the promises, unlocking potentials, setting creativity free, but in a collective and collaborative context, aiming for durable and sustainable ends, then it more than envisages an exciting and viable future.

How can this be tested? Imagine, discover, think, prototype, test, iterate, implement.

Is this viable within current constraints? It’s not easy. For example, the iterative process of inspiration-ideation-implementation may sometimes benefit from long pauses. For example, David Morley (Director of the Warwick Writing Programme) suggests that a text is left for six weeks before exposing it to critical stress: “it’s easier to murder someone else’s darlings than your own.” (Morley, 2008) How can this fit with our speed obsessed (educational) culture? How can that be compatible with our modes of assessment and student expectations of rapid feedback? The IDEO team recommend using a dedicated project room for each project. It should be possible to leave the room as is at any stage, returning later when further inspiration has been gathered from forays into the field. That might be necessary for quality creative work, but where do we have the required infrastructure?

These are significant design challenges to be addressed.

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