What could be more passe than to define Design Thinking now — now that it has been over-hyped, described in a million ways, implemented very glamorously and expensively, found to not live up to the hype and finally publicly declared dead?

Nonetheless, Design Thinking ought to be defined, as crisply as possible, because it is a real thing with a precise meaning, and knowing its precise meaning is required to approach it in the right way and get those promised results. Without this precision, Design Thinking is really little more than an appearance of systematic creative activity, a style of carrying on, and unwarranted hopes.

So here’s my definition. Design Thinking is an approach to solving problems that involve hybrid systems composed of both objective and subjective elements. By objective elements I mean entities that exist “out there”, as physical objects, virtual objects, environments, services, and anything else a person can encounter in the world. And by subjective elements I mean ideas, thoughts, emotions, decisions, perceptions — all those things a person experiences “in here”.

In its inclusion of subjective elements in its problem definitions, design distinguishes itself from engineering, which treats only systems composed of objective elements.

The 20th Century was obsessed with the creative possibilities of cleansing problems of subjective elements. And in many areas, especially in the physical sciences and the technologies based on the physical sciences, this was the key to progress. However, this systematic elimination of subjectivity was misunderstood by many to be one of the key principles of scientific method. A scientific approach to anything involving human beings  meant treating human beings strictly as objective entities (behaving objects) and removing the messier and more arbitrary elements of human experience — subjectivity.

In fact, the scientific method does not necessitate the objectification of problems except in instances where the phenomenon to be understood is itself purely objective. What scientific method requires is clarification of the problem, inclusion of all relevant factors in exploring the problem. So to understand a social problem scientifically, it is necessary to include not only the objective factors at play but also the subjective ones. This, of course is what the social sciences do in a variety of different ways.

So, another way to grasp what Design Thinking is is to make an analogy between engineering and the physical sciences. To some extent, you can engineer by instinct referring explicitly to theories from physics or drawing on science to test the adequacy of your engineering solution. Or you can harness scientific knowledge, use your instincts to come up with crazy possible approaches to try out, and then test them to make sure they actually work. The exact same thing goes for design, except where engineering uses the physical sciences, design thinking uses the knowledge and methods of the social sciences.

*

Some analogies:

Design thinking is to the social sciences what engineering is to the physical sciences.

Design thinking is to agency “creative” as engineering is to tinkering.

To the degree an individual participates in the life of a group, the behavior tends to be formatted according to conventions of speech, concept and procedure. One uses the vocabulary, ideas and behaviors easily understood and accepted by the majority of group members, in order to gain influence within the pace and formatting of group work. To stray outside of the commonalities of the group is to risk frustrating or alienating some members of the group and consequently losing their support, or to slow the pace of the activity and interfere with meeting goals, or to fragment the group into conflicting factions, or to require too much effort or time to understand and risk being interrupted, ignored or otherwise silenced.

With some individuals things can be different — if the individuals do not insist on enforcement of group conventions.

Once again, this connects with Buber’s distinction between “the social” and “the interhuman”.

*

Deep innovation and novel syntheses require new procedures for conceiving and evaluating thoughts, new language to express new thoughts (and to distinguish the new thoughts from older, more familiar ones), a willingness to wrestle with frustrations, unclarity and dead-ends — in other words, it runs counter to everything that makes groups function effectively. This is why innovations tend to be hatched by individuals and why “group-think” has such bad connotations. However, groups outfitted with new conventions — perhaps in workshop settings or in semi-permanent  collectives governed by new codes, processes or cultural values — might produce results impossible in other conditions. (A way to see it is that a workshop or a department or team can be socially programmed to produce different results.) But the novel results achieved are still different in kind from the more flexible conditions of individual or small group work.

Qualitative methods help you:

• Decide what to measure.
• Interpret the meaning of measurements.
• Respond to measurements effectively.

Quantitative methods help you:

• Identify problems to investigate.
• Observe phenomena precisely.
• Evaluate the effectiveness of strategies.

These methods thread together:

• Identify problems to investigate. Where are things not measuring up? (quant)
• Decide what to measure. What elements in the situation warrant scrutiny? (qual)
• Observe phenomena precisely. What is really going on? (quant)
• Interpret the meaning of measurements. What motivates what is going on? (qual)
• Respond to measurements effectively. How can we act into the situation to change it? (qual)
• Evaluate the effectiveness of strategies. How does the situation change when we act into it? (quant)
• Repeat…

It would be lovely if I could get these methods to interleave more elegantly. This is how they seem to me to line up, though.

It’s mine: I saw the opportunity.

It’s mine: It was my idea.

It’s mine: I articulated the idea.

It’s mine: I championed the idea.

It’s mine: I translated the idea.

It’s mine: I laid the plans.

It’s mine: I made the case.

It’s mine: I formed the team.

It’s mine: I motivated the team.

It’s mine: I aligned the team.

It’s mine: I coordinated the team.

It’s mine: I fleshed out the idea.

It’s mine: I built it and made it real.

It’s mine: I made it profitable.

It’s mine: I funded it.

It’s mine: I told the world about it.

It’s mine: I made people care about it.

It’s mine: I keep it going everyday.

It’s mine: I improve it.

It’s mine: I find ways to grow it.

It’s mine: I discovered it first.

It’s mine: I use it.

It’s mine: I pay for it.

It’s mine: I rely on it.

It’s mine: It was made for people like me.

It’s mine: It was made by people like me.

It’s mine: It’s part of my life.

It’s mine: It’s part of who I am.

Ideas for innovation come from many sources.

• New technological possibilities  can be used to create and evolve new products.
• New industry developments can create new strategic pressures and opportunities that make new products competitive.
• New insights into people and the details of their lives can show how new products might fit into and transform their worlds.
• New combinations of skills in inter-disciplinary teams provided the right conditions and supports can co-invent new ideas impossible for isolated individuals.
• New innovation tools, techniques and approaches can produce and evolve new products.
• New forms of analysis can lead to new understandings of situations that reveal new opportunities to innovate.
• And — at the risk of sounding old-fashioned — inspiration can strike a person at any time, in any place, for any reason or no reason at all.

This is not even close to a complete list. Most people prefer one or another source and sometimes would have their organization cultivate only one or a few sources instead of as many as possible. But why? Perhaps because most organizations already have many ideas and are looking for ways to narrow the list.

But really, what is needed is a way to evaluate ideas and select the best ones. And the majority of organizations rely on one method, which could be called “table-thinking” — people sitting behind desks and tables, presenting, debating and deciding things about distant situations they at best partially understand and largely misunderstand.

For all I know the innovation consultants are right that anybody can innovate.

But I will insist on adding one stipulation: anyone who really wants to can innovate.

“Really wants to” means wanting everything that goes with innovation — non-linearity, doubt, anxiety,  ambiguity and profound disorientation.

Wanting all the conditions of innovation might be something not that many people can want, despite wanting to have the output.

Overcoming mistrust is very expensive.

I tell my clients that research designed to overcome skepticism can cost three to five times as much as research designed simply to inform.

Reality is radically heterogeneous: it is made out of materials, people, ideas, imagination, interactions, feelings, roles, habits, perspectives… whatever interacts to make a situation what it is — that is real.

Design works with heterogeneous materials in heterogeneous situations. Whatever reality is there, no matter what it is, it is considered part of a system to be modified.

Design accepts the entirety of reality as its medium and material.

We have to be who we are to be a participant in any relationship.

When it comes to relationships selflessness is as destructive as selfishness.

It is entirely a matter of knowing how to situate first-person-singular — I — within first-person-plural — We — and to allow a second person singular — You — to do the same.

This goes for relationship between people, but also for relationships between people and  things.

To be selfless in creation — to set yourself aside to do what is called for —  is to make trash. It is crucial to invest yourself in the things you make.

To be selfish in creation — to fail craft by not listen to the material — is to offend nature, including human nature, and gives artifice a bad name.

*

When we do design research we are not collecting bits of data that will speak for itself later if we suppress our subjectivity. Not only is this approach naive, it is unnatural, alienating and highly conducive to creating the projection it seeks to prevent.

To be good researchers we have to be there, in situ, listening, letting the present reality speak for itself while it is present, letting it teach us while it is there with us able to tutor us. We have to struggling to understand and to become fluent and articulate by seeing how the reality articulates itself. And we have to be changed by what we learn, from baffled outsider to fluent participant. It is our fluency that will guide our introduction of new elements into the situation, not the data we record, chop up into individual sentences, then categorize into labeled heaps.

What does the learning look like? Like a student struggling to understand, trying out different ways to grasp the material, making mistakes, accepting correction, trying again. Frustration, then light bulbs go off. Ideas erupt spontaneously. This is also what science looks like, not like white-coated gods standing above reality like objective eyes-in-the-sky.

To learn is a humble activity.

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” — Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind