Design Thinking and Systems Thinking (5 posts)

  • Profile picture of David Ing David Ing said 9 months, 2 weeks ago:

    The article on ”Systems & Design Thinking: A Conceptual Framework for their Integration” by Pourdehnad, Wexler and Wilson has raised the salience of Design Thinking for me. I’m creating a thread here, so that parallel readings will be bundled together, and others can comment.

    The paper was presented at ISSS Hull 2011, so it will appear in the proceedings online. There’s another version posted as a working paper at U. Penn, where the authors have an affiliation.

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  • Profile picture of David Ing David Ing said 9 months, 2 weeks ago:

    “Design Thinking” Isn’t a Miracle Cure, but Here’s How It Helps | Helen Walters | March 24, 2011 | fastcodesign.com

    “Design thinking is not a panacea. It is a process, just as Six Sigma is a process.” says Walters.

    I note that the first response to the blog post is by @peterjones to an unedited August 2008 draft version of an article “Learning the lessons of systems thinking: Exploring the gap between Thinking and Leadership”.

    Peter points to Fred Collopy, “Lessons Learned — Why the Failure of Systems Thinking Should Inform the Future of Design Thinking”, July 7, 2009, fastcompany,com.

    Collopy says …

    “The drive to nail “design thinking” down has the same normative flavor that has restricted the spread of systems thinking. The urge to create a framework that specifies what and how a design thinker proceeds seems not just futile but dangerous to the survival of a movement aimed at expanding the kinds of thinking that managers, policy makers and citizens engage in.

    What is the alternative? I would suggest that we should focus instead on building and describing an arsenal of methods and techniques, many of them drawn from various extant design practices, that are applicable to the domains and problems in questions. Describing these techniques as well as the conditions under which each is of value would constitute an invaluable program of research.”

    Peter positions Ackoff’s approach to systems thinking as a pregenitor to design thinking.

    “Why then were some practices much more successfully adopted than others? Russ Ackoff shares many stories of successful applications, but then his approaches (for example, Idealized Design) reformulate deep theory into simple working language and structures for action. He has participated in the front lines of organizational decision making, unlike other systems theorists who step in and out of the arena of committed action. And Ackoff’s approach is identified as design for a reason. His school of systems thinking is explicitly framed as designing, and I consider it the progenitor of today’s design thinking. Finally, Professor Ackoff also demonstrates the capability to think independently —to not be attached to the belief systems he himself may have constructed. I will add that systems or design ‘thinking’ must be dynamic processes, not just frameworks of ideas, to be considered thinking. We must free it up from the belief systems accrued from its theoretical development and (often limited) validation.”

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  • Profile picture of David Ing David Ing said 9 months, 2 weeks ago:

    Bruce Nussbaum | Design Thinking Is A Failed Experiment. So What’s Next? | April 6, 2011 | fastcodesign.com

    In this April 6, 2011 blog post, Bruce Nussbaum first points back to a July 10, 2009 blog post responding to Fred Collopy (with Collopy the first commenter).

    Bruce Nussbaum, | Design Thinking Battle — Managers Embrace Design Thinking, Designers Reject It | July 10, 2009 | businessweek.com

    Nussbaum is working towards a new book on “Creative Intelligence”, where he says that …

    “I am defining Creative Intelligence as the ability to frame problems in new ways and to make original solutions. You can have a low or high ability to frame and solve problems, but these two capacities are key and they can be learned. I place CQ within the intellectual space of gaming, scenario planning, systems thinking and, of course, design thinking. It is a sociological approach in which creativity emerges from group activity, not a psychological approach of development stages and individual genius.”

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  • Profile picture of David Ing David Ing said 9 months, 2 weeks ago:

    Design Thinking on Film | Avinash Rajagopal | July 7, 2011 | metropolismag.com

    This article by Rajagopal summarizes progress on a Kickstarter project on “Design & Thinking – a documentary” seeking completion funding towards October 2011. In the video, Paul Pangaro gets a good portion of the air time.

    The makers of the documentary (from San Francisco and Taiwan) have a Design and Thinking blog charting their progress.

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  • Profile picture of David Ing David Ing said 9 months, 2 weeks ago:

    My Problem with Design | Chauncey Bell | September 2008 | ubiquity.acm.org

    Coming from a stronger phenomenological perspective on design, Chauncey Bell writes:

    “I will raise several questions about the way we commonly interpret ‘design.’

    First, our way of understanding design strips apart components, activities, and contexts. I like simplification, but not this kind of atomistic simplification that destroys the context.

    Second, the commonplace notions of design don’t give observers of the design process strong ways of making sense of the object of the designer’s attention – what the designer thinks he or she is designing.

    Third, the designer doesn’t have a useful way of thinking about who he or she is in the process of design – the role they think they are playing.

    Fourth, I want to question the accountability the designer takes in the invention of whatever he or she is designing.”

    Bell, in comparison to some other perspectives on design, is not only anti-reductionist in looking at the whole, but also brings in the designer himself or herself. Asking about the accountability that the designer takes is a fresh question.

    The prescription that follow suggests …

    “Five Aspects of Bringing a New Practice. I named the five: Provocation, Diagnosis, Offer, Mobilization, and Accumulation.”

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