Dealing with the Devil in Design Thinking

Design Thinking is the latest exotic heuristic to show up in fishmongers' stalls. The old saying, "give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime" comes to mind. On one hand, Design Thinking is something you could use off the shelf (buy some fish). Alternatively, by adding the foundational rules (DSRP) of Systems Thinking (ST), Design Thinking (DT) can be something you catch yourself, adapt on the fly, and make to order.

A heuristic is any approach to problem solving, learning, or discovery that employs a practical method not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect, but sufficient for the immediate goals[^n]

In fact, there are many types of thinking heuristics. Research shows that underlying ALL of these thinking types are four simple metacognitive patterns (DSRP):

• Making Distinctions between and among ideas.
• Organizing ideas into Systems of parts and wholes.
• Identifying Relationships between ideas.
• Taking many Perspectives on any idea.

Below is a poster with 9 important types of thinking (click here to download a free hi-res version). In this blog we will be delving deeper into Design Thinking (lower right).

First, What is Design Thinking?

Design Thinking originated at the Stanford University Design School. Their short description:[^n]

"The Design Thinking process first defines the problem and then implements the solutions, always with the needs of the user demographic at the core of concept development. This process focuses on need-finding, understanding, creating, thinking, and doing. At the core of this process is a bias towards action and creation: by creating and testing something, you can continue to learn and improve upon your initial ideas. The design thinking process consists of these 5 steps:


EMPATHIZE: Work to fully understand the experience of the user for whom you are designing. Do this through observation, interaction, and immersing yourself in their experiences.

DEFINE: Process and synthesize the findings from your empathy work in order to form a user point of view that you will address with your design.

IDEATE: Explore a wide variety of possible solutions through generating a large quantity of diverse possible solutions, allowing you to step beyond the obvious and explore a range of ideas.

PROTOTYPE: Transform your ideas into a physical form so that you can experience and interact with them and, in the process, learn and develop more empathy.

TEST: Try out high-resolution products and use observations and feedback to refine prototypes, learn more about the user, and refine your original point of view."

What does Design Thinking Do?

Design Thinking isn't just for products (like a iPhone). One can apply Design Thinking to designing political movements, designing a better social policy, a more sustainable product or service, creative endeavors, accessibility-increasing software, and life saving products, not just stereotypical consumer products. Design Thinking is about creating products (and programs and services) that better serve humans, thus the first step is based upon an empathic disposition. Design Thinking is less about creating a new whizbang product that no one needs and more about designing things that work for people. It is about making "user experience" central to "design".

The Upside and Downside of Design Thinking

The upside is that Design Thinking gives us 5 straightforward steps to design success. The downside is that the devil is in the details. While the 5 Steps of Design Thinking are clear, the sophisticated cognitive skills one needs to perform these steps successfully are opaque. DSRP, the cognitive code that underlies many thinking heuristics including Design Thinking, can help sort out the details and rid one of the devil. DSRP is an acronym that stands for: making Distinctions, organizing Systems, drawing Relationships, and taking Perspectives. We won't go into DSRP in depth here. There are numerous other places[^n] where it has been given a more extensive treatment. We will show you how together, Design Thinking + DSRP, leads to a powerful process.

Let me restate the five principles here, to provide a somewhat more critical summary of them:

See, the hard part isn't following the Design Thinking steps, it's things like: taking a deeply empathic perspective, synthesizing another person's experience, converting that synthesis into a great idea, transforming that great idea into a physical prototype, once again empathically engaging user perspective and experience, and translating that experience into improvements in design and function. And, all of these skills require mixing and matching four patterns of metacognition: carefully making Distinctions, painstakingly organizing part-whole Systems, fastidiously tracking action-reaction Relationships, and religiously taking the Perspective of the other that makes the difference between success and failure in the design process. The universal patterns of thought (DSRP) that underlie Design Thinking will help you sort out the details and bring rich and robust complexity to an otherwise oversimplified but useful heuristic.

Design Thinking + DSRP

The five steps of Design Thinking require mixing and matching the simple DSRP Rules.

How to Do Design Thinking Better?

My simple advice: use the 5 Step Design Thinking model. It's a good, superficial, step-by-step model. But the complexities that lie underneath need a nonlinear and complexity-friendly model. So, use it with DSRP. How to learn DSRP?

• Read Systems Thinking Made Simple
• Join the STDaily Facebook discussion group
• See the 6 Things you can do (most of them free) at www.crlab.us
• Check out a recent study with graduate students
• For a detailed analysis of the ethical implications of DSRP, such as empathy and prosocial behavior, read this research
• Also be sure to read Solving the Dilemma of Design Thinking to better understand the crux of ideating-to-prototyping