Nigel Cross article “Design Thinking: What just happened”
Nigel Cross is one of the most influential design theorists today. His book "Design Thinking: Understanding How Designers Think and Work" just came out in a revised 2nd edition. This book has been instrumental in the field of enhancing the understanding of design practice. (I will come back to the book in other posts)
For now, I will comment on a short article that Cross published earlier this year in the journal Design Studies, see ref below. In this article, Cross discusses the history and development of design thinking. He presents an overview of the field and he does it as a historical journey. I truly appreciate how he slowly and carefully builds his argument by going through literature and citations. His analysis leads to some important insights that align with many design researchers' intuitive sense of the field, and how it has developed, and what the notion of design thinking stands for.
?I could not agree more with Cross' analysis and conclusion. One of the concrete contributions is that he labels two kinds of design thinking. He calls them DesignThinking 1 and DesignThinking 2. He describes DesignThinking 1 as being based on "the design-based, scholarly literature", and DesignThinking 2 as existing in a "more widely accessible, especially business-oriented media."
Cross does a great job of distinguishing these two understandings of design thinking. He goes through a lot of the existing criticism of a simplistic understanding of design thinking and shows how most of it is directed towards DesignThinking 2. For instance, he writes "This weakness is the lack of a sound methodological basis to DesignThinking 2, leading to its reliance upon cookbook ‘suggestions for actions’. They believe that this may explain why there are complaints that ‘design thinking does not work’:?" ("they" refers to Laursen and Haase, see ref below).
Cross ends the article with this paragraph "These designerly ways of knowing, thinking and acting are certainly relevant to tackling a broad range of problems, but they are not a universal issue-resolving cure-all. Nor are they something that can be gained adequately just from a workbook, a seminar, a one-day workshop, or even a four-day ‘bootcamp’ in Design Thinking.?"
?The text is so rich in analysis and conclusions that it is difficult to summarize. Anyone who is interested in the notion of design thinking should read this article.
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Cross, N. (2023).?Design thinking: Understanding how designers think and work. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Cross, N. (2023). Design thinking: What just happened?.?Design Studies,?86.
Laursen, L. N., & Haase, L. M. (2019). The short- comings of design thinking when compared to designerly thinking. The Design Journal, 22(6), 813e832.?
Senior Advisor (PhLic) with passion for sustainability, digital product passport, and modern enterprise and information architecture.
1 年One aspect that does not come through in Nigel Cross article is that the methods, techniques, or checklists of Design Thinking 2 often are constructed for some purpose based on the large method base of Designerly ways of thinking and doing 1. I usually separate them into the front of the curtain (DT2) of the curtain and behind the curtain (DT1). What we see in DT2 is predominately what a company, community or theorist choose to include to serve their stated purposes. Of course they create a method that they think serves their customers or members best. With this in mind, it becomes easier to understand and compare DT2.
UX Design, Anthropology, some coding (JS, Python)
1 年What I miss in the references is Lilly Irani’s critique of design thinking, putting it both in the context of one of its strongest proponents, design consultancy IDEO, and the position of the silicon valley in the global economy: https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/view/29638/html
Senior research scientist at TNO: Responsible Innovation. Book: ‘Ethics for people who work in tech’.
1 年Jasper van Kuijk , Guido Stompff
Systemic Designer | Professor | Convener | Author
1 年Thanks Erik - Nigel helpfully puts all his work on Open Access which might be challenged with the new direction that Design Studies is being taken within Elsevier. https://oro.open.ac.uk/88602/1/1-s2.0-S0142694X23000285-main.pdf I think the DT1 and DT2 are clear distinctions we can accommodate, and its helpful to have a reference to point to these difference in epistemology. There is an epistemic culture of business in which DT2 is widely accepted. Nigel's position on designerly thinking makes more sense as a description anyway. I think this distinction could settle the concerns of "executive designers" such as Jen, cited by Ramirez, who rail against the erosion of the depth of the field. (Do artists get mad when similar crap is called art or only designers?) I think WE are the ones who will have to adapt, as in a postmodern world, which hasn't been mentioned yet (in these papers). Its the ambiente we're all in. Also see GK VanPatter's long-standing critiques and reframes of Design Thinking, and I'd recall he was perhaps the first to really push back publicly when Fast Company and Ron R (Business Week) and similar pundits rolled out DT2 around 2007. Recently: https://issuu.com/humantific/docs/preview_design1234_book_1
Professor at Bauhaus University Weimar
1 年yep, 2 days workshop can't replace 3 or more years of education and hard/painful work/thinking - nobody would expect a 2 day programming workshop to get a newbie able to develop software architectures (or to do your surgery), so why with design thinking?