Rylander examines design thinking as knowledge work, asking not simply what designers do differently, but how different constructions of knowledge shape the ways ambiguous situations are interpreted, framed and acted upon. The implication is that design’s contribution may lie less in a transferable method than in widening what organisations recognise as legitimate ways of knowing, sensemaking and working with uncertainty.

What counts as knowledge shapes what we are able to see.

This is one of the more useful provocations in Anna Rylander’s 2009 article, ‘Design Thinking as Knowledge Work: Epistemological Foundations and Practical Implications’. Rather than treating design thinking principally as a method for innovation, Rylander places it alongside another management discourse: that of knowledge work and the so-called knowledge-intensive firm.

The comparison is revealing because both claim to address a similar condition: qualified people working creatively with complex and ambiguous problems. Yet they construct knowledge rather differently.

This connects to something we have explored previously in considering the different intellectual traditions gathered under the label of design thinking. Much of the management discourse has concentrated on what organisations might gain by adopting the methods, attitudes or behaviours associated with designers. An epistemological perspective asks a different question: what ways of knowing make those practices possible in the first place?

Rylander gives us another way into that question.

Different constructions of knowing

Rylander contrasts two dominant constructions. Within the literature on knowledge-intensive firms, knowledge has frequently been associated with intellectual competence: analytical, theory-guided and predominantly verbal forms of knowing. Management consulting provides one of her principal examples.

Design discourse, by contrast, has tended to describe knowing as practical, situated and embodied. Designers sketch, model, prototype and interact with materials. Donald Schön’s familiar description of a designer having a “conversation” with a drawing captures something important here. The representation does not merely communicate an idea that has already been completed internally. Making the representation participates in the thinking. Rylander consequently draws attention to visual, spatial, kinaesthetic and other sensory modes through which organisational sensemaking can occur.

The above distinction is useful, but it should not be mistaken for an essential difference between “business people” and “designers”. Rylander herself gives us reason to resist that reading. She is interested in constructions of knowledge: discourses through which professions describe themselves, establish identities and make particular forms of expertise credible.

In practice, complex work contains analytical and intuitive, discursive and embodied, rational and interpretive activity in varying combinations.

The more interesting question is what happens when one construction becomes dominant. What kinds of knowledge become legitimate. What kinds become difficult to articulate? And what forms of practice follow?

Knowing who we are

This is where Rylander connects knowledge to identity and sensemaking. Drawing on Karl Weick, she notes that the establishment and maintenance of identity is the first of his seven properties of sensemaking. As Weick puts it, depending on who I understand myself to be, my definition of what is “out there” changes too.

Identity is therefore not simply professional branding applied after knowledge has been produced. It participates in what can be known.

A consultant whose professional identity is organised around analytical expertise and data-driven objectivity may attend differently to a situation from someone trained to value ambiguity, material exploration and reflection-in-action. The difference is not simply in the tools they reach for. Their professional identities help establish what looks like evidence, what appears credible and what constitutes responsible action.

This offers an interesting extension to our recent discussion of Kees Dorst and framing. A frame establishes a standpoint from which a problematic situation can be understood and approached. But frames are not constructed by neutral observers standing outside the situations they interpret.

Who we believe ourselves to be is already involved in what becomes visible from that standpoint. Reframing may therefore demand more than developing an alternative interpretation of the problem. Sometimes the identity from which the original interpretation appeared sensible must itself become available for questioning.

For organisations, this can be difficult. Professional identities provide legitimacy, status and a sense of competence. The very identities that allow people to act confidently under uncertainty can also stabilise the frames through which uncertainty is interpreted.

Performing certainty

Rylander’s discussion of management consulting becomes especially interesting here. Both design firms and management consultancies, she observes, sell work whose outcomes can be difficult to evaluate in advance. Both operate under considerable ambiguity. Yet the management-consulting discourse has historically responded to this uncertainty by cultivating symbols of rationality: methodologies, analytical expertise and the promise of data-driven objectivity.

Rylander draws on a more provocative strand of research that asks whether knowledge-intensive firms might partly operate as “systems of persuasion”: organisations whose authority depends not only on possessing expertise, but also on successfully persuading clients that they possess the knowledge required to manage uncertainty.

Nearly two decades later, the object around which this performance of expertise is organised has changed considerably. Artificial intelligence is now being sold into organisations through a vocabulary of transformation, reinvention, scale, competitive advantage and measurable value. Consulting firms increasingly talk of redesigning work around AI and translating rapidly developing technologies into enterprise performance.

There is real expertise involved in this work. More considered accounts also acknowledge that the difficulty is not simply technological. Governance, organisational capability, workflow redesign, culture and adoption matter enormously.

But Rylander makes another question difficult to ignore: What rhetorical work is AI itself now doing?

The capabilities, organisational consequences and longer-term implications of these technologies remain unsettled. At the same time, organisations are confronted with increasingly confident propositions about how AI will transform their work.

The tension is familiar. When ambiguity cannot actually be removed, expertise may partly consist in constructing forms through which ambiguity appears governable. AI does not make Rylander’s argument obsolete. In some respects, it makes the argument easier to see.

There is also an irony here. As more analytical and discursive work becomes available to computational systems, other forms of knowing become increasingly consequential: situated judgement, embodied experience, interpretation, negotiation, organisational memory and the ability to understand what matters in a particular situation.

The old opposition between “rational knowledge work” and “interpretive design thinking” consequently looks less stable. Perhaps it always was.

Representations do things

This matters because Rylander’s argument is not only about different kinds of expertise. It is also about the ways through which knowledge becomes organised. The words, categories and representations through which we make sense of a situation do not simply describe reality. They participate in constructing it.

Differentiating, naming, labelling and classifying establish distinctions through which some things become meaningful and actionable. These representations therefore have practical, social and political consequences.

This brings us back to design as knowledge work. A sketch, map, model, persona or framework should not necessarily be understood as the final packaging of an insight produced elsewhere. Such artefacts can participate in the production of knowledge itself. They allow relationships to become visible, interpretations to be proposed and alternatives to be explored.

Design is therefore not interesting merely because designers make knowledge more visual. Representational work can change what can be known. And because those representations can be revised, challenged and combined, knowledge work is also iterative. A provisional representation creates something that people can think with, not only something they can inspect once the thinking is finished.

This matters when situations are complex enough that no individual perspective can adequately contain them.

From individual knowing to organisational arrangements

Rylander’s account also exposes an interesting difference between the literatures she compares.

Design-thinking discourse has frequently concentrated on what designers and designerly practices can contribute to organisations. Knowledge-work research has asked a somewhat different set of questions: how autonomous professionals are coordinated, how organisational identities are produced, how expertise is governed and what cultural and institutional conditions shape their work.

Putting these traditions together changes the question again.

Instead of asking only:

What designerly practices should organisations adopt?

we can also ask:

What organisational conditions allow different forms of knowing to participate meaningfully in how situations are interpreted?

That question reaches beyond individual expertise. A researcher may bring situated qualitative knowledge. An analyst may bring quantitative evidence. Someone operating the service every day may possess tacit practical knowledge that neither can reproduce. Leaders, technical specialists, customers and other participants may each disclose different aspects of the situation. The challenge is not necessarily to collapse these into one definitive account. It may be to develop arrangements through which they can encounter, challenge and modify one another.

This is where Rylander begins to point us beyond the individual knowledge worker. If design is knowledge work, the interesting question is no longer simply what designers know differently. It is how different forms of knowing are produced, represented, negotiated and made actionable together.

That, in turn, raises another set of questions. What allows knowledge to move between different groups without losing its connection to the situations from which it arose? How much agreement is actually necessary for people to work together? What role do the artefacts through which knowledge is represented play in that coordination? What needs to remain open rather than being resolved?

And what happens when representations become embedded deeply enough in organisational practice that they begin to operate as infrastructure?

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