In their oft-cited 2013 article ‘Design Thinking: Past, Present and Possible Futures’, Ulla Johansson-Sköldberg, Jill Woodilla and Mehves Çetinkaya explore the literature demographics of design thinking discourse—how constituent discourses developed over time and what types of literature have been published—up to 2013, thereby offering a kind of history of the development of the design thinking discourse up to a decade ago.
From their extensive literature review, they classify and characterise two main discourses prevalent in their survey: one derived from design-oriented, scholarly literature, and the other derived from widely accessible business media and distinguished by its application in the realm of business management. The former they denote as ‘designerly thinking’, the academic construction of the professional designer’s practice and theoretical reflections around how to interpret and characterise this non-verbal competence of the designers. This discourse “links theory and practice from a design perspective, and is accordingly rooted in the academic field of design.” Meanwhile, they reserve the term ‘design thinking’ for “the discourse where design practice and competence are used beyond the design context (including art and architecture), for and with people without a scholarly background in design, particularly in management.”
The authors suggest that, while design thinking might seem to the business world like “a new concept from this side of the millennium,” characteristics of designers’ work and practice had been discussed for at least 40 years prior within design research, forming an academic stream consisting of contributions from both designers and related disciplines. From the contributions made to the academic discourse five sub-discourses are derived, each corresponding to their own respective theoretical perspectives and each having apparent roots in foundational works. These are summarised as follows:
Design and designerly thinking as the creation of artefacts. Marking the start of the academic discourse of design thinking, this sub-discourse is initiated by Herbert Simon’s advocacy for the establishment of “sciences of the artificial” in 1961. Foundational work: Simon’s The Sciences of the Artificial.
Design and designerly thinking as a reflexive practice. Reacting to the shortcomings he perceived in the rational problem-solving approach to professional practice, Donald Schön proposed a pragmatist, constructionist theory, describing design as an activity involving “reflective practice.” Foundational work: Schön’s The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action, published 1983.
Design and designerly thinking as a problem-solving activity.* Richard Buchanan advanced an understanding of designers’ professional way of thinking as a matter of dealing with “wicked problems”, a class of social systems problems with a fundamental indeterminacy, without a single solution and where creativity is needed to find solutions. Foundational works: Buchanan’s 1992 Design Issues article ‘Wicked Problems in Design Thinking’, where he develops ideas on wicked problems introduced by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber in the 1973 article for Policy Sciences titled ‘Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning’.
Design and designerly thinking as a way of reasoning / making sense of things. Using abductive processes to find patterns that are grounded in practical experience and can be described through practical examples, Bryan Lawson and Nigel Cross each suggested a ‘model’ of the design process—Lawson in a number of process-driven steps that attempt to describe the complex processes of designing, and Cross in a recursive representation of the design strategy followed by creative designers. Foundational works: Bryan Lawson’s How Designers Think: The Design Process Demyistfied published in 1980 (with an updated edition published 2006); Nigel Cross’ 2006 book Designerly Ways of Knowing and 2011 book Design Thinking.
Design and designerly thinking as creation of meaning. Shifting the focus from the design process and how designers think to a human-centered concern for “what people do with artifacts,” Klaus Krippendorff defined design and the work of designers as encompassing the creation of meaning. Foundational work: Krippendorff’s 2006 book The Semantic Turn: A New Foundation for Design.
As the authors point out, while these ways to describe what designers do in practice have distinctly different epistemological roots, they do not stand in competition with each other but could be developed in parallel; indeed, they frequently refer to each other:
“The five different discourses with different epistemological underpinnings that we refer to collectively as a ‘designerly way of thinking’ each have both forerunners and followers that exist as parallel tracks. Anyone wishing to make an academic contribution therefore needs to have this pluralistic perspective in mind, because without recognizing the plurality and identifying the specific perspective, it is impossible to make an academic contribution. Academic knowledge always needs to take earlier knowledge into consideration, and to build upon a similar epistemology (this holds even for a critique that takes distance from a specific discourse). From an academic perspective, this plurality in discourses within designerly ways of thinking is not a sign of weakness but rather a sign of maturity.”
On the other hand, the management design thinking discourse is found, in general, to be less thoughtful and robust—”more superficial”—than contributions to the designerly thinking discourse. The management design thinking discourse “seldom refers to designerly thinking and thereby hinders cumulative knowledge construction.” The authors hence propose further research to be undertaken to link the discourses. As they suggest:
“As with many novel ideas and processes promoted by business consultants (such as management by objectives or business process re-engineering), the design thinking discourse will most probably die if it does not acquire a scholarly base that relates more to designerly thinking. Firm academic links will preserve valuable parts of the practice for managerial use and provide designers with fresh insights into how to make connections with the management world.”
Johansson-Sköldberg, Woodilla and Çetinkaya, in other words, propose that design thinking can be nurtured by closer connections with designerly thinking.
In their 2012 book ‘The Design Way: Intentional Change in an Unpredictable World‘ Harold Nelson and Erik Stolterman lament the situation in which ‘[d]esign and creative problem-solving processes for businesses have been commoditized into branded approaches for delivering expected outcomes…[whereby design thinking] has been transformed into rule-based algorithms fashioned out of heuristics that seemed to have worked with limitations in the real world.” If the call is taken seriously for cross-pollination between the designerly thinking and design thinking discourses, we might see the embrace in the management discourse of—and a return in the academic design discourse to—unscripted approaches to design, driven not by rule-based formulae but by inquiry for intentional action—what Nelson and Stolterman define as ‘design learning’.
Link to Design Thinking: Past, Present and Possible Futures.
* While Johansson-Sköldberg et al associate Buchanan with a theoretical perspective of designerly thinking as a problem-solving activity, a reading of Buchanan on the links between design and rhetoric might rather lead to the conclusion that design is a process of problem-framing or -placing.