What if the problem is not difficult to solve, but inadequately framed? In 'The core of “design thinking” and its application', Kees Dorst shifts attention away from generic innovation methods towards frame creation: the practice of developing new relationships between how a situation is understood, how we might act and what we hope to achieve. We ask where his model needs pressing further: who defines that value, whose interests shape the frame, and who is pushed to its margins?

In Why Design Thinking Might Save You, Yet, we considered Peter Merholz’s objection to the promotion of design thinking as a general answer to organisations struggling to interpret and act within ambiguous, complex situations. We saw that framing “design thinking” and “business thinking” as opposing modes of thought not only simplifies both; it can also obscure the contributions of sociology, anthropology and other traditions needed to understand complex human situations.

Kees Dorst’s 2011 article, ‘The core of “design thinking” and its application’, offers a useful response to this problem. Rather than defending design thinking as a general mindset or universally applicable process, Dorst asks what particular practices have been developed within the design disciplines and under what circumstances they might be valuable elsewhere.

Dorst points to a key distinction:

“Although many of the activities that designers do are quite universal, and thus it would be inappropriate to claim these as exclusive to design or ‘Design Thinking’, some of these activities have been professionalised in the design disciplines in ways that could be valuable for other fields. The value then is not so much to be found in a general adoption of something as amorphous as ‘Design Thinking’, but it lies in the application of these specific professional design practices.”

Dorst therefore avoids both the expansive claim that design thinking offers a general remedy for organisational problems and the equally unhelpful conclusion that professional design practice has nothing distinctive to contribute.

The more notable question is one of specificity: which practices, addressing which kinds of situations, and requiring which forms of judgement?

Dorst’s answer centres on frame creation.

From solving problems to creating frames

A frame is often understood simply as a different perspective on a problem. Dorst gives it a more consequential meaning.

A frame brings together a way of interpreting a situation, a possible principle for acting within it and a proposition about the value that might be created. Its logic is conditional: if we understand the situation in this way, and act according to this principle, then we may move towards a preferred condition.

Framing is therefore not a cosmetic change in language. Frames organise attention and action. They make some aspects of a situation significant, render others peripheral and establish which responses appear sensible or even possible.

This becomes particularly important when organisations encounter open situations in which neither the problem nor the appropriate means of addressing it can be assumed in advance. Under these conditions, producing a new solution within an established definition of the problem may simply reproduce the assumptions that made the situation difficult in the first place.

Dorst illustrates this through an entertainment district in which drunkenness, theft and violence had been treated primarily as law-and-order concerns. Increased policing, surveillance and private security followed logically from this frame, but did little to change the conditions contributing to the problems.

By attending to the broader experience of the district, designers noticed that young people attempting to enjoy a night out were becoming stranded, bored and frustrated. The situation could instead be approached as if it were a large music festival, where transport, wayfinding, rest spaces, information and visible support enter the frame for design intervention.

The music-festival frame was not itself a solution. It established a different relationship between the situation, a working principle and the value being pursued. From it, different interventions could be imagined.

The example shows why frame creation cannot be reduced to brainstorming alternative descriptions. A useful frame must be capable of reorganising the situation in a way that supports coherent and testable possibilities for action.

Getting close enough to notice what matters

Dorst argues that new frames emerge through engagement with the broader context of a problematic situation. Rather than confronting its central paradox directly, experienced designers search around it for themes, that is to say, points of significance that may initially appear peripheral to the stated problem.

He connects this process to phenomenological analysis, in which themes are not merely categories used to organise data. They are apprehensions of meaning: attempts to recognise something significant in how a situation is experienced and lived.

People do not encounter the world as detached observers processing neutral information, but with intentionality. They are already involved in situations through their purposes, expectations, relationships and concerns. Meaning arises through these involvements.

Getting close to a situation therefore involves more than asking people to report their needs or preferences. It requires attending to what they are trying to accomplish, what interrupts or enables them, what they take for granted and what possibilities appear available from within their circumstances.

This connects to what we have called Our Kind of Sociology. An ethnomethodological orientation attends to the practical work through which people produce and sustain recognisable activities. Workarounds, informal routines, moments of hesitation and ordinary repairs may reveal how a setting actually operates in ways that its formal accounts do not.

These observations do not automatically translate into solutions. Their value lies partly in their capacity to disclose themes from which a different frame might be developed.

Frame creation is thus neither the direct conversion of research findings into requirements nor a detached act of creative inspiration. It is an interpretive practice: moving between sustained attention to what is happening and imaginative propositions about what the situation could become.

Beyond the individual project

One of the more significant aspects of Dorst’s article is his distinction between the project, the process and the field. Projects are particular undertakings. Processes are developed ways of working that can be applied across projects. The field is broader:

“The third layer, ‘field’ then is the organisational, intellectual and physical environment in which a type of design practice can take shape (hence the term, as Bourdieu sets out the ‘playing field’ of a social group).”

The concept of the field shifts attention from whether an organisation has used a design method to whether it has developed the conditions in which design practice can take shape.

An organisation may commission a designer to reframe a particular problem without altering how it generally interprets difficult situations. A workshop may temporarily authorise experimentation while existing structures continue to reward certainty and familiar responses. An external consultant may introduce a productive frame that disappears when the engagement ends. In such cases, design remains at the level of a project.

The more substantial possibility is that the organisation develops its own capacity to investigate themes, question established interpretations and create new frames. This requires more than teaching people a process. It involves developing an organisational environment in which situated knowledge can enter decision-making and established assumptions can genuinely be reconsidered.

Organisations already contain extensive practical knowledge that is often absent from formal strategies and process descriptions. People continually coordinate, adapt and improvise in response to the situations they encounter. Attending to this everyday work may reveal both the frames already shaping organisational action and the themes from which alternative frames could emerge.

The field determines whether such knowledge will be noticed and whether it can make a difference. It shapes whose interpretations are considered credible, what language is available for describing a situation, which tensions can be discussed and what forms of action can be authorised. The organisational field is therefore not simply the setting surrounding design work. It is part of an organisation’s capacity to design.

Value for whom?

Dorst’s account of framing brings together a situation, a working principle and a value to be created. For the purposes of his model, value provides the point of orientation: designers may not know what to create or how it should work, but they have some sense of the preferred condition towards which they are working. This is useful for explaining the logic of design reasoning. It is less adequate as an account of value in complex social situations.

Dorst describes productive practices as creating value for others and recognises that an organisation may be misreading “the values in the world”. Yet value largely remains a placeholder in his model. The paper gives less attention to who defines it, how competing accounts are negotiated or how the benefits and harms of transformation may be distributed.

The entertainment-district example itself opens this question. Reframing the situation around enabling a good night out makes the experience of young visitors more visible. It provides a more generative basis for action than treating them principally as potential offenders. But a good night out is not the only value at stake. Residents, hospitality workers, transport providers, venue operators, public authorities and different groups of visitors may have conflicting accounts of what the district should enable. Dorst offers limited guidance for deciding whose experience should orient the frame or how these differences should be negotiated.

Design situations bring different beliefs, needs and desired outcomes into relation. What counts as a preferred condition cannot always be accepted as a settled instruction supplied by the organisation commissioning the work.

The value towards which design is directed may itself require investigation.

This complicates Dorst’s model in a productive way. Frame creation may involve more than identifying a new principle through which an established value can be achieved. It may also require asking how that value was defined, whose world it represents and what it pushes to the margins. Frames do not merely provide alternative routes towards neutral ends. They organise significance and help determine whose concerns can become grounds for action. Reframing can therefore alter not only the available means, but also the ends that appear desirable.

Frame creation is also value work. In complex social situations, that work is inevitably ethical and political.

A more specific (and more demanding) promise

Dorst gives us a useful way of moving beyond design thinking as an indistinct collection of creative behaviours.

Design does not own observation, collaboration, empathy or imagination. Its contribution is better understood through the specific ways in which practices such as frame creation have been developed to engage situations where accepted definitions and familiar mechanisms no longer provide an adequate way forward.

Dorst’s account also suggests that the organisational application of design should not be judged simply by whether design methods have been used. The deeper question is whether an organisation has developed a field in which themes can be investigated, frames can be challenged and new relationships between interpretation and action can emerge.

To this we might add another requirement: the capacity to question the values towards which those actions are directed. The promise is therefore not that adopting design thinking will make an organisation more innovative. It is that particular design practices may help organisations engage more carefully with situations they can no longer adequately interpret, provided that they are also willing to question whose interpretations, interests and desired futures are allowed to shape the frame.

This is a more modest claim than those often made on behalf of design thinking. It is also a more substantial and demanding one.

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