Design Thinking Research

Organizational research demonstrates that team interpersonal trust enhances team performance and creativity. Design thinking offers many interactive team events such as warm-up games that are aimed at increasing team trust and collaboration. While effective in practice, little is understood about the underlying brain mechanisms that facilitate interpersonal trust during these activities. In this chapter, we present a novel interpersonal trust activity centered around human emotions that is designed to enhance interpersonal trust in both in-person and virtual (zoom) team interactions. We hypothesize that participating in an interpersonal trust activity prior to a collaborative design task will increase interpersonal trust and the creativity level of the collaborative outcome (i.e., creative product/innovation). We present our scientific approach for testing this hypothesis by applying the methods of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) hyperscanning in both in-person and virtual (video conferencing) team interactions. A better understanding of the neural signatures underlying an interpersonal trust activity will allow design thinking practitioners and educators to design novel and effective design thinking activities and interactions that can positively impact team trust and collaboration.

While scholars have made valuable steps towards claiming legitimacy for deploying Design Thinking in organizations, the underlying practices, effects, and links between Design Thinking and Digital Transformation still seem an underexplored area. This conceptual study aims to shed light on how Design Thinking can contribute to an organization’s Digital Transformation by linking explicit Design Thinking elements to dimensions of Digital Transformation and investigating the role Dynamic Capabilities might play within this effect nexus. In particular, this study proposes three modes of design-enabled Digital Transformation and integrates theoretical with practical perspectives in a conceptual framework. The holistic nature of the framework, including the variety of possible combinations, permits a nuanced investigation of specific, context-dependent cause–effect relationships. This can be used by researchers as a foundation for deriving and testing hypotheses on specific contributions Design Thinking can make to Digital Transformation and by practitioners to analyze, communicate, and manage how they utilize Design Thinking for Digital Transformation.

To deliver excellent virtual education experiences, design thinking educators adapt along all three “P”s: of People, Place, and Process. This book chapter provides the theoretical foundations for delivering virtual education experiences and, relying on both relevant streams of research and the authors’ own expertise, derives six areas of action—(Digital) Engagement, Embodied Cognition, Safe Space, Atmosphere, Random Inspiration, and Managing Workshops. The theories linked to these areas also inspire questions for further research and, together with the specific suggestions provided, give practitioners a rich resource for enhancing their virtual DT education.

Online whiteboards leverage our spatial thinking abilities to support rich, collaborative, and interactive design. However, these tools are often exclusionary to people who are blind. We ran a series of user studies with university students to better understand the accessibility of current tools and evaluated several existing audio and haptic approaches to inform design guidelines and future directions. We observed how current interfaces do not provide access to the graph generation process, provide incomplete access connections and spatial relationships, and can lead to users feeling uncertain or misinterpreting information in the graph. By exploring existing solutions, we identify and discuss the importance of reflecting the diagram structure within the navigation scheme and provide a spatial overview whereby users can reference their exploration. We summarize a series of recommendations to inform the investigation of future interactions to improve the accessibility of online whiteboards.

Software design and the underlying programming activities entail a great portion of exploration to better understand problem and solution spaces. There are programming tools and environments that support such exploratory programming practices exceptionally well. However, inexperienced programmers typically face a steep learning curve until they can reach the promised efficiency in such tools. They need a long time to study best practices firsthand in real projects. The tools in use might also need adjustments, given that modern programming languages are continually introducing new features or redesigning old ones. We want to apply the idea of patterns to capture traditional and modern practices of exploratory programming. In this chapter, we focus on the workspace tool, whose core ideas transcend many different programming communities such as the Smalltalk workspace, the Unix shell, and data-analysis notebooks. We extracted the essence into a novel pattern language around the conversations that programmers have with their environment. We believe that our work can help programmers to quickly understand and apply the idea of workspaces, as well as tool builders to increase the efficiency of their project team when facing exploratory challenges.

Doing relevant and rigorous research often leads to a research-to-practice and practice-to-research gap, which both involved parties need to actively address and bridge. All parties involved face the challenges presented in the steps of identifying practice- and science-relevant research questions. This begins with the translation of these questions into a practice-feasible, but also empirically-based, research design and is followed by the retranslation of observations into scientific language to assess and interpret the observed phenomena. In this chapter, we report on our research approach to move from innovation practitioners’ narratives to a quantitative study design. We translate what we have learned from employees about innovation activities, behaviors, and structures, into a study design to measure employees’ innovative behaviors overall in a large quantitative study. The resulting empirical study assesses the link between employees’ Job Insecurity and Innovation Behavior as well as three assumed moderating effects (Organizational Support, Participative Decision-Making, Job Autonomy).

The computational systems we interact with are increasingly intelligent and dynamic, as they learn from user interactions and are updated over time. Principles of good design highlight the importance of understanding user mental models and providing feedback to expose the internal state of the system. In the context of intelligent systems situated in the real world, this notion of feedback is highly temporal and requires a deep investigation of when feedback should be provided to users. In this chapter, we first motivate the need for timely state exposure in the design of such dynamic systems. We then lay out the design space of timing strategies for providing feedback, highlighting the frequency of state exposure and the information necessary for each strategy. We report on a preliminary exploration of this design space using our news article recommender system. We find that one feasible approach may be to provide feedback only after failures when the system behavior is incorrect. Finally, we discuss open challenges that need to be studied in future work, including methods for effective evaluation of user mental models over time, anticipation of breakdowns, and detection of system failures.

While design thinking has been described in different ways, there is widespread agreement about two characteristics of the approach: Design thinking involves a “focus on needs” and works towards “radical innovation”. However, some authors have argued that these two characteristics actually antagonize each other. According to their assessment, a focus on needs reduces the innovation potential of projects, rather than fostering new breakthrough solutions. What is the logic of these arguments and is design thinking in trouble? The purpose of this chapter is to shed further light on the concept of needs in design thinking. We review need theories by three authors—John Arnold, Abraham Maslow and Robert McKim—who have prominently shaped design thinking theory and practices from the 1950s onwards. In each case, we summarize the author’s basic statements and trace relations to present-day methodologies of working with human needs. The chapter highlights notable agreement among all discussants concerning favourable approaches to foster radical innovation. We further emphasize the importance of distinguishing between narrow versus wide accounts of needs, where design projects with narrow accounts stick closely to user statements that are often highly context-bound, while projects with wider accounts include re-framing and visionary contextualisation. Design thinking education as offered at the d.school in Stanford and the D-School at Potsdam involves a wide account of human needs. In this context, two important skills in order to move from need assessments to worthwhile, radical innovation are the abilities to uncover need hierarchies from context-dependent desires stated by users to basic human needs, and to identify conflicts in need hierarchies that call for different and better solutions in society.

This book chapter outlines different facets of Human-Centered Design, which evolved over half a century. These facets have different foundational influences that lead to design by, with, and for people. Designing for people, including Ergonomics and Human Factors and Interactions Design, originated from early developments in experimental psychology. Similarly, designing for people with specific needs emerged from developments in medicine and rehabilitation, which resulted in design approaches, such as Universal Design and Inclusive Design. Designing with people, including Participatory Design, developed from communal architecture. Designing by people is grounded in the psychology of creativity, resulting in design approaches, such as Creative Engineering and Design Thinking. Early developments in social psychology developed over time into Social Design and Design by Society. These approaches emerged as designers responded to socio-material and socio-economic challenges with new Human-Centered Design approaches. This book chapter aims to raise awareness of the contextual evolution of different Human-Centered Design approaches and the need to continuously respond creatively to these challenges with new design solutions and adequate design approaches.

Design is an essential part of engineering practice and engineering education. As such, our research aims to examine the longer-term impact of engineering design education on graduates’ career paths and their practical utilization of design, post-graduation. We have focused our attention on several decades of alumni from two specific graduate course sequences, Project-Based Engineering Design Innovation & Development (ME310) and Smart Product Design (ME218), in order to gain a deeper understanding of how particular course elements and strategies are directly linked to what alumni retain and take away from their education. These course sequences represent two possible Mechanical Engineering depth areas that leverage a project-based learning approach to allow students to dive deeply into designing and building functional systems of some engineering complexity.

In this chapter, we describe a multifaceted and mixed methods research effort that considers decades of graduates from ME310 and ME218 at Stanford University. The qualitative interviews and quantitative survey studies were designed to establish a deeper understanding of the longer-term impact of education on career plans and pathways (particularly as related to engineering innovation and entrepreneurship) and to also demonstrate the need to take a “bigger view” of graduates’ feedback on courses and on their formal education more generally.

The analyses of this rich dataset are already bearing fruit by allowing us to identify specific curricular “features” that inspire innovative and entrepreneurial actions. We are also seeing how ME310 and ME218 graduates have built careers in a variety of professions, are scattered around the globe, and do not follow a singular career pathway or even dominant industry sector. Some stay highly technical throughout their post-graduate work, whereas others turn to less technical roles immediately after graduation.

This book chapter outlines the theory of Productive Thinking in Design. This theory is the psychological foundation of today’s Design Thinking. Productive Thinking incorporates the psychological processes of finding a need, problem, or structural tension and determining a means that satisfies the need and harmonizes the tension. These psychological processes are driven by forces and factors, including attitudes, attributes, and human values. In this article, we outline five different types of Productive Thinking and discuss them in the context of Design. These are (1) Rational, (2) Situational, (3) Experimental, (4) Dialectic, and (5) Counterproductive. Each type of Productive Thinking is dependent on the situational context for which a design solution needs to be created. For example, a situation in which a solution-method can be determined directly requires Rational Productive Thinking, while unintelligible, ambiguous, and emerging situations require Experimental or Dialectic Productive Thinking. We emphasize that it is essential to cultivate a Productive Culture in which individuals can freely, creatively, confidently, competently, and collaboratively design for a harmonious ecological and social whole.

While people around the world constantly come up with ingenious ideas to solve problems, the expressions of their ingenuity and their underlying motivations and experiences may vary greatly across cultures. Currently, the role of culture is often overlooked in research and practice aimed at understanding and promoting creativity. The lack of understanding of cultural variations in creative processes hinders cross-cultural collaboration in problem-solving and innovation. We challenge the unexamined American perspectives of creativity through a systematic analysis of how ideas, policies, norms, practices, and individual tendencies around creative problem-solving are shaped in American and East Asian cultural contexts, using the culture cycle framework. We share initial findings from several pilot studies that challenge the popular view that only agentic change-makers are seen as creative problem solvers. In the context of design, designers are culturally shaped shapers who are motivated to solve problems in creative ways that resonate with their cultural values. Our research seeks to empower designers from non-Western societies. We urge design educators and practitioners to explicitly incorporate culturally varied ideas about creative problem-solving into their design processes. Our ultimate goal is to ground the theories and practices of design thinking in cultural contexts around the world.

Despite often-heroic efforts from dedicated scientists, researchers, educators, policymakers, activists, and everyday citizens, sustainability issues impact communities across the globe, with achievable solutions remaining daunting. Solving these wicked challenges requires creative ways of thinking, including an often-radical reimagining of the problem space itself. There is a growing recognition that individual action is insufficient as sustainability issues involve a complex web of actors, scales, and systems. Supported by an exploratory literature review, we argue that design thinking is a useful, appropriate, and necessary approach to support collective action in addressing sustainability issues. We outline five design thinking characteristics that support this argument: design thinking inspires creativity; is participatory and people-focused; encourages and inspires diversity in thought and action; adopts a holistic, systems-thinking mindset; and offers a streamlined, action-oriented approach. We conclude with reflections on this union between design thinking and sustainability action and suggest future directions for aligned research and practice.