Design Thinking Research

Places causally impact the development of creativity and innovation. Observable patterns include “creative explosions” at some places and times, which contrast to phases of continuity at other locations and times. But what characteristics of places enhance or trim creativity? This paper draws attention to governance, which strongly impacts emerging creative work in the region. We therefore introduce a four-leaf clover model in design thinking, according to which promising innovation is (1) desirable in terms of human values, (2) feasible in terms of technology, (3) viable in terms of business models, and (4) legal in terms of governance. Making a start in quantifying the impact of governance, we share a case study on genetic engineering in European agriculture. Furthermore, the TYPE method is introduced as an approach to compare rates of creativity and innovation in a region under current regulation as opposed to a hypothetical scenario without regulation. Subsequently, we suggest key figures to trace the innovation potential in a region over time, building on the computational process model of invention. Such key figures allow comparisons between regions on behalf of their overall innovation potential, and they reveal profiles of strengths and weakness in terms of available resources for creative work. This chapter closes with a discussion of governance approaches that trim creativity and innovation, as opposed to governance approaches that raise the innovation potential in a region.

The range and complexity of the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals make clear the need for innovative, effective, and efficient problem-solving approaches involving the people most impacted by the issues being addressed. In previous work, we argued that design thinking provides a useful and appropriate process for generating sustainability-oriented solutions and outlined five characteristics of design thinking that support this argument. In this chapter, we present findings from 20 semi-structured, qualitative interviews with sustainability practitioners, designers, and university professors from 9 countries who have used design thinking approaches in their work. Based on a deductive coding analysis of the interview data, we found support for all five of our suggested design thinking characteristics as facilitators of sustainability solutions. Nearly all interviewees appeared to value design thinking as a tool for sustainability work because design thinking is participatory and people-focused. Many interviewees also emphasized that design thinking encourages creativity, diversity in thought and action, systems thinking, and a streamlined approach to action. These findings add further support for calls to use design thinking as a tool in sustainability work and suggest a need for more in-depth exploration to solidify a theoretical understanding of why, how, and under what conditions design thinking approaches are effective in the quest for addressing sustainability challenges.

Intelligent workplace systems that support well-being offer the potential to reduce stress and burnout, promote physical activity, or increase creativity and collaboration while at work. However, such systems rely on the collection of sensitive personal information that can pose significant privacy risks to users. In this chapter, we investigate how user perceptions of privacy vary with privacy interface designs and framing scenarios. In a user study with 60 participants, we present participants with four privacy interfaces based on different privacy frameworks and study how perceptions of comfort and control vary depending on the owner of the sensing technology and the user’s relationship with that owner. We find that participants express greater comfort and control with interfaces that foreground contextual information and provide relationship-based access control. Moreover, participants display lower feelings of comfort and control when the technology is deployed company-wide or by a manager with whom they have a negative relationship. Concerningly, we find that interfaces based on technical privacy metrics are poorly understood and have the potential to promote a false sense of security. Taken together, our findings have implications for the design of privacy interfaces and can inform future large-scale studies on privacy attitudes in the workplace.

Reflective practices correlate with both insight in engineering design projects (Currano. 2015 Reflective Practice in Engineering Design) and learning in engineering education (Chew et al. 2016 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition 2016). Schön (Knowledge-Based Systems 5:3–14. 1992) observed that designers engage in a reflective conversation with design materials as they sketch and prototype their ideas. However, students can struggle when learning domain knowledge and design practices simultaneously. We hypothesized that (1) making the conversation between student designers and their prototyping materials literal and explicit, rather than metaphorical, can assist in reflection, and (2) the effect can be enhanced by embodying a conversational agent within the prototype itself. We developed an embodied conversational agent as a tool to elicit reflection and lead to greater insight and learning, during a hands-on mechatronics prototyping and design activity. In addition to guiding learners through a tutorial, the agent answers questions, offers comments, and asks deep reasoning and generative design questions, which correlate with convergent and divergent phases of the design process (Eris. DS 31: Proc. 14th Intl. Conf. on Engineering Design (ICED). 2003). We compare learners’ gained knowledge, performance, and reactions in conditions with or without a conversational agent, and using an embodied or non-embodied agent, to evaluate the impact of (1) conversational communication, and (2) physical embodiment, on learning and insight. In this chapter, we describe the background and rationale for our study, details of the study design, and preliminary insights from our pilot data.

Programming environments that provide a feeling of liveness help professionals and amateurs alike to approach unfamiliar domains with ease through short feedback loops. Exploration and experimentation are promoted because any change to the program under construction can be observed immediately. However, live-programming systems such as Squeak/Smalltalk struggle with the predictable emergence of adapted program behavior as object communication can be unconstrained and diverse. While programmers wish for immediate effects, it would be helpful to at least know whether anything will happen after some time. In this chapter, we take a closer look at the means available in Squeak to explore and adjust object state and object behavior so that programmers can ensure the system’s responsiveness and hence observe gradual or even induce eventual emergence. We argue that these design strategies are sufficient to architect communication patterns that reward changes with immediate effects. We believe that our work can help programmers to better understand their leverage toward a predictable emergence in systems whose liveness stems from objects and messaging in a space where tools and applications live side by side.

This chapter outlines and discusses different perspectives on design thinking. It provides a schema that illustrates three different understandings of design thinking: (1) methodology, (2) thinking of designers, and (3) practice-based design thinking (embodied thinking). We seek to clarify some of the substantial differences and nuances of alternative understandings of design thinking. Specifically, this chapter discusses significant nuances between structuralism (i.e., information-processing), formal logic (i.e., abductive reasoning), and Gestalt psychology (i.e., humanistic psychology). These differences are based on schools of thought that emerged in early experimental psychology and that then informed numerous design scholars. These perspectives have also informed various practice-based aspects of design thinking, such as variation-selection, meaning-making, and comprehensive design. By outlining these alternative understandings, this chapter presents answers to the question “What is design thinking?” from different perspectives. This discussion and outlined schema encourage researchers and practitioners to articulate their perspective when referring to “design thinking.”

This chapter outlines the recent developments, such as neuroscience on design, design neurocognition, and NeuroDesign, in the intersection of neuroscience and design. This intersection of diverse disciplines, including psychology, neurophysiology, engineering, interaction design, and architecture, provides various opportunities and challenges to advance areas, such as design thinking, neurotechnology, embodied artificial intelligence (AI), and human-centered AI. We outline some of the opportunities and challenges with several examples, such as methodological and technological developments, necessary to develop this promising pan-disciplinary field. We emphasize the importance of educating researchers (i.e., NeuroDesign Researchers) and practitioners (neurodesigner/engineers) to advance this intersection toward a new area that could be greater than the sum of its parts.

Making a successful pitch to investors is vital to the success of startups. Improving pitch performance in women entrepreneurs might be an effective mechanism to close gender disparity in entrepreneurship. Drawing on social neuroscience studies, we present our scientific approach to shedding light on the role of “inter-brain synchrony” between women entrepreneurs and investors in pitch performance. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) hyperscanning, we will scan 40 entrepreneur-investor dyads who engage in naturalistic pitch events. We will elucidate patterns of inter-brain synchrony that are associated with pitch performance. Additionally, we will assess whether the sex composition of an entrepreneur-investor dyad affects these associations. A better understanding of the inter-brain signatures underlying successful (and unsuccessful) pitches will generate insights into the design of novel and effective interventions that can help catalyze the success of women entrepreneurs.

Organizational research demonstrates that team interpersonal closeness enhances team performance and creativity. Design thinking practitioners and educators have adopted the concepts of interpersonal closeness and developed priming activities to propel subsequent creative-innovation tasks. In recent years, it has become paramount that these activities are effective in in-person and virtual (Zoom^®) interaction settings. In this chapter, we present a design thinking (DT) activity to increase interpersonal closeness in in-person and virtual teams. We derived the DT activity from a Nonviolent Communication exercise frequently used to increase interpersonal closeness between individuals. In an empirical study (N = 72 participants, N = 36 dyads), we assessed whether the DT activity increased interpersonal closeness compared to two control tasks (i.e., a problem-solving and a creative-innovation task). Dyad partners engaged in either an in-person or virtual interaction group throughout the experiment (between-subject design). We also captured inter-brain signatures between dyad partners with portable functional near-infrared spectroscopy neuroimaging during the entire study. Results show that the DT activity increased interpersonal closeness in the in-person and virtual groups compared to the control tasks. We identified a distinct inter-brain signature in the right frontocortical region linked to the DT activity. Notably, this inter-brain signature differed between in-person and virtual groups. This finding suggests that conducting the DT activity in person may be more conducive to this prosocial inter-brain coherence pattern than the virtual interaction setting. Finally, preliminary results (N = 12 dyads) suggest that the DT activity increased performance in a subsequent creative-innovation task. Future research needs to confirm this hypothesis.

No one universal affective route leads to creative ideas. Rather, the designers’ affective experience is influenced by the cultural contexts they are in. However, scant research has examined how culture shapes designers’ emotion in creative problem-solving activities. We present two survey studies that explore the interplay between affect, culture, and idea generation. The findings suggest that people tend to associate low-arousal, positive emotion with idea generation in Japanese contexts, compared with high-arousal, positive emotion in American contexts. We also found that Japanese participants expressed more socially engaging emotions, had higher levels of emotional fluctuation, and reported lower levels of emotional expressiveness than their American counterparts. This research contributes to the emerging field of emotion research in design by examining the cultural shaping of affect in idea generation. We call for more cultural research to enable designers to provide insights into the profound roles of affective experience and expression in creative processes and how it may vary across cultures. In doing so, we hope to offer new vistas for enhancing creative performance and enabling cross-cultural collaboration in creative work.

Digital transformation is fueled by the growing offer of digital technology, promising new business models, and growing revenues. The inevitable systemic change needed for digital transformation accompanied by the dynamic conditions for such is what contributes to the growing complexity of transformation projects in organizations, bringing new opportunities and hurdles for the people affected. This complexity results in most digital transformation activities falling short of their goal and leaders not being able to create the desired impact. There is evidence that design thinking has the potential to significantly contribute to the field of digital transformation. This research project aims at getting a better understanding of how design thinking as strategic approach can contribute to the success of digital transformation activities and, if so, to what extent. With a mixed-method approach, including a literature review and qualitative research, we conducted three case studies. Our learnings show that digital transformation is very individual to the respective organization regarding scope, motivations, goals, and starting points. Therefore, there is no general or linear approach to digital transformation processes. Our findings show that it can start anywhere and includes forward as well as backward steps. The individual transformation needs of organizations are also based on the high complexity of transformation processes and activities. Orchestrating complex transformation projects requires a systematic, clearly structured, and integrated process. This process needs both diverging and converging activities in the areas of analysis, vision, learning, and diffusion. These activities enable ambidextrous navigation through all transformation areas. To overcome transformation hurdles, the constant integration of human, technology, and system perspective is crucial to mirror the interrelation of all three systems. We found that the organizational culture plays a significant role in successful transformation projects. On a strategic level, the cultural digital transformation maturity can serve as decision reference to define starting point, metrics, and individual identification. On a systemic level, we learned that methods are less likely to be transferred into the organizational value creation practice than concepts/principles (as individual lessons learned). Our cases show the vulnerability and fragility of transformation processes: On an operational level, transformation gets blocked by daily business or urgent matters leading to teams hitting the breaks in transformation activities. To make our research actionable, we developed an integrated and clearly structured digital transformation process and transferred the findings of this project for creating an adaptive digital transformation strategy kit, that aims at closing the research-practice gap and offers practitioners a scientifically substantiated strategic decision support on how to navigate their own digital transformation endeavors.

Companies that embrace human-centered digital innovation approaches like Design Thinking are better equipped to master the challenges of digital transformation. Still, the number of failed digital transformation activities is rising, and companies struggle more than ever to turn their transformation initiatives into a success to remain competitive in the digital age. One promising avenue toward detangling this phenomenon is to identify the “traps” that, if not identified or addressed, can cause an organizational digital transformation to run into distress and potentially fail. In this chapter, we discuss the potential traps organizations can fall into during their digital transformation activities. We then synthesize them based on their difficulty to identify in a three-layered framework. The framework consists of execution traps, reaction traps, assessment traps, and recognition traps. Based on an in-depth case study with a large incumbent firm in the banking sector, we validate the trap categories and provide guidelines on how to use the framework in practice. This not only adds to the “demystification” of failing digital transformation endeavors but also serves as a foundation for understanding how adopting human-centered digital innovation approaches or other mitigation strategies can help to maneuver around the traps of transformation.

Hybrid educational formats are on the rise, but there exists neither definitional clarity on the term “hybrid” nor has there been a deeper examination of approaches that lend themselves to highly collaborative education, such as that required for design thinking. This book chapter first presents a taxonomy of time- and place-based hybridity. It then discusses in-depth the settings that are particularly relevant to design thinking education and presents their key opportunities and challenges. Overall, this chapter raises awareness and understanding of teaching in hybrid settings and offers researchers inspiration for future research and educators issues to consider when teaching in hybrid formats.

Design thinking has become a popular innovation approach in organizations globally. The request for design thinking (DT) training has increased in the past 10 years. However, the question remains if and how employees transfer their DT knowledge into their organization. In this study, we assess employees’ DT knowledge and DT application in an international company. We assume a gap between what employees know and apply, what we call the design thinking transfer gap. Furthermore, we assess employees’ perception of their own DT practice vs. the company’s DT practice. We find that on average, employees rate their knowledge of DT significantly higher than the extent of the application of DT in their work. Employees also perceive their individual practice of DT as higher than the company’s practice, indicating a potential mismatch between the organizational climate for innovation and employees’ capabilities. Our results call for further examination of the design thinking transfer gap. We discuss future research avenues and point out practical implications.

In this final chapter, we provide a genealogy of the Designing as Performance approach taking readers on the journey of how we got here. In an interview with Jonathan A. Edelman, we reflect on our work in the Design Thinking Research Program and specifically our Designing as Performance approach, tracing the events, encounters, and inspirations that have shaped it. The power of our approach to designing is that it leverages a vast array of research generated within the design thinking community, as well as elsewhere. While in previous book chapters we have elaborated on each one of these varied influences, the places, situations, and people that contributed to bringing them together are often missing. Put in simple terms, this document is the conversation that goes along with “An Introduction to Designing as Performance” in a workshop setting. Thus, we trace the events and make the connections that help the Designing as Performance practitioner find inspiration and guidance when working with this approach. In this regard, the following chapter should be read as a companion to our previous writings on Designing as Performance because it complements them. Fellow researchers and practitioners will find in the following pages a myriad of rich examples, stories, and references provided in a more casual tone that places the reader inside the conversation. “A Genealogy of Designing as Performance” aims to make our approach more accessible and closer to the practitioner, fulfilling our long-term goal of bridging design research and practice.