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2015 | Buch

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Design Thinking Research

Building Innovators

herausgegeben von: Hasso Plattner, Christoph Meinel, Larry Leifer

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

Buchreihe : Understanding Innovation

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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Über dieses Buch

Design thinking as a user-centric innovation method has become more and more widespread during the past years. An increasing number of people and institutions have experienced its innovative power. While at the same time the demand has grown for a deep, evidence-based understanding of the way design thinking functions. This challenge is addressed by the Design Thinking Research Program between Stanford University, Palo Alto, USA and Hasso Plattner Institute, Potsdam, Germany. Summarizing the outcomes of the 5th program year, this book imparts the scientific findings gained by the researchers through their investigations, experiments and studies.

The method of design thinking works when applied with diligence and insight. With this book and the underlying research projects, we aim to understand the innovation process of design thinking and the people behind it. The contributions ultimately center on the issue of building innovators. The focus of the investigation is on what people are doing and thinking when engaged in creative design innovation and how their innovation work can be supported.

Therefore, within three topic areas, various frameworks, methodologies, mind sets, systems and tools are explored and further developed. The book begins with an assessment of crucial factors for innovators such as empathy and creativity, the second part addresses the improvement of team collaboration and finally we turn to specific tools and approaches which ensure information transfer during the design process. All in all, the contributions shed light and show deeper insights how to support the work of design teams in order to systematically and successfully develop innovations and design progressive solutions for tomorrow.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

Introduction – Design Thinking Is Mainly About Building Innovators

Abstract

There is mounting evidence that the engineering design thinking paradigm works when applied with diligence and insight, but is it really only about products and services? While profits are typically associated with goods and services, we really must ask, who made that happen? Who was responsible for their conception and implementation? Are we too pre-occupied with the innovation when the real story is about the innovators?

Christoph Meinel, Larry Leifer

Assessing Influential Factors in Design Thinking

Frontmatter

Empathy via Design Thinking: Creation of Sense and Knowledge

Abstract

A growing demand to be empathic can be witnessed in organization studies and management advice literature. This requirement does not only focus on the leadership anymore, but rather on the whole staff. Design Thinking has ultimately provided methods and techniques for fostering empathy in teamwork settings. From these developments two questions arise that shall be addressed by this article: How could empathy have become one of the most important things for the economy today? And second: Does Design Thinking indeed deliver useful empathy-techniques that will help employees in their daily routine? For this study we used a documentary analysis approach. The results show that empathy in organizations is a creator of sense and knowledge, but misconceptions of it may also lead to unintentional costs for employees.

Eva Köppen, Christoph Meinel

Developing Novel Methods to Assess Long-Term Sustainability of Creative Capacity Building and Applied Creativity

Abstract

Creativity, the ability to create novel and useful outcomes, has been widely recognized as an essential skill for both entrepreneurial and every-day success. Given the vital import of creativity in our everyday lives, our research proposes to examine the impact and sustainability of creative capacity building using targeted training. In this chapter, we provide (a) a summary of behavioral results of creative capacity enhancement following 5-weeks of targeted training; (b) an unique experimental design to examine the long-term (after 1 year) sustainability of creative capacity building and the effect of a “booster-shot” of creativity training; and (c) preliminary insights and proposed work on the newly developed Design Test of Creativity Thinking (DTCT) to assess applied creativity. Altogether, we anticipate that our work will provide valuable insights into creative capacity building and assessment.

Manish Saggar, Grace Hawthorne, Eve-Marie Quintin, Eliza Kienitz, Nicholas T. Bott, Daniel Hong, Yin-Hsuan Chien, Ning Liu, Adam Royalty, Allan L. Reiss

The Personal Trait Myth: A Comparative Analysis of the Innovation Impact of Design Thinking Tools and Personal Traits

Abstract

Design thinking asserts that individuals and teams have the ability to build their innovative capacity through various tools and methods no matter their predispositions to creativity and innovation. The contexts of design thinking attempt to alter design process towards more innovative ideas. This work attempts to experimentally disentangle the impact of disposition and situation during design activity. We present a variety of design contexts intended to be tested against dispositional factors during an experimental design task. We then present a pilot study exploring how process-priming impacts design process during a problem-solving task and an open-ended design task. Our preliminary results suggest that short process-priming activities may not be the most effective means for altering design process. Rather, more integrated contextual interventions may be better candidates for impacting design process and would be interesting test variables for future studies.

Nikolas Martelaro, Shameek Ganguly, Martin Steinert, Malte Jung

Theaters of Alternative Industry: Hobbyist Repair Collectives and the Legacy of the 1960s American Counterculture

Abstract

This chapter describes initial results from an ethnographic study of design and engineering engagements in community-operated sites at which hobbyists mend and repair mass-produced goods. We conducted participant observation at seven repair events and two collectives in the San Francisco Bay area where consumer electronics are reassembled, and spoke with approximately eighty repair practitioners. Here we describe surprising connections between repair and social movements that, in turn, reveal deep ties between contemporary hobbyist repair and countercultural design practices of the 1960s. These links, we argue, open new and important areas for design research.

Daniela K. Rosner, Fred Turner

Empowering Team Collaboration

Frontmatter

Assessing the Development of Design Thinking: From Training to Organizational Application

Abstract

Increasingly organizations are turning to off-site design thinking professional development programs as a way to grow design competencies in their workforce. This paper has two main goals (1) to develop an initial assessment tool that helps identify how well organizations support employees’ continued learning and application of design thinking. (2) To describe a process for constructing design thinking assessment tools. The assessment created is informed by an exploration of existing design thinking Executive Education programs and tested in a large organization committed to using design thinking.

Adam Royalty, Karen Ladenheim, Bernard Roth

TeamSense: Prototyping Modular Electronics Sensor Systems for Team Biometrics

Abstract

Electronic sensors systems can be used to unobtrusively gather real-time measurements of human interaction and biometrics. However, developing custom sensor systems can be costly, time intensive and often requires high technical expertise in embedded mechatronic systems. We present a prototyping case study of a real world system, TeamSense, with the scenario of a manager who wishes to use embedded sensors to develop data-driven insights on team performance. Team Biometrics is a term used here to refer to a sensor system that measures some physical characteristic of a group of individuals. We explore how existing novice electronics toolkits, such as Arduino, can be used to develop a custom wireless biometric sensing network, without requiring deep technical experience, time investment, or cost. A series of functional data collection prototypes are presented, and we present lessons learned from initial testing with live deployment in a team setting. The need for more (1) modular and (2) mutable electronics and software components were discovered to be a limiting factor in allowing more experimentation in the early stages of sensor system prototyping. Modularity enables fixed functional blocks to be swapped in and out of a system (enabling combinations), and mutability allows modification of blocks to change their function (enabling mutation). We propose a future sensor platform that explores how modularity and mutability affects electronics prototyping with sensors. This work has broad implications for Designing Thinking, and importance of toolkits in reducing the barriers to entry for rapid prototyping with sensors.

Joel Sadler, Larry Leifer

Tele-Board MED: Supporting Twenty-First Century Medicine for Mutual Benefit

Abstract

Tele-Board MED is a medical documentation system designed to support patient-doctor cooperation at eye level. In particular, it tackles the challenge of turning medical documentation from a necessity, which disturbs the treatment flow, into a curative process by itself. With its focus on cooperative documentation, Tele-Board MED embraces a call uttered by many scientists and politicians nowadays for twenty-first century medicine and patient empowerment. At the same time, the project is deeply rooted in the culture of design thinking. Accordingly, the benefit for patients should not be at the expense of doctors. Rather, the needs of all stakeholders shall be discerned and served. Behaviour psychotherapy has been chosen as a first field of application for Tele-Board MED. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, an initial feedback study was launched with 34 behaviour psychotherapists. It showed that many therapists are skeptical towards digital documentation and record transparency in general. Nonetheless, Tele-Board MED is considered helpful and promising. In particular, therapists estimate to save one third of their normal working time when assembling case reports with the system. The vast majority of therapists can well imagine using Tele-Board MED with patients. Apart from that, quantitative methodological strategies—though seldom used in the design thinking community—proved to be potent tools for carving out needs and insights that will inspire the next generation of Tele-Board MED.

Julia von Thienen, Anja Perlich, Christoph Meinel

Peer and Self Assessment in Massive Online Classes

Abstract

Peer and self assessment offer an opportunity to scale both assessment and learning to global classrooms. This paper reports our experiences with two iterations of the first large online class to use peer and self assessment. In this class, peer grades correlated highly with staff-assigned grades. The second iteration had 42.9 % of students’ grades within 5 % of the staff grade, and 65.5 % within 10 %. On average, students assessed their work 7 % higher than staff did. Students also rated peers’ work from their own country 3.6 % higher than those from elsewhere. We performed three experiments to improve grading accuracy. We found that giving students feedback about their grading bias increased subsequent accuracy. We introduce short, customizable feedback snippets that cover common issues with assignments, providing students more qualitative peer feedback. Finally, we introduce a data-driven approach that highlights high-variance items for improvement. We find that rubrics that use a parallel sentence structure, unambiguous wording and well-specified dimensions have lower variance. After revising rubrics, median grading error decreased from 12.4 to 9.9 %.

Chinmay Kulkarni, Koh Pang Wei, Huy Le, Daniel Chia, Kathryn Papadopoulos, Justin Cheng, Daphne Koller, Scott R. Klemmer

Tagging User Research Data: How to Support the Synthesis of Information in Design Teams

Abstract

In user-centered design processes, one of the most important tasks is to synthesize information from user research into insights and a shared point of view among team members. This paper explores the synthesis process and opportunities for providing computational support. First, we present interviews on the common practices and challenges of information synthesis from people with different levels of experience. Based on these interviews we developed digital whiteboard software for sorting individual segments of user research. The system separates out individual and group activity and helps the team to externalize and synthesize their different views of the data. Through a case study, we explore the differences between computer-supported group interaction and an individual clustering condition. We learned that participants really appreciated an individual working phase before entering a group synthesis phase. Novice designers tended to prefer the structured computer-supported synthesis process that externalizes the different views of each team member. More experienced designers preferred to freely arrange information segments and create clusterings on their own.

Raja Gumienny, Steven Dow, Matthias Wenzel, Lutz Gericke, Christoph Meinel

Supporting Information Transfer

Frontmatter

Embodied Design Improvisation: A Method to Make Tacit Design Knowledge Explicit and Usable

Abstract

We present a design generative and evaluative technique that we call embodied design improvisation, which incorporates aspects of storyboarding, Wizard of Oz prototyping, domain expert improvisation, video prototyping and crowdsourced experimentation to elicit tacit knowledge about embodied experience. We have been developing this technique over the last year for our research on physical interaction design, where practitioners often rely on subtle, shared cues that are difficult to codify, and are therefore often left underexplored. Our current technique provides an approach to understanding how everyday objects can transition into mobile, actuated, robotic devices, and prescribing how they should behave while interacting with humans. By codifying and providing an example of this technique, we hope to encourage its adoption in other design domains.

David Sirkin, Wendy Ju

Connecting Designing and Engineering Activities II

Abstract

Nowadays, innovation is an important competitive business advantage. Therefore, companies implement innovation processes or outsource them to external consulting companies. One example for such an innovation process is the methodology of design thinking, which enables the creation of innovative products or services. In Design Thinking an innovative product or service makes sense to people and for people, is likely to become a sustainable business model, and furthermore is functionally possible within the foreseeable future. Therefore, Design Thinking is considered as incubator for new innovative products and services. However, the transition from designing innovative products or services to implementing them is challenging since innovators and engineers are seldom the same people. This means a knowledge transfer between both groups is inevitable. As can be observed in practice, this knowledge transfer seldom goes smoothly since usually only the final innovative product or service is subject to the handover process. This is the case in spite of the fact that design decisions and the design path leading to this innovative outcome include important design rationales required by engineers. Thus, the design path and design decisions need to be recovered later on. We tackle this challenge with a manifold approach, which consists of (a) capturing design thinking artifacts, (b) inferring additional knowledge to recover the design path and design decisions, and (c) querying this knowledge. In this chapter we introduce our inference engine, which infers the design path and design decisions of Design Thinkers with the help of our Design Thinking inference rule set.

Thomas Beyhl, Holger Giese

How Cost Reduction in Recovery Improves Performance in Program Design Tasks

Abstract

Changing source code often leads to undesired implications, raising the need for recovery actions. Programmers need to manually keep recovery costs low by working in a structured and disciplined manner and regularly performing practices such as testing and versioning. While additional tool support can alleviate this constant need, the question is whether it affects programming performance? In a controlled lab study, 22 participants improved the design of two different applications. Using a repeated measurement setup, we compared the effect of two sets of tools on programming performance: a traditional setting and a setting with our recovery tool called CoExist. CoExist makes it possible to easily revert to previous development states even, if they are not committed explicitly. It also allows forgoing test runs, while still being able to understand the impact of each change later. The results suggest that additional recovery support such as provided with CoExist positively affects programming performance in explorative programming tasks.

Bastian Steinert, Robert Hirschfeld

DT@Scrum: Integrating Design Thinking with Software Development Processes

Abstract

Design Thinking has shown its potential for generating innovative, user-centered concepts in various projects at d.schools, in innovation courses like ME310, used by design consultancies like IDEO, and recently even in projects at large companies. However, if Design Thinking activities are not properly integrated with production processes, e.g. software development, handovers become necessary and potentially prevent great ideas from becoming real products.

To reduce the perception of these handovers as acts of “throwing a wild idea over the fence,” different integration approaches have been proposed. A seamless integration of Design Thinking into the regular development processes of software development companies, however, is still subject to research.

In this chapter, we present DT@Scrum, a process model that uses the Scrum framework to integrate Design Thinking into software development. Three operation modes, which differ in the ratio between software development and Design Thinking activities, form the foundation of our approach. Development teams chose their respective operation mode after each sprint based on how well the requirements of the product are understood. We present initial applications of our approach in two university courses, and preliminary results of an experiment that tests if and how Design Thinking can benefit from Scrum’s planning techniques. The chapter concludes with an outline of future applications of our process model in industry scenarios and experimental validations of further techniques that supplement DT@Scrum.

Franziska Häger, Thomas Kowark, Jens Krüger, Christophe Vetterli, Falk Übernickel, Matthias Uflacker

Titel: Design Thinking Research
herausgegeben von: Hasso Plattner
Christoph Meinel
Larry Leifer
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-06823-7
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-06822-0
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06823-7