Design Thinking Research

Remote collaboration processes require digital tools supporting work over distances. Transferring physical artifacts to the digital world and facilitating their flexible usage are common cases in remote settings.

In this article, we present new developments that we have integrated into our remote collaboration software system Tele-Board supporting such use cases. We describe a software tool for automatically digitizing analog whiteboard artifacts that can then be used in remote settings on a shared virtual whiteboard surface via Tele-Board. Additionally, we show a web browser-based virtual whiteboard application. It allows shared real-time collaboration in a web browser as part of the Tele-Board system. The application makes use of modern web technologies and does not require any browser plugins. This way, it can be used equally on a multitude of hardware, especially mobile devices.

By closing the media gap, our tools lower the hurdle of switching from analog co-located to digital remote working modes. Once arrived in the digital world, our browser-based approach takes account of increased hardware diversity and allows an easy and flexible participation in remote collaboration settings.

Multidisciplinary teamwork is a key requirement in the design thinking approach to innovation. The tools currently available for effective team coaching are limited to heuristics derived from either experienced design thinking professionals or clinical psychology practitioners. Our research aims to improve this current situation by providing design thinking managers, coaches and instructors a scientifically validated tool for augmenting design team performance. We present the development of a software tool called the IDN Tool based on the Interaction Dynamics Notation to analyze team interactions and diagnose patterns of behavior that influence design outcomes. We demonstrate the use of the IDN Tool through analysis of the interaction behaviors of seven design teams engaged in a concept generation activity, which were independently rated by a two-person Jury using the criteria of utility and novelty. Through the analysis we were able to visually isolate the interaction behaviors that had a high positive or negative correlation with the levels of novelty and utility of concepts judged a priori. With further work, this has the potential of improving in-process design team performance with a positive influence on design outcomes.

This research examines the capabilities and boundaries of a hands-free mobile augmented reality (AR) system for distributed healthcare. We use a developer version of the Google Glass™ head-mounted display to develop software applications to enable remote connectivity in the healthcare field; characterize system usage, data integration, and data visualization capabilities; and conduct a series of pilot studies involving medical scenarios. This book chapter discusses the need for a AR head-mounted display to improve chronic wound care photography and to facilitate surgical interventions. We provide an overview of the system architecture used in this research, and highlight future applications of AR systems for improved clinical care.

In the broader context of distributed collaboration for improved healthcare delivery, this research provides a foundation for: (i) examining the use of technology for complex distributed problem solving through interdisciplinary collaboration; (ii) gaining an improved understanding of the benefits of human augmentation through enhanced visualization and auditory capabilities, on healthcare team performance; and (iii) exploring an AR system’s ability to influence behavior change in situations requiring acute decision-making through interaction between centralized experts and point-of-impact delivery personnel. Moreover, this chapter provides insight into the need for future IT systems engineering projects aimed at enhancing healthcare connectivity and distributed care.

Massive online classes are global and diverse. How can we harness this diversity to improve engagement and learning? Currently, though enrollments are high, students’ interactions with each other are minimal: most are alone together. This isolation is particularly disappointing given that a global community is a major draw of online classes. This paper illustrates the potential of leveraging geographic diversity in massive online classes. We connect students from around the world through small-group video discussions. Our peer discussion system, Talkabout, has connected over 5000 students in 14 online classes. Three studies with 2670 students from two classes found that globally diverse discussions boost student performance and engagement: the more geographically diverse the discussion group, the better the students performed on later quizzes. Through this work, we challenge the view that online classes are useful only when in-person classes are unavailable. Instead, we demonstrate how diverse online classrooms can create benefits that are largely unavailable in a traditional classroom.

Over the last 2 years, we have been following an improvisational approach to physical interaction design research. It emphasizes the use of exploratory lab and field experiments as a way to (a) source novel ideas about how people might interact with expressive objects such as robots and active spaces, (b) appraise the performance of our prototypes of these technologies, and (c) build frameworks to understand users’ mental models and develop new insights into interaction. We have focused, in particular, on staging environments—whether in public settings or recreated in our workspace—where we can provoke discussion about what behaviors and emotions would be desirable or natural. This paper describes how we design and run experiments to evaluate how people interact with expressive robots built from everyday objects, including a mechanical ottoman, emotive dresser drawers and roving trash barrel.

In order to assess a person’s creative capacity in real-world situations, we propose a novel Design Thinking Creativity Test (DTCT). The DTCT is based on the design thinking principles and can serve as an assessment that reflects problem-solving needs of the twenty-first century. In particular, the DTCT emphasizes assessment of case-based skills to directly measure an individual’s application of creativity during an innovation event. In order to create a robust and standardized creativity assessment, we are currently examining (1) the reliability of DTCT in capturing applied creativity in a simulated real-world setting; (2) the validity of DTCT by relating DTCT scores with other standardized assessments of creativity; and (3) the correlations between neuroimaging data and scores achieved in the DTCT task. In this chapter, we provide a thorough background on already existing tools to assess creative capacity and how our approach advances the current state of the art. We also share challenges faced in collecting and analyzing DTCT data, along with proposed solutions. Lastly, we provide our hypotheses and preliminary insights regarding DTCT’s ability to capture applied creative capacity.

Design thinking is a methodological approach addressing to solve wicked problems with multidisciplinary and cross-functional innovation teams. A flexible work environment enables innovation teams using this approach to ideate, create and design. This paper investigates the impact of creative environments on team wellbeing and performance as an outcome of perceptions, feelings and interactions of individual team members with their respective environment. The study introduces a new qualitative method, cultural probes, as an empirical instrument. The results of this study indicate that innovation teams need access to flexible spatial environments to fulfill their innovation process tasks (performance-oriented perspective), but also need different working zones to foster their team-wellbeing related activities (team-oriented perspective).

Can we enable anyone to create anything? The prototyping tools of a rising Maker Movement are enabling the next generation of artists, designers, educators, and engineers to bootstrap from napkin sketch to functional prototype. However for technical novices, the process of including electronic components in prototypes can hamper the creative process with technical details. Software and electronic modules can reduce the amount of work a designer must perform in order to express an idea, by condensing the number of choices into a physical and cognitive “chunk.” What are the core building blocks that might make up electronics toolkits of the future, and what are the key affordances? We present the idea that modularity, the ability to freely recombine elements, is a key affordance for novice prototyping with electronics. We present the results of a creative prototyping experiment (N = 86) that explores how tool modularity influences the creative design process. Using a browser-based crowd platform (Amazon’s Mechanical Turk), participants created electric “creature circuits” with LEDs in a virtual prototyping environment. We found that increasing the modularity of LED components (i) increased the quantity of prototypes created by study participants; and (ii) increased participants’ degree of perceived self-efficacy, self-reported creative feeling, and cognitive flow. The results highlight the importance of tool modularity in creative prototyping.

This article focuses on how organizations measure the impact of design thinking. The results are based on a quantitative survey that is complemented by qualitative interviews with experienced design thinkers. Even though a majority of respondents perceive some kind of impact, only a minority has tried to determine the impact in some way. Those who do not evaluate the impact, often do not know how or lack the necessary resources. The metrics of those who do measure design thinking’s impact vary considerably, but customer feedback and satisfaction is a recurring theme. We propose that the traditional means of performance measurements are often ill-suited for evaluating the impact of design thinking. We conclude with a promising industry example of how traditional measures can be used to gauge overall performance and how a story-based approach can capture the role of design thinking.

The creative behaviors that underpin design thinking are difficult to measure. This is problematic because people who have a desire to practice design thinking in an organizational context are often assessed only on their ability to execute via traditional metrics. Therefore they have less incentive to work in a creative way. In order for organizations to fully support and incentivize design thinking, they must measure creative behaviors as much as they do executional behaviors. This chapter highlights a suite of initial metrics that arose from research on d.school alumni and organizations applying design thinking as a core driver of their innovation strategy.

Design teams have different problems and needs during their projects. For the teams’ coaches this can amount to a high workload due to acquainting themselves with new topics and preparing different coaching sessions for the teams. On the other hand, former teams might have experienced similar problems, and the experiences and solutions of members from such a team could be valuable to the current teams. In this chapter, we present the concept of special topic coaches that lets former members of design teams provide additional coaching sessions to current teams. This concept allows experienced members of design teams to share their knowledge and experiences with a current team by preparing and running a coaching session. Thus it relieves the dedicated team coaches while providing the team with valuable input and establishing an exchange between different design teams. The teams can discuss their problems with peers and receive additional input on topics important to them when needed. To ensure that our goals are met, we implemented the concept with the help of a coaching seminar parallel to one of our design engineering courses. The seminar was evaluated through observations and questionnaires. We will present the results as well as derived changes to the next iteration of the seminar and our ideas of how to adopt this concept in a company context.

Documentation is a field of active research both for the community of design thinkers and medical practitioners. One major challenge is to combine the advantages of analogue and digital documentation. Since documentation needs are particularly similar in the fields of design thinking and behaviour psychotherapy, an intense collaboration has emerged among these disciplines. The design thinking tool Tele-Board has been adapted for documentation purposes in behaviour psychotherapy, yielding a first medical application of the new tool Tele-Board MED. In the course of tool adaptation, additional features have been developed such as an automatic protocol function. These new features are not only useful for therapists but beneficial for design thinkers too. This chapter explains why collaborative work on documentation tools is particularly promising at the intersection of design thinking and behaviour psychotherapy. We outline the development and empirical evaluation of the new protocol function. Furthermore, this chapter discusses how Tele-Board MED supports documentation in behaviour psychotherapy on the one hand and documentation of design thinking projects on the other hand.

In programming systems such as the Lively Kernel, programmers construct applications from objects. Dedicated tools make it possible to manipulate the state and behavior of objects at runtime. Programmers are encouraged to make changes directly and receive immediate feedback on their actions. However, when programmers make mistakes in such programming systems, they need to undo the effects of their actions. Programmers either have to edit objects manually or reload parts of their applications. Moreover, changes can spread across many objects. As a result, recovering previous states is often error-prone and time-consuming. This report presents an approach to object versioning for systems like the Lively Kernel. Access to previous versions of objects is preserved using version-aware references. These references can be resolved to multiple versions of objects and, thereby, allow reestablishing preserved states of the system. We present a design based on proxies and an implementation in JavaScript.

Nowadays, companies implement innovation processes or outsource them to external consulting companies to gain a competitive business advantage. The methodology of Design Thinking is one example for such an innovation process that enables the creation of innovative products or services, which make sense to people and for people, are likely to become a sustainable business model as well as are functionally possible in the foreseeable future.

But, innovators and engineers are seldom the same people, what makes documenting innovation projects with a subsequent information handover inevitable. In practice, this information handover seldom goes smoothly due to missing, incomplete, or not traceable documentation of innovation projects. The situation becomes even worse when important design rationales, design paths and design alternatives are not retrievable anymore, because the missing information may lead to a realization of the innovation that was not intended by the innovators. The retrieval of design paths, design rationales, and design alternatives requires high manual effort, if at all possible.

In this chapter, we present a recovery approach that eases the retrieval of design artifacts by recovering design paths before the actual retrieval happens. For that purpose, our recovery approach employs recovery modules that implement knowledge extraction procedures and recovery algorithms. We evaluate our recovery approach using inventory documentation collected in educational Design Thinking settings.