(DT)²-Box – A Multi-sensory Approach to Support Design Thinking Teams

Creative innovations are of immense importance for companies in the modern working world as well as in research. Design thinking as a solution approach for complex problems has become an indispensable part of innovation development and is used in many industries for a wide variety of fields and technologies. However, the documentation of the process in such projects is often neglected despite its great importance for the transfer of information and the reflection of the process. As a result, errors occur in the implementation of the developed ideas or further improvements to the process cannot take place. Software tools that support documentation are therefore desirable, but exist in small numbers so far. Also for the joint reflection of Design Thinking teams, no known approaches to assistance by software exist so far. This paper therefore iteratively develops an IoT-tool for supporting documentation in Design Thinking projects within the framework of a design-scientific investigation, which also offers assistance in method selection as well as the joint reflection on the work carried out, and which is particularly easy to use due to an alternative form of operation. The developed solution is evaluated with the support of experts from innovation research and tested for its practical suitability to answer the questions to what extent software can support documentation, reflection, and method selection in Design Thinking projects. At the same time, it is shown how video recordings can be used to demonstrate the developed solutions in design science research digitally, even in times of contact restrictions.