Design Thinking Research

The adoption of Design Thinking as an innovation method has grown from traditional design circles to a broader range of industries and professions looking to become more innovative. The growth seen in industry has also influenced a rise in Design Thinking research and education with a strong focus on team-based design. In the last 10 years, design research programs have yielded a rigorously vetted body of new knowledge in the study of team interactions in high performing teams. Despite research-informed and data-driven insights, the impact of these outcomes in the realm of Design Thinking education remains marginal, and the development and application of new DT methods, tools, and frameworks often lack a rigorous empirical foundation. In an effort towards bridging the gap between research and practice, this chapter presents new research-based training methods for team-based design. These training packages are built on the research outcomes from the Stanford Center for Design Research and the Hasso Plattner Design Thinking Research Program, as well as contemporary work in cognitive science. The training packages take the form of performative patterns (Edelman et al. Design thinking research. Springer International, Cham, 2020). Performative patterns are micro-interactions that can be articulated into warm-ups, drills, and exercises for training purposes. Findings from this research demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach for both students of Design Thinking practice, and coaches.

The goal of design thinking training is to prepare participants to transfer what they learn in the classroom to real world scenarios. Because context influences transfer, a crucial step towards developing a transfer measure is understanding differences between training contexts and applied contexts. This chapter presents a study that investigates the influence academic contexts have on design thinking. We found three general influences; Supports for Learning Design, Self-differentiation of Design, and Internal Responses. Additionally, we outline three pilot studies that explore influences a range of applied contexts have on design thinking.

This chapter relies on an interactionist understanding of space, a shared leadership approach, and Design Thinking coaching to derive consequences for the use of space in Design Thinking workshops. It combines, on the one hand, concepts from theory with experience, insights, and tools from practice. On the other hand, it takes both the perspective of a Design Thinking coach and of workshop participants and it seeks to provide a broad perspective of how a space in Design Thinking can be prepared, used, and transformed to leverage its potential for teams. Deriving practical implications from theory will allow readers to better understand, reflect, and teach space in a Design Thinking context and further support them in developing their own interventions or variations of the tools presented.

Design engineers and teams have found value in recording (in analog or digital form) the details of their process—including meeting notes, sketches, physical prototypes, enactments, and so on—so that they can revisit, or even reuse, these details at a later time, or multiple later times, even on another project years later to build upon the ideas of others. Design knowledge capture and reuse is an underutilized practice for professional, as well as student, design teams We studied students enrolled in a graduate level academic-year-long course in design practice at Stanford, which focuses on developing students’ skills in design process, project management, physical prototyping, and global team dynamics. Experienced designers value design knowledge capture and reuse highly but are challenged to communicate and facilitate their value to students through graded activities alone. This chapter describes our own design process to address the teaching team’s challenge by quickly prototyping a “critical experience prototype” to help students learn, use, and reuse a video-based design archiving system. We built and tested a (relatively) large, table-top, electronic pushbutton that design team members could press whenever they encountered a moment, or insight, that they considered potentially important for their team’s prospects. A press on the “recording engineering design” (or RED) button initiates the recording and storage of video of the surrounding several minutes of team activity. We found during testing that (1) the button was fraught with novelty effects during usage, and (2) it would occasionally break the flow of thought and progress during meetings. We also find that while the prototype might effectively capture salient design moments, it still does not address the needs of design knowledge reuse, as it does not assist team members with the subsequent consumption of that documented knowledge, or emphasize the value of design knowledge reuse.

Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) instructors often use written discussion forum posts to initiate the course and to onboard their learners. To improve and expand on this practice, we adapted “warm-up games” from the context of design thinking and improvisational theatre to the discussion forum format of three MOOCs. In this chapter we describe how we set up these visual, interactive and purposeful games and explain or aims in implementing them. We conclude that warm-up games help to boost discussion forum usage and warm-up game activity may be used as an indicator for high assignment performance.

Measuring design performance for effective support of team coaching and redesign efforts has been difficult to near impossible. This is because, design is context dependent and takes place in different environments. Virtual reality gives us as designers, the opportunity to construct and simulate different environments, as coaches, the opportunity to improve our effectiveness in different design scenarios, and as researchers, the possibility to measure design performance and factors that affect it. This possibility was investigated experimentally. Two environments were constructed—one corresponding to a garage in a rural setting, and the other, to a conference room on one of the floors of a skyscraper in the city. Teams of three designers were recruited for the experiment. They worked on two product concept generation tasks and two decision making tasks, while being situated in each of the spaces. Several types of data were collected including video records, screen records, participant questionnaires, and position data of the VR headset and the hand controllers. The position data was used to calculate the level of synchrony between the designers. To investigate the correlation between the synchrony scores and the environment, we used a Kruskal-Wallis ordinal test. The test showed that the teams in the conference room had significantly higher synchrony (H(1) = 7.056, p = 0.0079) than the teams in the garage. This data was surprising, unexpected, and difficult to explain. In the course of searching for an explanation, several earlier models of behavior and context from the literature were reviewed. This led to the development of a comprehensive model of human-environment interaction which we believe will help guide future experiments. Early prototypes of this model are presented and discussed.

In this book chapter, we present our scientific approach for applying the methods of fNIRS hyperscanning to decode distinct qualities of team interaction. Specifically, we are interested in detecting states of inter-brain synchrony that correlate with the behavioral states of cooperation and collaboration—terminologies which have been previously introduced as separate states in design thinking literature. We propose that the differentiation between those two concepts holds great promise for a better classification of team interaction, and a more thorough understanding of the dynamics leading to improved performance and (design) results. It is our hope that this work will provide more accurate and valuable information on human social interaction within working teams in the design thinking and related areas.

In this paper we endeavor to explore how organizational learning unfolds on the level of group discourses.

Research in organizational learning ranges from small groups to large corporations. A useful framework to observe organizational learning is the exploration-exploitation concept by James March (Organization Science 2(1):71–87, 1991). Studies that are based on this concept primarily focus on the analysis of learning as an explorative activity that creates specific outcomes, for example new ideas, products, and strategies. In addition, another concept by Nonaka et al. 1996 describes organizational learning as a spiral between the modes of externalization, combination, internalization, and socialization between individuals, groups and the organization as a whole (SECI model). How this learning process is unfolding within those levels is rarely described, which is why our focus is on an analysis of learning processes as they occur in situ, at the level of group discourses.

The authors analyzed video material from various group sessions and applied the documentary method (Bohnsack, Qualitative analysis and documentary method in international educational research. B. Budrich, Opladen, 2010) as a method of reconstructive social research to explore learning in situ, as it unfolds in the interactional group discourse.

The authors argue that learning processes in group discourses are triggered by incongruences between frames of orientations of the individuals involved. However, not all incongruences initiate learning processes. Whether or not learning occurs, depends on the group’s interactions—namely their ability and willingness to switch from a communicative to a meta-communicative level of their discussion. Only on this level of communication, are individual framings of orientations likely to be reflected, negotiated or even newly created.

The meta-communicative level is where learning as an explorative activity happens. In our examples, different orientations towards the next task of a group are discussed in various ways in order to get to a framing of the group’s orientation towards that next task. In contrast, the communicative level is where an existing framing of the group’s orientation towards the next task guides the execution process as exploitative activities.

This work can be regarded as a pre-study to our current work in progress: the analysis of group discourses to explore the effect of design thinking on learning in groups.

Was a problematic team always doomed to frustration, or could it have ended another way? In this paper, we study the consistency of team fracture: a loss of team viability so severe that the team no longer wants to work together. Understanding whether team fracture is driven by the membership of the team, or by how their collaboration unfolded, motivates the design of interventions that either identify compatible teammates or ensure effective early interactions. We introduce an online experiment that reconvenes the same team without members realizing that they have worked together before, enabling us to temporarily erase previous team dynamics. Participants in our study completed a series of tasks across multiple teams, including one reconvened team, and privately blacklisted any teams that they would not want to work with again. We identify fractured teams as those blacklisted by half the members. We find that reconvened teams are strikingly polarized by task in the consistency of their fracture outcomes. On a creative task, teams might as well have been a completely different set of people: the same teams changed their fracture outcomes at a random chance rate. On a cognitive conflict and on an intellective task, the team instead replayed the same dynamics without realizing it, rarely changing their fracture outcomes. These results indicate that, for some tasks, team fracture can be strongly influenced by interactions in the first moments of a team’s collaboration, and that interventions targeting these initial moments may be critical to scaffolding long-lasting teams.

Design Thinking has become an important and widely accepted innovation approach in many companies worldwide. However, it is mostly used in small innovation or research projects, or is outsourced to innovation labs or design agencies. Furthermore, there is little published data on how to leverage Design Thinking for complex applications. Multiple, collaborating development teams are required to construct sophisticated software products for different stakeholder groups. Therefore, similarly to scaled agile development, several Design Thinking teams should be employed in complex software projects to take advantage of parallel work capabilities and to investigate needs and demands of several customers, user and stakeholder groups. However, currently no approaches to scale Design Thinking to multiple teams exist. With this chapter, we aim to tackle this challenge and present a scaled Design Thinking approach, in which multiple teams conceive ideas in a Design Thinking phase and implement the resulting ideas in follow-up projects ultimately converging into one project and product. This approach is validated in an educational context with a master-level seminar and in the resulting follow-up projects in and outside of the curriculum. We discuss our experiences from the case study as well as the benefits and challenges of our approach. With this study we provide first insights on how to scale Design Thinking to multiple teams and how to leverage its capabilities for complex software products.

The design of domain-specific software systems can benefit from participatory design practices making domain experts and programmers equal, collaborating partners. The source code of such a system might be a viable communication artifact to mediate the perspectives of the two groups. However, source code written in a general-purpose programming language is often considered too difficult to comprehend for untrained readers. At the same time, it is yet unclear what makes general-purpose programming languages difficult to understand. Based on our previous study and related work from programming pedagogy and cognitive psychology, we develop an initial theory of factors that might influence the comprehensibility of source code documents by untrained readers. This theory covers factors stemming from the features of source code, factors related to the visual appearance of source code, and factors concerned with aspects independent of code documents. This chapter discusses and illustrates these potential factors and points out initial hypotheses about how these factors can influence comprehensibility.

In the coming era of ubiquitous robotics we envision the need for the effortless design of contextually-aware interactions with robots. Ubiquitous robots create a number of challenges for designers. Firstly, due to their dynamic nature, prototyping requires skillful programming and is often time consuming. Moreover, these devices are often context-aware and their behavior is affected by people, objects, and their environment. Existing tools for human-robot interaction designers require programming expertise, do not leverage design methodologies such as iterative design, and do not support in-situ user testing. We propose that bodystorming can be used as an effective method in this process, to communicate needfinding results and to explore the design of situated interactions with robots. As a case study, we first conduct a series of interviews and observe the workflow of human-robot interaction designers, to better understand the challenges they face. We summarize the insights gathered from our needfinding, including challenges around data capture and information overload. We then describe how we used a mystery-game-style role-playing activity in an interactive workshop to communicate our findings, induce empathy, and initiate an effective ideation phase. Finally, we summarize the learnings from this workshop and how such bodystorming techniques can be used to communicate needfinding results at early stages of the human-robot interaction design process.

There is an increasing use of neuroscience research methods to understand the neural basis of design activity. The use of Neuroscience research tools such as fMRI, EEG and fNIRS presents a new and insightful approach to potentially understand the neurocognitive processes underlying design thinking at the level of individual designers as well as teams. However, the results from neuroscience research while insightful are rarely directly applied to design practice. In this chapter, we explore this gap between neuroscience research and design practice and explore how the emerging field of NeuroDesign might bridge this gap. Delving into the epistemology of design practice and the promise of neuroscience, we present the understanding and practice of learning as a key bridge between the two fields. We explore the broader implication of learning in the framing of NeuroDesign and present a research agenda for further studies in the field.

Neurodesign is a novel field of research, education and practice that emerges as a cross-disciplinary initiative. In 2019, the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) offered for the first time a neurodesign curriculum. The objective of neurodesign as we pursue it is to explore synergies at the intersection of (i) neuroscience, (ii) engineering and (iii) design thinking · creativity · collaboration · innovation. In this chapter, we share insights into the development of a curriculum that quickly became more comprehensive than we had anticipated for this initial implementation phase. Neurodesign evolves serendipitously driven by the passions of numerous protagonists who contribute their expertise, ideas and work results in a uniquely collaborative fashion. The chapter briefly summarizes input provided by neuroscientists and creative engineers from several countries and different continents, who contributed guest expert talks at the HPI to help build up a joint knowledge base. The major part of the chapter is a review of neurodesign projects that have emerged, often in collaboration with guest experts of the program. Overall, these projects indicate how intersections of neurodesign (i)–(ii)–(iii) open up cornucopias of opportunities. Especially the integration of engineering expertise has introduced many favourable dynamics. In terms of strategic reflections, this chapter shares “missions” we pursue in the development of neurodesign. These directions for further initiatives also commence a brief outlook on upcoming neurodesign developments.