Design Thinking: Past, Present andPossible Futures

Ulla Johansson-Sköldberg, Jill Woodilla andMehves Çetinkaya

This paper takes a critical look at the design thinking discourse, one that has differentmeanings depending on its context. Within the managerial realm, design thinking has beendescribed as the best way to be creative and innovate, while within the design realm, designthinking may be partly ignored and taken for granted, despite a long history of academicdevelopment and debate. In the design area, we find five different discourses of ‘designerlythinking’, or ways to describe what designers do in practice, that have distinctly differentepistemological roots. These different discourses do not stand in competition with each otherbut could be developed in parallel. We also observe that the management discourse has threedistinct origins, but in general has a more superficial and popular character and is lessacademically anchored than the designerly one. Also, the management design thinking dis-course seldom refers to designerly thinking and thereby hinders cumulative knowledge con-struction. We suggest further research to link the discourses.

Introduction

‘Design thinking’ is a concept used both intheory and practice. In the management

realm it is so closely related to practice thatsome researchers say that there is no theoreti-cal body, a comment frequently heard at the2011 Cambridge Design Management Confer-ence. Certainly there is an extensive literature,both academic and practitioner-oriented, inbooks, journals and the news media, andrecently the popular press and semi-academicliterature has displayed a zeal for the conceptas if ‘design thinking’ is a panacea for theeconomy. Turning to the academic literaturefor a more reasoned treatment, we find, to oursurprise, there is no sustained development ofthe concept. And even though there must besome relationships between the academic dis-courses of design(erly) thinking and the man-agement discourse based on the sameconcepts, there are seldom references linkingthe two. It is as if design theorists such asRichard Buchanan (1992) and managementwriters such as Roger Martin (2009) coined thelabel of ‘design thinking’ to describe thethought processes of designing completely

independently of each other. This might bepossible, but is hardly plausible.

It is therefore easy for the temporarily inten-sive discourse to be dismissed as hype or a fad(Johansson & Woodilla, 2010), thereby imply-ing that design thinking is not an enduringconcept to be used in academia or the manage-ment world. This path seems even morecertain as some of the more prominent proph-ets of design thinking have renounced theconcept, like Professor Bruce Nussbaum ofParsons – The New School of Design, formerlyassociate editor at BusinessWeek, who hasturned away in favour of ‘creative intelligence’(Nussbaum, 2011); Professor Fred Collopy ofCase Western Reserve University, who hasbecome increasingly ‘bothered’ by the term(Collopy, 2009), and Dean Roger Martin,Rotman School of Management, University ofToronto, who continues to explore differentvarieties of executive thinking. Continuing inthis way, however, would be to make a messysituation too easy; instead, we propose step-ping back and surveying the field to explorethe roots and development of the discourse.

The paper is structured as follows. First, wediscuss the demographics of the discourse,

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how it has grown and what types of literaturehave been published, followed by the descrip-tion and characteristics of the two main dis-courses, the designerly and the managementdiscourses of design thinking. We identify fivesub-discourses of the designerly thinking dis-course and three origins of the managementdiscourse, and critically review their contentand contributions. Finally, we discuss relationsbetween the two discourses and suggest pos-sible research directions.

The Demographics of the Literature

In our previous work we observed two dis-tinct discourses on design thinking: one in thedesign-based, scholarly literature, and theother in the widely accessible business media(Johansson & Woodilla, 2010). In this articleour research questions centre around relation-ships between the two discourses and theirsources: the types of literature, rather than thespecific content. We searched the literatureuntil we were satisfied and had reached thelevel of saturation.

We started with questions like, ‘What is theliterature on design thinking? What are thediscourse streams and relative strengths, andWhat is different about the presentation inthe different media?’ We were interested inuncovering trends, recognizing importantauthors to follow, and appreciating differencesin how the concept has been treated in theacademic and non-academic press. We antici-pated that there would be different discussionsabout the use of design thinking in educationand empirical work with potentially differentmethodologies. We were also interested inuncovering what has been forgotten andthemes that had potential for furtherdevelopment.

Our initial scoping search using academicelectronic databases, journals, book publish-ers’ lists and informal methods such as GoogleScholar cast light on the structure and differ-ent streams in the overall discourse. Wesearched for ‘design thinking’, ‘design’ or‘thinking’ in the title, subject, abstract or key-words, and reviewed the findings with asubject-matter expert. The resulting literaturebase provided the history of the developmentof the design thinking discourse. Later, whenexamining the character and structure ofvarious sub-discourses, we refined the list byselecting academic and practitioner journalarticles, and refereed conference papers avail-able in the public domain that included‘design thinking’ in the title, abstract or key-words, and books that were referenced fre-quently in scholarly papers. For this article,

some sources from the literature base wereignored as not directly related to our interestsand others were added because they were keyreferences for sources from our original list orwritten after our original search.

Identifying the Populations

The literature base consists of 168 items, ofwhich more than 80 per cent date from afterthe year 2000. It includes books (31), academicrefereed papers (48), professional/practitionerarticles (28), refereed conference papers (7),magazines and newspaper articles (39) andweb blogs (15). The numbers graduallyincrease by year, starting from Simon’s (1969)foundational work about the nature of design,then design theorists’ publications beginningin the 1980s, becoming more numerousaround 1999, and reaching a high point in2009. Management scholars first showed aninterest in links between business and designin the mid-1980s, followed by scholars in otherareas. The subject gathered popular mediaattention starting around 2004 and peaked in2009. The development of the broad field isshown in Figure 1. Here the literature isdivided into three genres: (1) books (blackcolumn), (2) substantial articles in academic(peer-reviewed) and respected practitionerjournals (dark grey column), and (3) shortpieces in the business press and online media(light grey column). Appendices A and Belaborate on the base literature list by catego-rizing the entries.

Books provide an elaborated argumentwhere the author demonstrates proficiency inthe field. Some books are theory-driven (e.g.,Simon, 1969): the early books tend to be of thisnature due to the publication norms of thefield at the time. Other books present casesand examples that elaborate and developtheory (e.g., Rowe, 1987), or are ‘recipes’ for‘how to do design thinking’ for practitioners(e.g., Leidtka & Ogilvie, 2011) or textbooks forstudents (e.g., Ambrose & Harris, 2010), withsimplified arguments, diagrams and check-lists, but little theory development. Mostrecent books are of this nature.

Articles in scholarly or academic journalsand respected practitioner or professionaljournals are the foundational ground for anysubject. We located articles that discussed thedevelopment of the design discourse, exclud-ing those with an industrial or computer engi-neering technical focus because, as scholars in‘design management’, we were unprepared toevaluate them appropriately. Not surprisingly,most of the articles developing theory ondesign thinking were in design journals, inparticular UK-based Design Studies andUS-based Design Issues. Some academic man-

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agement journals included conceptual articlesrelated to design thinking, while professionaljournal articles tended to be explanationsor case studies of successful practice. Two,Harvard Business Review and Design Manage-ment Review, deserve special mention: theformer for its prestige among US executivesand managers, and the latter for its long-standing focus on ‘demonstrating the strategicrole of design in business’ (www.dmi.org).Finally, a few scholarly conference papers wereincluded in our review to gauge trends intheory development; here our selection formsa convenient sample.

Using the ‘trade’ and ‘popular’ literature,culled from magazines, the business press andreputable online sources, is controversial aspart of an academic literature review. Weincluded these sources to gain a sense of thescope and timing of interest in the topicoutside of academe and professional practice.Determining the total number of contributionsin these areas is difficult, but the overall trend-line is revealing. The news media comment onchanges in firm strategy or personnel (e.g.,Birchall, 2008): the same event is likely to betaken up across several publications, effec-tively ‘promoting’ the use of design thinkingin context. Magazines include interviews with‘experts’ on the topic (e.g., Tischler, 2009): theinterviewee is ‘newsworthy’ in some way orother, effectively establishing expertise in thefield. Finally, many publications supportregular blogs by subject-matter experts (e.g.,Bruce Nussbaum at BusinessWeek, or FredCollopy at Fast Company): this is the spacewhere opinions are stated and viral newsbegins, such as the ‘hot news’ that ‘designthinking is dead!’

The Nature of the Two Discourses:Designerly Thinking andDesign Thinking

A simple way of discussing the discourse ofdesign thinking is as two distinct discourses:

• One we call ‘designerly thinking’. Thisrefers to the academic construction of theprofessional designer’s practice (practicalskills and competence) and theoreticalreflections around how to interpret andcharacterize this non-verbal competence ofthe designers. Designerly thinking linkstheory and practice from a design perspec-tive, and is accordingly rooted in the aca-demic field of design.

• The other discourse is ‘design thinking’. Wereserve this term for the discourse wheredesign practice and competence are usedbeyond the design context (including artand architecture), for and with peoplewithout a scholarly background in design,particularly in management. ‘Design think-ing’ then becomes a simplified version of‘designerly thinking’ or a way of describinga designer’s methods that is integrated intoan academic or practical managementdiscourse.

The Academic Discourses ofDesignerly Thinking

For the business world, design thinking mightseem like a new concept from this side of themillennium, but within design research char-acteristics of designers’ work and practicehave been discussed for at least 40 years, whilethe management discourse of design thinking

Figure 1. Timeline of Publications by Type

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developed over the last decade is only slightlyrelated to the earlier discourse. The designerlypart of the discourse forms an academicstream, with contributions from both design-ers and related disciplines (architecture, plan-ning, design history, etc.). The aim has beenpurely academic, either understanding for itsown sake or for communicating such under-standing to students. The consultancy genrethat is typical of the management discourse isgenerally absent and normative elements aremuch more rare. The writing style with exces-sive praise found in the management dis-course is absent.

Theoretical perspectives can be categorizedinto five sub-discourses, identified as havingclear roots and a substantial academic follow-ing, with the foundational work(s) withinparentheses:

1. Design and designerly thinking as the crea-tion of artefacts (Simon, 1969).

2. Design and designerly thinking as a reflex-ive practice (Schön, 1983).

3. Design and designerly thinking as aproblem-solving activity (Buchanan, 1992based on Rittel and Webber, 1973).

4. Design and designerly thinking as a way ofreasoning/making sense of things (Lawson,2006 [1980]; Cross, 2006, 2011).

5. Design and designerly thinking as creationof meaning (Krippendorff, 2006).

1. Design and Designerly Thinking as theCreation of Artefacts

Simon (1916–2001), winner of the 1978 NobelPrize in Economics for his critique of the opti-mizing model of rational decision making andits replacement with the concept of boundedrationality, earned an international reputationas a founder of artificial intelligence. Hisresearch extended from computer science tocognitive psychology, business administrationand economics, with design becoming aninterest in his later years. Simon understood‘design’ to encompass all conscious activitiesto create artefacts, and thereby differentiatedit from natural science, social science andhumanities – but not from engineering. Hismain concern was about research – what con-stitutes the character of design research? Hispoint of departure was that design is aboutcreation, while other sciences deal with whatalready exists. What, then, is research aboutcreation? His seminal work, The Sciences of theArtificial, was an answer to that question, and alegitimization of an experimental approach todesign research in academia.

As far as we know, Simon himself neverused the term ‘design thinking’. However,

with his cognitive approach to decisionmaking and his often-quoted definition ofdesign as ‘the transformation of existing con-ditions into preferred ones’ (Simon, 1996: 4),he is a reference point for the academic writ-ings about design and design thinking. He is afoundational father of design research in theway Taylor was for management research.

What is striking about Simon’s view of‘design thinking’ is that he distinguishedbetween activities that create something newand activities that deal with existing reality,but not between artistic creation and engineer-ing. The difference between designers’ andengineers’ ways of thinking, something that isnoticed and problematized in practice, there-fore became a non-issue for Simon.

Another issue is Simon’s epistemologicalplatform. He was critical of positivisticapproaches both in economics and in design.However, he created his argument within aneo-positivistic and rationalistic realm inorder to have the positivists understand thattheir arguments were incorrect. Maybe it is notsurprising that the neo-Simon movement (e.g.,Hatchuel, 2002; Hatchuel & Weill, 2003) origi-nated in engineering schools rather than fromdesign management or design.

2. Design and Designerly Thinking as aReflexive Practice

Schön (1930–1997) was originally a philoso-pher with pragmatism as his theoretical frameof reference. He first focused on the logics ofinventions and later, with Argyris, turned toorganizational learning. The last 20 years of hislife were devoted to practice theory. In TheReflective Practitioner, Schön (1983) challengedboth researchers and practitioners to recon-sider the role of technical knowledge versus‘artistry’ in developing professional excel-lence. The book can be read in many ways,such as from an organizational competenceperspective or from a practice perspective(e.g., Schön & Wiggins, 1992). From a designthinking perspective, it is a critique of Simon’scognitive perspective. At a time when therewas a big division made between positivismand hermeneutics, Simon, with his analyticalreasoning, was close to positivism, whileSchön, with his philosophical pragmatism,was close to hermeneutics. In contrast toSimon, Schön constructed a picture of thedesigner through a practice-based focus on therelation between creation and reflection-upon-the-creation that allows for constantlyimproved competence and re-creation. Suchreflection, which Schön found in the work ofboth architects and psychoanalysts, becameunderstood as the core of design work. This

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reflection was not something that was sepa-rated from the practice as such, but was under-stood as part of the practice.

Schön also considered management prac-tice, and noted that managers are well aware ofthe important areas of practice that fall outsideof technical rationality. While managers dealwith decisions under uncertainty throughintuition, they build up an essentially unana-lysable capacity for problem solving throughlong and varied practice rather than throughstudying theory or techniques. Managersreflect-in-action, but they seldom reflect ontheir reflection-in-action.

Differences between Simon and Schön’sviews of design have been discussed fre-quently (Bousbaci, 2008; Dorst, 1997). In ourview, Simon created an objective frameworkfor the field of design, while Schön fleshed itout with descriptions of designers in practice.Their writings, therefore, belong to quite dif-ferent worlds from an epistemological point ofview.

3. Design and Designerly Thinking as aProblem-Solving Activity

Buchanan’s (1992) article about ‘wicked prob-lems’ in design has become a foundational ref-erence not only for the discourse about designthinking, but also for the whole design area.Buchanan presented designers’ professionalway of thinking as a matter of dealing withwicked problems, a class of social systemsproblems with a fundamental indeterminacywithout a single solution and where muchcreativity is needed to find solutions.

Buchanan was the first to really take adesignerly perspective on design thinking,building on Rittel and Webber’s (1973) wickedproblem approach as an alternative to theaccepted step-by-step model of the designprocess with its two distinct phases: an ana-lytic step of problem definition, followed by asynthetic sequence of problem solution. Bucha-nan introduced the concept of placements todescribe the process of contextualization.Placements are ‘tools’ for intuitively or delib-erately shaping a design situation, identifyingthe views of all participants, the issues ofconcern, and the intervention that becomes aworking hypothesis for exploration and devel-opment, thereby letting the problem formula-tion and solution go hand in hand rather thanas sequential steps. As Wylant (2010) notes,design thinking is the discipline of cyclingthrough many contextual exercises of place-ments to understand ‘how sense can be madeof something and given this, the designer isthen in a position to choose which contexts

should dominate and the manner in which theyshould’ (p. 228). The notion of placements inresponse to worked problems dissolves theboundaries between modernist and postmod-ernist design thinking.

Buchanan’s process perspective is con-cerned with gaining a deeper understandingof design thinking in an increasingly complextechnological culture, so there can be commu-nication among all participants engaged in theprocess of design. He suggests four distinctareas of design thinking as places of interven-tions where problems and solutions could bereconsidered: (1) symbolic and visual commu-nications (or graphic design), (2) materialobjects (or industrial design), (3) activities andorganizational services (or service design), (4)complex systems or environments for living,working, playing and learning (or interactiondesign).

4. Design and Designerly Thinking as aPractice-Based Activity and Way of MakingSense of Things

Lawson and Cross, who both trained as archi-tects, each described and reflected on practicalcases of designers thinking and working. Theirinterests spanned many years: Lawson’s book,How Designers Think: The Design ProcessDemystified, has had four revisions since 1980,and Cross’s research included design thinkingworkshops at Delft University of Technologyin 1991, continued with a series of articles on‘designerly ways of knowing’ (see Cross, 2006)and, recently, his book Design Thinking (2011).Cross works from ethnographic research toreveal what designers do during the activity ofdesigning, while Lawson draws on the psy-chology of creative design processes to turnhis research knowledge into forms designerscan use.

Lawson and Cross could be seen as part ofthe reflexive tradition started by Schön.However, their texts are within a differentdiscourse: they are practice-based throughpresenting examples rather than taking aphilosophical perspective. Both Lawson andCross use abductive processes to make senseof and generalize from observations, andhence find patterns that are grounded in prac-tical experience and can be described throughpractical examples. Ultimately each scholarsuggests a ‘model’ of the design process:Lawson in a number of process-driven stepsthat attempt to describe the complex proc-esses of designing (2005: 289–301), and Crossin a recursive representation of the designstrategy followed by creative designers(2011: 78).

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5. Design and Designerly Thinking as Creationof Meaning (rather than Artefacts)

Starting from a philosophical and semanticbackground, Krippendorff (2006) defineddesign and designers’ work as a matter of cre-ating meaning (rather than artefacts as inSimon’s notion). Compared with Simon, onecould say that Krippendorff reversed the rela-tion between the design object and its inten-tion. For Simon the artefact is at the core, andhe would probably say that meaning is anattribute, while for Krippendorff meaning isthe core of the design process and the artefactbecomes a medium for communicating thesemeanings.

Krippendorff is concerned with the textualand intertextual matter of discourse, ‘the arte-facts it constructs and leaves behind . . . (and)the connections created between these arte-facts’ (2006: 23–4). Design thinking concernshim only as articulated by designers, that is,when it creates a text that becomes part of thediscourse of the design community. ‘Theprimary aim of a discourse is to stay viable . . .to be kept alive within a community of itspractitioners . . . [and] to justify its identity tooutsiders’ (2006: 24).

Unlike Simon’s ‘design science’ (an explic-itly organized, rational and wholly systematicapproach to design, not just the utilization ofscientific knowledge of artefacts, but design insome sense a scientific activity in itself), orCross’s ‘science of design’ (with accurate rep-resentations of design practices, designers,institutions of design, aesthetic conventions orhistory of particular designs), the semanticturn leads to Krippendorff’s ‘science fordesign’, as ‘a systematic collection of accountsof successful design practices, designmethods, and their lessons, however abstract,codified or theorized, whose continuous reart-iculation and evaluation within the designcommunity amounts to a self-reflective repro-duction of the design profession’ (2006: 209).The semantic roots of Krippendorf’s approachto meaning-making distinguishes it from thepractices roots of Lawson and Cross.

Verganti (2009) extended Krippendorff’swork to innovation processes, arguing thatinnovation in meaning is as important as tech-nological innovations that are mostly related tothe concept of innovation. One of his examplesis Alessi’s commercially successful kitchen-ware that gives radical new meanings to com-monplace objects like a corkscrew and a lemonsqueezer. Before they were designed, thecompany had an extensive collaboration witha psychologist, and the way the objects look –as stylized products rather than mundanetools – was based on frame theories ofboundary objects to which individuals wereespecially attached (Verganti, 2009: 40–3). Nin-tendo’s Wii is another example of a productthat could not have been conceived by videogame players before its appearance in themarket, yet the console was a radical innova-tion in meaning, from an entertainment gadgetfor children to active physical entertainment,in the real world, through socialization(Verganti, 2009: 4–6). In other innovationresearch, winemakers have deliberatelyaltered meanings for new wines (Dell’Era &Bellini, 2009), and design students have radi-cally changed meanings of gender conveyedthrough chairs or objects to sit on (Jahnke &Hansson, 2010).

Comparison of the Five Discourses ofDesignerly Thinking

The five discourses of designerly ways ofthinking can be compared as in Table 1. Anargument could be made for collapsing thesefive discourse streams into three: creating asingle practice-based approach by combiningthe frameworks of Schön, Buchanan, andLawson and Cross, and placing ‘designerlythinking in practice’ in contrast to the ration-alized, systematic study of design by Simon,and the meaning-creation of Krippendorff’shermeneutic approach. We prefer treating thepractice-related approaches as three differentdiscourse streams, based on the level of theo-retical focus: Schön examines the designer’sreflection-in-actions of problems encountered

Table 1. Comparison of Five Discourses of Design Thinking

Founder Background Epistemology Core Concept

Simon Economics & politicalscience

Rationalism The science of the artificial

Schön Philosophy & music Pragmatism Reflection in actionBuchanan Art history Postmodernism Wicked problemsLawson & Cross Design & architecture Practice perspective Designerly ways of knowingKrippendorff Philosophy & semantics Hermeneutics Creating meaning

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in practice from an objective stance, theorizing‘about’ the practice. Buchanan examines thenature of the problems themselves, and thedesigner’s use of placements as ‘tools’ to intui-tively or deliberately shape a design problem,while Lawson and Cross’s empirically-basedstudies focus on the designer’s specific aware-ness and abilities. We suggest that furthertheoretical investigation is needed to connectthe three approaches in a meaningful andcoherent manner.

Design scholars continue to discuss theo-retical developments in the leading designjournals, with one or two articles a year, out ofa total of about 50 articles a year, and moreinfrequent articles in other journals and con-ference papers. Different theoretical perspec-tives have been used in research intodesignerly thinking: one stream of articles dis-cusses research through protocol analysis tocatch the ways designers are making sense oftheir own working processes (Galle & Kovács,1996; Ho, 2001); another examines methods forteaching designerly thinking to design stu-dents through normative decision-based pro-tocols (Leong & Clark, 2003; Oxman, 2004). Inconceptual research, Liu (1996) followed theneo-positivistic tradition and considereddesigning as a combinational search based firston Simon’s model, and then on Schön’s waysof seeing, while Louridas (1999) drew onSchön’s reflective practice, but also hintedtowards a meaning-making perspective. Ingeneral, there has been a move towards thehermeneutics and practice perspective. Wenow return to the management focused andmore popularized discourse.

‘Design Thinking’ within theManagement Discourse

In general, the management design thinkingdiscourse is less thoughtful and robust thancontributions to the designerly thinking dis-course that have been argued and reflected onby scholars over several decades. ‘Designthinking’ is much younger than ‘designerlythinking’, but it has grown rapidly. In oneinterpretation, ‘design thinking’ may also be away for managers to ‘understand design’ in amore straightforward way than through thedesign management discourse that is built on amanagerial platform.

When design management started as anacademic area in the 1970s, it was taught bydesigners aiming to help management schol-ars and practitioners understand what designis and why it is relevant. The designers choseto talk about design in a managerial way, ref-erencing Porter (Olson, Cooper & Slater, 1998),considering design as a metaphor (Leidtka,

2000), or through descriptions of successfulcases (e.g., McCullagh, 2006). This approachusing the management discourse might beunderstandable, but the result was probablycounterproductive as such positivistic descrip-tions stripped design of its constructionist andcontextualized meanings.

Both the design-based ‘designerly thinking’and the management-oriented ‘design think-ing’ discourses do the opposite. They startwith the designers’ way of thinking and invitemanagers to come and share this world ratherthan the opposite (Cooper, Junginger &Lockwood, 2009). Some authors highlightdifferences between the two functions andsuggest ways to come together (Martin, 2007a;Leidtka, 2010). Managers became curiousabout designers’ way of making sense ofthings on the designers’ own terms.

The concept of ‘design thinking’ became aportal for the whole design area to contributeto innovation, and design thinking enabledinnovation to supersede strategic managementas a way to deal with a complex reality. Designas a strategic tool was first mentioned in 1984(Kotler & Rath, 1984), but it was not untilanother 20 years later that there was any sus-tained discussion (cf., Fraser, 2007; Junginger,2007; Martin, 2007a) with wicked problems(Camillus, 2008) and design thinking (Brown,2009; Holloway, 2009).

The academic innovation area, anchoredwithin engineering, and much occupied withstatistical relationships and rational models ofinnovation (Johansson & Woodilla, 2009) wasin need of more creativity. IDEO (www.ideo.com), the world’s largest design company,started to market itself as ‘an innovationcompany’ rather than a design company: itspractical experience made it trustworthy, andits co-operation with Stanford University pro-vided academic credentials. This, plus a viewof a more complex rationality than strategycould offer, boosted a design interest in theinnovation discourse (Bruce & Bessant, 2002;Feldman & Boult, 2005; Ward, Runcie &Morris, 2009; Stevens & Moultrie, 2011).

With some experience from design practice,we find it hard to think about innovationwithout including design. And it is from aninnovation perspective that the popularity of‘design thinking’ has to be understood, as herethe concept captures the design practice andthe way designers make sense of their task,and ‘a way of thinking’ that non-designers canalso use, or as a source of inspiration(Johansson & Woodilla, 2009), rather thanbeing limited to a professional group ofdesigners as Schön might argue. And heremight be one of the keys to the popularity ofthe concept just after the millennium.

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These various ways of working with designin the management area connect to three dif-ferent origins of the design thinking discourse:

1. Design thinking as design company IDEO’sway of working with design and innovation(Kelley, 2001, 2005; Brown, 2008, 2009).

2. Design thinking as a way to approach inde-terminate organizational problems, and anecessary skill for practising managers (Dunne& Martin, 2006; Martin, 2009).

3. Design thinking as part of management theory(Boland & Collopy, 2004a).

1. Design Thinking as Design Company IDEO’sWay of Working with Design and Innovation

Stories of IDEO’s way of working successfullywith product development innovations told byTom Kelley, the founder’s brother and generalmanager (Kelley, 2001) and the variouspersona and roles played by members of thedesign teams (Kelley, 2005) introduced thecompany’s work to a broader audience thantheir local network. The books provided‘lessons in creativity’ starting from the particu-lar, then generalized to IDEO’s point of view, a‘design practice’ perspective using their ‘secretformula’ of a blend of methodologies, workculture and infrastructure. The CEO, TimBrown, labelled the concept as ‘design think-ing’, detailing steps in the process (2008), andproviding stories to help everyone use IDEO’smethods, particularly business people andsocial innovators (Brown & Wyatt, 2007).

While Brown’s stories are compelling, thereis no published theoretical framework otherthan his description of the circular process.Naturally there are links between the IDEOdiscourse of design thinking and the design-erly discourses described earlier, even if theyare not explicitly spelled out in references.Members of IDEO are all inspired by design-ers’ work processes that are the grounds forthe five designerly discourses, even if they arenot all trained as professional designers (onthe contrary, ‘pure’ designers are in the minor-ity at the company). Maybe it is the experienceof designers and non-designers working withthe design process that inspired Brown tosuggest that, ‘everybody could do it’ just byfollowing the steps.

While no formal links exist between PaloAlto-headquartered IDEO and Boston-basedDesign Management Institute (DMI), manyarticles published by DMI (cf., Lockwood,2009, 2010) communicate the same intention,to make the practices of designers accessibleand meaningful to managers. Most oftenwithout theoretical grounding, at best theyprovide insightful anecdotes or lists of best

practices that readers may wish to try forthemselves.

2. Design Thinking as a Way to ApproachIndeterminate Organizational Problems, and aNecessary Skill for Practising Managers

A closely related, yet very different discourseemanates from Roger Martin, Dean of theRotman School of Business at the University ofToronto and a strategy consultant with a long-term interest in the cognitive processes of suc-cessful executives and their need for morethan analytical thinking (Martin, 2007b).Working with IDEO led Martin to use theconcept of design thinking to reconceptualizehis earlier models (Martin, 2009), and promoteteaching how to do design thinking to man-agement students (Dunne & Martin, 2006).Martin placed his arguments within thecontext of management, using examples ofcompany successes, and returned to thesesame companies to illustrate his model of ‘theknowledge funnel’ and the need to use boththe right and left halves of the brain. Hismessage gained widespread acceptanceamong practising managers, who from therebecame curious about design thinking. Designthinking in this discourse, as an ongoing cycleof generating ideas (abduction), predictingconsequences (deduction), testing, and gener-alizing (induction), became a way to approachindeterminate organizational problems, a nec-essary skill for practising managers familiarwith cognitively grounded arguments, andhence a necessary component of managementeducation. At the same time, for all its claritywelcomed by managers, Martin’s argumenthas been stripped of the ‘messiness’ of adesigner’s approach, and thereby separatedfrom connections with IDEO.

Dunne and Martin (2006) brought thenotion of teaching design thinking into theAcademy of Management, while the businesspress highlighted design-based, interdiscipli-nary programs (Wong, 2009). Similarly to thetheoretical discourse, the education streamshave remained separate (Melles, Howard& Thompson-Whiteside, 2012), with designthinking within design-based educationdrawing on Schön (Oxman, 1999, 2004), orSimon for engineering applications (Dymet al., 2005), and management-based offeringsbeing concerned with pedagogical founda-tions (cf., Wang & Wang, 2011).

As a result of Martin’s wide reach as aspeaker and author, design thinking has beenpromoted as a useful process in differentdisciplines, including library administration(Bell, 2008), in hospitals (Uehira & Kay, 2009),legal practice management (Szabo, 2010), and

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HR (Birchall-Spencer, 2010). In the manage-ment area he has influenced work in strategy(Fraser, 2007) and organizational change anddevelopment (Sato et al., 2010), and hasinspired the creation of a design thinkingtoolkit for managers (Leidtka & Ogilvie, 2011),although these authors later comment that forbest results designers should lead the process(Leidtka & Ogilvie, 2012).

3. Design Thinking as Part ofManagement Theory

A third use of the term ‘design thinking’ ema-nates from Richard Boland and Frank Collopy,who are academic researchers and professorsin management information systems. Theirinspiration came from architect Frank Gehry’sway of working on the new building forWeatherhead School of Management in Cleve-land, and subsequently captured in a book ofessays by scholars invited to a workshop tocelebrate the opening of the building andreflect on ways managers are designers as welland decision makers (Boland & Collopy,2004b). Boland and Collopy interchangeablyuse the concept ‘design thinking’ and ‘thedesign attitude’ (expectations and orientationsone brings to a design project; 2004b: 9),thereby pointing less towards design as a wayof working or a work process with distinctcharacteristics (as stressed in the IDEOversion) and more towards cognitive charac-teristics (similar to Martin). Previously inorganization and management theory, designhad been considered at the organizationallevel (cf., Romme, 2003).

Boland and Collopy credit Simon withdeveloping a theory of the design attitude formanagers, and subsequently distinguish thisfrom a decision attitude. If there is a commonfoundation for the various essays, it may befound in Simon’s notion of design projects as‘the urge to change an existing state of affairsinto a more preferred one’ (2004b: 10).However, most of the contributors to thismore theoretical but yet quite diverse dis-course stream are world-renowned scholarswho use the design situation as an applicationof their own frameworks of thinking and theo-rizing. Boland (2004) himself looks uponorganizations in general and states that man-aging is very similar to designing in moregeneral characteristics: like art, it is all but arational process.

One insightful comment highlights theextent to which we are limited by our vocabu-laries, quoting Cooperrider, ‘words are fateful– words make worlds’ (Boland & Collopy,2004c: 266), hence they conclude the book withsuggestions for a new ‘design vocabulary for

management’ based on the work of the confer-ence. Yet there seem to be no traces of this newvocabulary reported in business or academictexts, maybe because the sources of individualconcepts come from different epistemologicalorientations.

The legacy of this opportunity to reflect on‘managing as designing’ is difficult to assess. Itmay be inferred as one impetus for specialjournal issues relating design or designing toorganization science or development (e.g.,Dunbar & Starbuck, 2006; Bate, 2007; Jelinek,Romme & Boland, 2008). Also academic con-ferences have provided calls or opportunitiesfor scholarly conversations connecting design-ing with managing, for example, the Academyof Management 2011 Professional Develop-ment Workshop ‘Creating Design Thinkers’,the Cambridge Academic Design ManagementConference 2011, or the theme of the EuropeanGroup for Organization Studies 2011 Collo-quium ‘Design!?’ Maybe a more robust aca-demic conversation on ‘design thinking’within the management realm will emergewith time.

Comparison of the Three ManagementDiscourses of Design Thinking

The management discourses of design think-ing can be compared as in Table 2.

Other frameworks exist that synthesize thearea ‘design thinking’. Following a literaturereview concentrating mainly on the practice-based literatures, Hassi and Laakso (2011) con-cluded that the concept of design thinking inthe management discourse consists of threeelements: (1) a set of practices, (2) cognitiveapproaches and (3) mindsets. Rylander (2009)compares the two discourses of ‘design think-ing’ and ‘knowledge work’ and considers‘design thinking’ as practical knowledge,open-ended problems, a social identity of cel-ebrating creativity, and visual forms of domi-nant sensemaking modes. These statementsmake the dominant management discourse of‘knowledge work’ appear purely cognitiveand lacking ‘embodied knowledge’ that is soimportant to designers. Kimbell’s (2011) criti-cal review of the entire literature found threedifferent ways of describing design thinking:(1) as a cognitive style of individual designersengaged in problem solving, (2) as a generaltheory of design as a field or discipline focusedon taming wicked problems, and (3) as anorganizational resource for businesses andother organizations in need of innovation. Sheproposes attending to the situated, embodiedroutines of designers and offers a useful wayto rethink design thinking. Any of theseframeworks can be the starting point for

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Tab

le2.

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further investigation. However, we think it isimportant to look closely at the discourse rootsand maintain epistemological clarity.

Relation between ‘DesignerlyThinking’ and ‘Design Thinking’

Similarities and Differences

Both designerly thinking and design thinkingrefer to an ongoing design practice, a reality thatis not a discrete and coherent practice, and isfar from standardized, but is nevertheless thebasis for generalizations, descriptions andtheories made in both discourses. They belongto different genres of writing. The designerlydiscourse is a more scholarly discourse, wherethe different authors refer to and quote eachother, either as followers or in opposition/asalternatives. Two of the design thinking dis-courses are written for a business or manage-rial audience, where convention does notrequire strict referencing and positioning thetext in relation to other texts. Consequently,scholars need to treat much of what is writtenin the design thinking discourse as anecdotal,rather than theoretically or empirically based.Further research may examine the assump-tions and connections, but the material itselfcannot be taken as the foundation for furtherresearch. The third origin of the design think-ing discourse – Gehry-inspired and facilitatedby Boland and Collopy – uses Simon as thepoint of theoretical departure, then connects toother organization and management concepts.Boland and Collopy use design thinking notso much with interest or focus on the design-ers’ way of thinking, or for giving managersinspiration to think like designers, but more todemonstrate that managers already do thinklike designers (which happens only on a veryabstract level).

What’s left out in Translation

Design thinking can be seen as a translation ofdesignerly thinking into a popularized, man-agement version. As with any translation,nuances of meaning may be left out, andacknowledging these ‘left out dimensions’ isimportant academic work. We have found twodimensions that are strikingly omitted intranslating ‘designerly thinking’ into ‘designthinking’:

1. Design thinking is often equated to creativ-ity: Sometimes the popular version ‘designthinking’ is presented as a way to makemanagers think more creatively. But beingcreative is only part of the competence andpractice of the designer’s work.

2. Design thinking is often equated to atoolbox: Sometimes the popular versionsfocus on the designer’s specific methodstaken out of context, as tools ready for use,but the person using the tools must have theknowledge and skill – competence thatcomes with training – to know when to usethem.

To talk about design and leaving the designerout is like talking about musicians and leavingthe music out: a musician is identified by hisor her instrument and the style of musicplayed. Just as there is never a generic ‘musi-cian’, the design thinking discourse is not onebut many, as are the designerly discourses.Therefore there is little use in trying to find asingle definition or description of the practiceof design thinking. To do so would be to con-centrate on an elegant model ‘to know’,without the ability to turn it into actionthrough ‘doing’ detailed processes (Pfeffer &Sutton, 1999).

Possible Futures: How Design Thinking canbe Nurtured by Closer Connections withDesignerly Thinking

As with many novel ideas and processes pro-moted by business consultants (such as man-agement by objectives or business processre-engineering), the design thinking discoursewill most probably die if it does not acquire ascholarly base that relates more to designerlythinking. Firm academic links will preservevaluable parts of the practice for managerialuse and provide designers with fresh insightsinto how to make connections with the man-agement world. Below we suggest avenues forfurther research.

Example 1. Teamwork has been an impor-tant aspect of IDEO’s work, and accordinglyan implicit part of the design thinking dis-course as presented by Kelley and Brown.Teamwork is already an important area ofresearch within the management area (e.g.,Hackman, 1989), and also an area withresearch efforts within the designerly dis-course (e.g., Stempfle, 2002). Therefore thedesign thinking discourse would gain from adeeper relation to existing theories of team-work. For example, we would welcome anempirical study of multidisciplinary team-work practices, as at IDEO, conducted byestablished teamwork researchers with con-nections to both design and management.

Example 2. Design and innovation isanother theme within design thinking. Herethe non-theoretical but popular discourse ofdesign thinking would benefit from a closerrelation with the hermeneutic stream of the

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designerly thinking discourse. Looking at thewhole design process as a matter of meaningcreation provides new perspectives on bothdesign and innovation (Verganti, 2009; Jahnke,2012). We therefore would welcome studies ofdesigners’ meaning creation in the practice ofinnovation from a designerly point of view.

Example 3. The design thinking discoursesbuild upon a notion that managers’ ways ofthinking and problem solving are differentfrom designers. At the same time, Boland andcolleagues maintain that managers are quitecapable of using designers’ ways of reasoningas well: a statement that assumes that the dif-ferences are complex and probably inheritsome ambiguity and paradox. As a way toinvestigate both differences and similarities,the whole design thinking area would gainfrom close ethnographic research that couldreplace descriptive anecdotes and build up anacademic body of knowledge. One possibilitycould be situations similar to that at Intuit, asdescribed by Martin (2011), but using an eth-nographic approach and an analysis frame-work that draws from the tradition describedby Cross (cf., Cross, 1999). The objective ofsuch a stream of research would be to attemptto understand what is happening naturally inthe setting, and to interpret the data gatheredin a systematic way to see what implicationscould be formed from the data.

Concluding Reflections

As social constructionists we regard anapproach that begins with the question, ‘Whatis design thinking?’ as an essentialist trap. Wedo not believe that there is a unique meaningof ‘design thinking’, and accordingly weshould not look for one. Instead, we look forwhere and how the concept is used in differentsituations, both theoretical and practical, andwhat meaning is given to the concept. In thisarticle we have identified multiple discourseswith distinctly different meanings andassumptions given to the concept ‘designthinking’: five scholarly discourses groundedwithin the design research area, and three dis-courses within the managerial area, of whichtwo are grounded in management researchand one in design practice.

The five designerly discourses are all awareof the others, being followers, alternatives or inclear opposition to each other. There is alsosome awareness between the three identifiedmanagement discourses: Martin links toIDEO, the Boland and Collopy-inspired dis-courses have common ground in Simon,with interpretations that spread in different

directions depending on the theoretical tradi-tion of the author.

When it comes to links between the designand management discourses (‘designerlythinking’ and ‘design thinking’) there are fewlinks between them. Out of the three manage-ment discourses, two (IDEO and Martin) arelinked to design practice by IDEO – but do notrefer to academic research within design (evenif there must be some connections becauseboth IDEO’s founder and design researchcome from similar experiences in industrialdesign education). Within the design dis-courses, we have located a single reference tothe managerial discourse of design thinking –as a ‘business model’ (Piotrowski, 2011).

The Designerly Ways of Thinking

The five different discourses with differentepistemological underpinnings that we referto collectively as a ‘designerly way of thinking’each have both forerunners and followers thatexist as parallel tracks. Anyone wishing tomake an academic contribution thereforeneeds to have this pluralistic perspective inmind, because without recognizing the plural-ity and identifying the specific perspective, itis impossible to make an academic contribu-tion. Academic knowledge always needs totake earlier knowledge into consideration, andto build upon a similar epistemology (thisholds even for a critique that takes distancefrom a specific discourse). From an academicperspective, this plurality in discourses withindesignerly ways of thinking is not a sign ofweakness but rather a sign of maturity.

The Management Discourse of‘Design Thinking’

The management discourse of ‘design think-ing’ is united as a fad, yet there is far from asingle meaning. Rather, the concept of designthinking seems to consist of different streamsthat are united only because they are not ana-lytical. Perhaps those designers and designresearchers who are not comfortable with theconcept ‘design thinking’ associate it with amore cognitive approach and a distinctionbetween thinking and doing. Conversely,management practitioners like the concept‘design thinking’ because it gives a label tosomething that is needed within management,but unless it is articulated, it remains under-valued. The normative descriptions are writtenwith industrial leaders as the target group.Though it is understandable that many peoplewould like a clear-cut definition of designthinking, such a quest for unity is counterpro-ductive for the academic development of thearea that we believe it deserves.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the SpecialIssue Guest Editor and two anonymousreviewers for their constructive comments thatgreatly improved our paper.

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Ulla Johansson-Sköldberg is the Torstenand Wanja Söderberg Professor of DesignManagement and founder of the Businessand Design Lab, a co-operation between theSchool of Design and Crafts and the Schoolof Business, Economics and Law at Gothen-burg University. Her research interestsinclude gender, methodology, critical man-agement, art and management and designmanagement.

Jill Woodilla is a Visiting Professor at theSchool of Business, Economics and Law,University of Gothenburg. Her ironic per-spective provides her with a critical view ofthe multiple realities of any situation, Herresearch interests include the theoreticalunderpinnings of design management, vari-eties of organizational discourse and inno-vative pedagogy.

Mehves Cetinkaya is writing her PhDdissertation on the effects of financial invest-ments made in design in large companiesand how that affects companies’ brandrecognition levels. Her general researchinterests cover design and branding rela-tionships in SMEs and large companies,design and innovation, and design thinking.

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Appendix A. Literature Demographics (Figure 1): Categorized Articles,Books and Presentations

DESIGNERLY THINKING

Stream Medium Reference Focus

1-Creation of artefacts Book Simon, H. (1969) The Sciences of theArtificial. MIT Press.

Conceptual

Prof Jnl Vogel, C. (2009) Notes on the Evolution ofDesign Thinking: A Work in Progress.Design Management Review, 20, 16–27.

Conceptual

1-Creation of artefacts& 2-Reflexive Practice

Acad Jnl Dorst, K. and Dijkhuis, J. (1995)Comparing Paradigms for DescribingDesign Activity. Design Studies, 16,261–74.

Conceptual

Liu, Y, (1996). Is Designing One Search orTwo? A Model of Design Thinkinginvolving Symbolism andConnectionism. Design Issues, 17,435–49.

Conceptual

1-Creation of artefacts& 5-Creation ofMeaning

Acad Jnl Louridas, P. (1999) Design as Bricolage:Anthropology Meets Design Thinking.Design Studies, 20, 517–35.

Conceptual

2-Reflexive Practice Acad Jnl Rylander, A. (2009). Design Thinking asKnowledge Work: EpistemologicalFoundations and Practical Implications.Design Management Journal, 5, 7–19.

Conceptual

Schön, D. (1988) Designing: Rules, Typesand Words. Design Studies, 9, 181–90.

Conceptual

Schön, D. & Wiggins, G. (1992) Kinds ofSeeing and their Functions in Designing.Design Studies, 13, 135–56.

Conceptual

Book Schön, D. (1984) The Reflective Practitioner:How Professionals Think In Action. BasicBooks.

Conceptual

Schön, D. (1986) The Design Studio: AnExploration of Its Traditions and Potentials.Intl Specialized Book Service Inc.

Conceptual

2-Reflexive Practice &5-Creation ofMeaning

Acad Jnl Bousbaci, R. (2008) ‘Models of Man’ inDesign Thinking: The ‘BoundedRationality’ Episode. Design Issues, 24,38–52.

Conceptual

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Appendix A. Continued

DESIGNERLY THINKING

Stream Medium Reference Focus

3-ProblemSolvingActivity

Acad Jnl Buchanan, R. (1992) Wicked Problems inDesign Thinking. Design Issues, 8, 5–21.

Conceptual

Ho, C. (2001) Some Phenomena of ProblemDecomposition Strategy for DesignThinking: Differences between Novicesand Experts. Design Studies, 22, 27–45.

Empirical

Owen, C. (2007) Design Thinking: Notes onits Nature and Use. Design ResearchQuarterly, 2, 16–27.

Conceptual

Oxman, R. (2004) Think-Maps: TeachingDesign Thinking in Design Education.Design Studies, 25, 63–91.

Design Education

Whyte, J., Ewenstein, B., Hales, M & Tidd, J.(2008) Visualizing Knowledge inProject-Based Work. Long Range Planning,41, 74–92.

Empirical

Book Ambrose, G. & Harris, P. (2010) Basics Design:Design Thinking. AVA Publishing.

How-to

Shamiyeh, M. (Ed.) (2010) Creating DesiredFutures: Solving Complex Business Problemswith Design Thinking. BirkhäuserArchitecture.

Conceptual

ConfPrsnt

Owen, C. (2005) Design Thinking. What It Is.Why It Is Different. Where It Has NewValue. International Conference on DesignResearch and Education for the Future, theGwangju Design Biennale.

Conceptual

Prof Jnl Junginger, S. (2007) Learning to Design:Giving Purpose to Heart, Hand and Mind.Journal of Business Strategy, 28, 59–65.

Design Educationfor Management

3-ProblemSolvingActivity

Report Owen, C. (2006) Design Thinking: DrivingInnovation. The Business ProcessManagement Institute, White Paper,September.

Conceptual

3-ProblemSolvingActivity &4-Way ofReasoning

Acad Jnl Dörner, D. (1999) Approaching DesignThinking Research. Design Studies, 20,407–15.

Conceptual

Book Buchanan, R (Ed.) and Margolin, V. (Ed.)(1995) Discovering Design: Explorations inDesign Studies. University of Chicago Press.

Conceptual

3-ProblemSolvingActivity &5-Creation ofMeaning

Acad Jnl Wylant, B. (2008) Design Thinking and theExperience of Innovation. Design Issues, 24,3–14.

Conceptual

DESIGN THINKING: PAST, PRESENT AND POSSIBLE FUTURES 137

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Appendix A. Continued

DESIGNERLY THINKING

Stream Medium Reference Focus

4-Way ofReasoning

Acad Jnl Carmel-Gilfilen, C. and Portillo, M. (2010).Developmental Trajectories in Design Thinking:An Examination of Criteria. Design Studies, 31,74–91.

Empirical

Cross, N. (1990) The Nature and Nurture ofDesign Ability. Design Studies, 11, 127–40.

Conceptual

Dorst, K. and Cross, N. (1999) Creativity in theDesign Process: Co-Evolution ofProblem–Solution. Design Studies, 22, 425–37.

Conceptual

Galle, P. And Kovacs, L. (1996) ReplicationProtocol Analysis: A Method for the Study ofReal-World Design Thinking. Design Studies, 17,181–200.

Conceptual

Gloppen, J. (2009) Perspectives on DesignLeadership and Design Thinking and How TheyRelate to European Service Industries. DesignManagement Journal, 4, 33–47.

Case

Goldschmidt, G. (1994) On Visual DesignThinking: the Vis Kids of Architecture. DesignStudies, 15, 158–74

Conceptual

Goldtschmidt, G. (1995) The Designer as a Team ofOne. Design Studies, 16, 189–209.

Conceptual

Stempfle, J. & Badke-Schaub, P. (2002) Thinking inDesign Teams – An Analysis of TeamCommunication. Design Studies, 23, 473–96.

Conceptual &Empirical

Taura, T, Yoshimi, T. & Ikai, T. (2002) Study ofGazing Points in Design Situation: A Proposaland Practice of an Analytical Method Based onthe Explanation of Design Activities. DesignStudies, 23, 165–85.

Empirical

Book Cross, N. (Ed.) (1992) Research in design thinking.Delft Univ Press.

Anthology

Lawson, B. (2005) How Designers Think: The DesignProcess Demystified, 4th edn. Architectural Press.

Conceptual

Rowe, P. (1991) Design Thinking. MIT Press. ConceptualThackara, J. (1997) Winners!: How Today’s Successful

Companies Innovate by Design. Gower Pub Co.Case

ConfPrsnt

Johansson, U. & Woodilla, J. (2009) Towards anEpistemelogical Merger of Design Thinking,Strategy and Innovation. 8th European AcademyOf Design Conference

Conceptual

5-Creation ofMeaning

Book Krippendorff, K. (2005) The Semantic Turn: A NewFoundation for Design. CRC Press.

Conceptual

Verganti, R. (2009) Design Driven Innovation:Changing the Rules of Competition by RadicallyInnovating What Things Mean. Harvard BusinessPress.

Conceptual& Case

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Appendix A. Continued

DESIGNERLY THINKING

Stream Medium Reference Focus

No SpecificCategory ofDesignerlyThinking

Acad Jnl Leong, B. & Clark, H. (2003) Culture-BasedKnowledge Towards New Design Thinking andPractice – A Dialogue. Design Issues, 19, 48–58.

PersonalExperience

Papantonopoulos, S. (2004) How System DesignersThink: A Study of Design Thinking in HumanFactors Engineering. Ergonomics, 47,1528–48.

Engineering

No SpecificCategory

Acad Jnl Senturer, A. & Istek. C. (2000) Discourse asRepresentation of Design Thinking and Beyond:Considering the Tripod of Architecture – Media,Education, & Practice. Journal of Art & DesignEducation, 19, 72–85.

Conceptual

Book LeMasson, P., Weil, B. and Hatchuel, A. (2005)Strategic Management of Innovation and Design.Cambridge University Press.

Conceptual

Margolin, V. (Ed.) and Buchanan, R. (ed.) (1996)The Idea of Design. MIT Press.

Anthology

Wigum, K. (2009) Radical Design Thinking: Thoughtsand Tools for Long Term Solutions. VDM Verlag.

How-to

DESIGN THINKING

Stream Medium Reference Focus

1-IDEO’s Wayof Working

Acad Jnl Callaghan, E. (2008). Personalities of DesignThinking. Design Management Journal, 4, 20–32.

Conceptual

Book Berger, W. (2010) CAD Monkeys, Dinosaur Babies,and T-Shaped People: Inside the World of DesignThinking and How It Can Spark Creativity andInnovation. Penguin.

Conceptual& Case

Brown, T. (2009). Change by Design: How DesignThinking Transforms Organizations and InspiresInnovation. HarperBusiness.

How-to

Esslinger, H. (2009) A Fine Line: How DesignStrategies are Shaping the Future of Business.Jossey-Bass.

Conceptual

Gaynor, G. (2002) Innovation by Design: What ItTakes To Keep Your Company on the Cutting Edge.AMACOM.

Conceptual

Kelley, T. with Littman, J. (2001) The Art ofInnovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO,America’s Leading Design Firm. Crown Business.

Case-based

Kelley, T. with Littmann, J. (2005) The Ten Faces ofInnovation: IDEO’s Strategies for Defeating theDevil’s Advocate and Driving CreativityThroughout Your Organization. Doubleday.

Case-based

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Appendix A. Continued

DESIGN THINKING

Stream Medium Reference Focus

Prof Jnl Brown, T. (2008) Design Thinking. HarvardBusiness Review, 86, 84–96.

How-to

Brown, T. and Wyatt, J. (2010). DesignThinking for Social Innovation. StanfordSocial Innovation Review, pp. 31–5.

How-to

Lockwood, T. (2010) Design Thinking inBusiness: An Interview with GianfrancoZaccai. Design Management Review, 21,16–24.

Case

McCullagh, K. (2006). Stepping Up: DesignThinking Has Uncovered RealOpportunities. Design Management Review,21, 36–9.

Case

Porcini, M. (2009) Your New Design ProcessIs Not Enough – Hire Design Thinkers!Design Management Review, 20, 6–18.

Case-based

Sato, S. (2009) Beyond Good: GreatInnovations through Design. Journal ofBusiness Strategy, 30, 40–9.

Conceptual

Sato, S., Lucente, S., Meyer, D. & Mrazek, D.(2010) Design Thinking to MakeOrganization Change and DevelopmentMore Responsive. Design ManagementReview, 21, 42–52.

Conceptual& Case

Uehira, T. & Kay, C. (2009) Using DesignThinking to Improve Patient Experiences inJapanese Hospitals: A Case Study. Journalof Business Strategy, 30, 6–12.

Empirical

Ward, A, Runcie, E. & Morris, L. (2009).Embedding Innovation: Design Thinkingfor Small Enterprises. Journal of BusinessStrategy, 30, 78–84.

Case-based

1-IDEO’s Way ofWorking & 2-Skillfor Managers

Book Lockwood, T. (Ed.) (2009) Design Thinking:Integrating Innovation, Customer Experience,and Brand Value. Allworth Press.

Anthology

2-NecessarySkillfor PracticingManagers

Acad Jnl Beckman, S. & Barry, M. (2007) Innovation asa Learning Process: Embedding DesignThinking. California Management Review, 50,25–56

Conceptual

Dunne, D. and Martin, R. (2006) DesignThinking and How It Will ChangeManagement Education: An Interview andDiscussion. Academy of ManagementLearning and Education, 5, 512–23.

Conceptual &Promotional

Oster, G. (2008) Derailing Design Thinking.International Journal of Leadership Studies, 4,107–15.

Conceptual

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Appendix A. Continued

DESIGN THINKING

Stream Medium Reference Focus

Book Martin, R. (2009) The Design of Business: Why DesignThinking is the Next Competitive Advantage. HarvardBusiness School Press.

Conceptual

Neumeier, M. (2008) The Designful Company: How toBuild a Culture of Nonstop Innovation. Peachpit Press.

Conceptual

Prahalad, D. and Sawhney, R. (2010). Predictable Magic:Unleash the Power of Design Strategy to Transform YourBusiness. Pearson Prentice Hall.

Conceptual

Prof Jnl Bell, S. (2008) Design Thinking: A Design Approach ToThe Delivery Of Outstanding Service Can Help Putthe User Experience First. American Libraries, 39, 44–9.

Promotional

Birchell-Spencer, M. (2010) Companies That EmployDesign Thinking Will Tap into Innovations, Longevityand Competitive Advantage, says Roger Martin. HRProfessional, 27, 51–7.

Promotional

Carr, S., Halloday, A., King, A., Leidtka, J., andLockwood, T. (2010). The Influence of DesignThinking in Business: Some Preliminary Observations.Design Management Review, 21, 58–63.

Empirical

Clark, K. and Smith, R. (2008) Unleashing the Power ofDesign Thinking. Design Management Review, 19, 8–15.

Promotional

Cooper, R., Junginger, S. and Lockwood, T. (2009).Design Thinking and Design Management: AResearch and Practice Perspective. Design ManagementReview, 20, 46–55.

Conceptual

Drews, C. (2009) Unleashing the Full Potential ofDesign Thinking as a Business Method. DesignManagement Review, 20, 38–44.

Empirical &Promotional

Fraser, H. (2009) Designing Business: New Models forSuccess. Design Management Review, 20, 56–65.

How-to

Hackett, J. (2009) Innovation is Good, Fitness is Better.Journal of Business Strategy, 30, 85–90.

Conceptual

Holloway, M. (2009) How Tangible is your Strategy?How Design Thinking can Turn your Strategy intoReality. Journal of Business Strategy, 30, 50–6.

Case

Leavy, B. (2010) Design Thinking – A New MentalModel of Value Innovation. Strategy & Leadership, 38,5–14.

Conceptual

Martin, R. (2010) Design thinking: achieving insights viathe ‘knowledge funnel’. Strategy & Leadership, 38,37–41.

Conceptual

Merholtz, P. (2010). Why Design Thinking Won’t SaveYou. Harvard Business Review, 88, 18.

Critique

Szabo, M. (2010) Design Thinking in Legal PracticeManagement. Design Management Review, 21, 44–46.

Promotional

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Appendix A. Continued

DESIGN THINKING

Stream Medium Reference Focus

3-Part ofManagementTheory

Acad Jnl Romme, G. (2004) Action Research,Emancipation and Design Thinking. Journal ofCommunity & Applied Social psychology, 14,495–9.

Conceptual

Book Boland, R. and Collopy, F. (eds.) (2004)Managing as Designing. Stanford BusinessBooks.

Conceptual

3-Part ofManagementTheory

Book Rasmus, D. (2010) Management by Design:Applying Design Principles to the WorkExperience. Wiley.

How-to

No specificcategory

Acad Jnl Lockwood, T. (2009) Frameworks of DesignThinking. Design Management Journal, 4, 3.

EditorIntroduction

Prof Jnl Lockwood, T. (2009). Transition: How toBecome a More Design-Minded Organization.Design Management Review, 20, 28–37.

EditorIntroduction

Walton, T. (2010) Insights on Business andDesign Thinking. Design Management Review,21, 3.

EditorIntroduction

NOT CLASSIFIED INTO EITHER DESIGNERLY THINKING OR DESIGN THINKING

Medium Reference Focus

Acad Jnl Brereton, M. and McGarry, B. (2000). Anobservational study of how objects supportengineering design thinking andcommunication: implications for the design oftangible media. CHI’00. Proceedings of theSIGCHI conference on Human factors incomputing systems

Engineering

Bross, J., Acar, A., Schilf, P. And Meinel, C.(2009) Spurring Design Thinking throughEducational Weblogging. Proceedings of theInternational Conference on ComputationalScience and Engineering.

Engineering

Cao, Q. and Protzen, J-P. (1999). ManagingDesign Information: Issue-Based InformationSystems and Fuzzy Reasoning System. DesignStudies, 20, 343–62.

Engineering

Casakin, H., Davidovitch, N, and Roberta, M.(2010). Creative Thinking as a Predictor ofCreative Problem Solving in ArchitecturalDesign Students. Psychology of Aesthetics,Creativity and the Arts, 4, 31–35.

DesignEducation

Eckert, C. and Martin, S. (2000) Sources ofInspiration: A Language of Design. DesignStudies, 21, 523–38.

Not relevant

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Appendix A. Continued

NOT CLASSIFIED INTO EITHER DESIGNERLY THINKING OR DESIGN THINKING

Medium Reference Focus

Li, M. (2002) Fostering Design Culture ThroughCultivating the User-Designers’ Design Thinking andSystems Thinking. Systemic Practice and ActionResearch, 15, 385–410.

Article notavailable

Maier, J. & Fadel, G. (2009) Affordance Based Design: ARelational Theory for Design. Research in EngineeringDesign, 20, 23–7.

Engineering

Morozumi, M., Shimokawa, Y. & Homma, R. (2002).Schematic Design System for Flexible andMulti-Aspect Design Thinking. Automation inConstruction, 11, 147–59.

Engineering

Nagai, Y. & Noguchi, H. (2003) An Experimental Studyon the Design Thinking Process Started from DifficultKeywords: Modeling the Thinking Process of CreativeDesign. Journal of Engineering Design, 14, 429–37.

Engineering

Oxman, R. (2002) The Thinking Eye: VisualRe-Cognition in Design Emergence. Design Studies,23, 135–64.

Not relevant

Smith, G. & Browne, G. (1993) Conceptual Foundationsof Design Problem Solving. Systems, Man andCybernetics, 23, 1209–19.

Engineering

Tovey, M. (1986) Thinking Styles and ModelllngSystems. Design Studies, 7, 20–30.

Article notavailable

Ulusoy, Z. (1999) To Design Versus to UnderstandDesign: The Role of Graphic Representations andVerbal Expressions. Design Studies, 20, 123–30.

DesignEducation

VanDerLugt, R. (2000). Developing a Graphic Tool forCreative Problem Solving in Design Groups. DesignStudies, 21, 505–22.

Not relevant

Vyas, K. (2006). Design History: An AlternativeApproach. Design Issues, 22, 27–34.

Not relevant

Yang, M. (2009) Observations on Concept Generationand Sketching in Engineering Design. Research inEngineering Design, 20, 1–11.

Engineering

NotClassified

Medium Reference Focus

Book Blaszxyl, R. (2002) Imagining consumers: Design andinnovation from Wedgewood to Corning (Studies inindustry and society). The Johns Hopkins UniversityPress.

Not relevant(Design)

Eris, O. (2004) Effective Inquiry for Innovative EngineeringDesign: From Basic Principles to Application. Springer.

Engineering

Jones, A. (2008) The Innovation Acid Test: Growth throughDesign and Differentiation. Triarchy Press.

Engineering

Mitchell, T. (1996). New Thinking in Design: Conversationson Theory and Practice. Wiley.

Design

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Appendix A. Continued

NOT CLASSIFIED INTO EITHER DESIGNERLY THINKING OR DESIGN THINKING

NotClassified

Medium Reference Focus

Conf Prsnt English, S. (2006) Design thinking – valueinnovation – deductive reason and the designerschoice. Proceedings of DRS2006 DesignResearch Society.

Engineering

Eris, O. (2003) Asking Generative DesignQuestions: A Fundamental CognitiveMechanism in Design Thinking. InternationalConference on Engineering Design ICED 03Stockholm.

Engineering

Janis, N. (2000) Design as a framework forinnovative thinking and learning: how candesign thinking reform education? IDATERConference, Loughborough.

Education

Oxman, R. (2006). Digital Design Thinking: In theNew Media is the New Pedagogy. CAADRIA,Kumamoto, Japan.

DesignEducation

Wong, C. (200) Some Phenomena of DesignThinking in the Concept Generation Stage UsingComputer Media. Proceedings of the FifthConference on Computer Aided ArchitecturalDesign Research in Asia Singapore, pp. 255–63

Engineering

Prof Jnl Kotler, P. and Rath, A. (1994) Design: A Powerfulbut Neglected Strategic Tool. Journal of BusinessStrategy, 5, 16–21.

Article notavailable

TeachingCase

Feinberg, B. and Thomke, S. (2009) DesignThinking and Innovation at Apple. HarvardBusiness School Cases.

Case

Note: Shaded references are used in the article text.Acad Jnl = Academic or scholarly peer reviewed journalProf Jnl = Professional or practitioner journalConf Prsnt = Peer reviewed conference presentation

Appendix B. LiteratureDemographics: Newspaper,Magazine and Web/Blog Posts(Not Classified)

Magazine Articles

Anon. (2004) Audi Design Foundation. DesignWeek, 19(Apr30), 4.

Anon. (2007, Oct5) Sustaining the Dream. Busi-nessWeek, p17.

Anon. (2007) Nussbaum says design thinkingmust be integral part of business. DesignWeek, 22(27), 4

Anon. (2008) Design Thinking + Doing. Crea-tivity, 16(11), 28.

Anon. Priestman Goode. Design Week,19(Sep30), 14.

Armit, G, (2010, Jun3) Beyond Design Think-ing: Why Hybrid Design Is the Next NewThing. FastCompany http://www.fastcompany.com/1656288/beyond-design-thinking-why-hybriddesign-is-the-next-new-thing

Boult, J. (2008) Inspired. Design Week, 23(15), 10.Brady, D. (2007, Mar6) Taking On the Global

Food Crisis. BusinessWeek, p4.Brown, (T. 2007, Dec19) Strategy by Design.

FastCompany http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/95/design-strategy.html

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Brunner, R. (2009, Jun6) Design Is Too Impor-tant to Be Left to the Thinkers FastCompany.http://www.fastcompany.com

Chan, D. (2010, Sep1) Hybrid Thinking:Designed Thinking. http://catalystsdr.com/2009/09/hybrid-thinking-designed-thinking

Cooperrider, D. (2008). Sustainable Innovation.BizEd Jul/Aug, 32–38.

Dziersk, M. (2008, Jul8) Design Thinking . . .What is That? FastCompany http://www.fastcompany.com/resources/design/dziersk/design-thinking-083107.html

Dziersk, M. (2010, Apr10) Why Design Think-ing Is the Next Competitive Advantage.FastCompany http://www.fastcompany.com/1628107/a-worthy-read

FastCompayStaff (2007, Dec19) The Power ofDesign. http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/95/open_design-index.html

Grace, R. (2010) ‘Design thinking’ drivesDow Corning change. Plastics News, 21(44),12.

Hempel, J. (2007) How Venture Philanthro-pists Use Design Thinking To Help SolveReal-World Problems. Business Week, Mar12, pp.8–13.

Katayama,L. (2010, Sep8) 5 Ways iPad’s PulseApp Creators Applied Design Thinking toTheir Business. FastCompany http://www.fastcompany.com/1687400/5-design-tips-from-ipads-pulseapp-creators-and-stanford-design-school

Kunur, P. (2008) Design Thinking in Govern-ment. Creativity, 16(11), 36.

Lee, L. (2008, Feb14) Innovation at Risk. Busi-nessWeek, p15.

Lovett, G. (2009) Ideo collaborative public-sector pilot heads for roll-out. Design Week,24(10), 7.

Lowe, C. (2005) The NHS needs design. DesignWeek, 20(3), 13.

McConnon, A. (2006, Nov6) Want a Master ofDesign with That? Business Week, p.15.

Merritt, J. & Lavelle, L. (2005, Aug1) Tomor-row’s B-School? It might be a D-School.BusinessWeek, p80–81.

Rae, J. (2008, Jul29) P&G Changes Its Game.BusinessWeek, p9.

Richardson, A. (2010) Independent touch.Design Week, 25(35), 17.

West, H. (2007, Oct5) The Cross-DisciplineDesign Imperative. BusinessWeek, p16.

Tischler,L. (2009, Jan14) Ideo’s David Kelley on‘Design Thinking’. http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/132/a-designer-takes-on-his-biggestchallenge-ever.html

Walters, H. (2009, Dec15) Inside the DesignThinking Process. BusinessWeek, p15.

West, H. (2007, Oct5) The Cross-DisciplineDesign Imperative. BusinessWeek, p16.

Newspaper ArticlesAnderson, L. (2008, Dec1) All the world’s a

stage for MBA students. http://www.financialtimes.com

Baker, D. (2007, Jun16) Thinking illustrated.http://www.financialtimes.com

Birchall, J. (2008, Apr, 4) P&G appoints designoutsider. http://www.financialtimes.com

Birhal, J. (2008, May22) Procter & Gamble hiresdesign outsider. http://www.financialtimes.com

Knight, R. (2010, Sep13) Schools learn fromthe world of design. http://www.financialtimes.com

Martin, R. (2010, Jan11) MBA world needs tobroaden its horizons. http://www.financialtimes.com

Sunshine, B. (2008, Sep 27) On show. http://www.financialtimes.com

Thornhill, J. (2006, Jan27) Workshop 4:Building a culture of innovation. http://www.financialtimes.com

Witzel, M (2009, Oct15) From mystery tosystem in innovation. http://www.financialtimes.com

Web & Blog PostsAmit, G. (2009, Nov 28) Making sense of

Design Thinking: Three definitions, twoproblems and one big question. http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/gadi-amit/new-deal/making-sense-designthinking-three-definitions-two-problems-and-one-big-ques

Barratt, J. (2009, Aug10) A Plea for More Criti-cal Thinking in Design, Please. http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/john-barratt/design-day/plea-more-criticalthinking-design-please

Breen, B. (2007, Aug23) Design Thursday: TheBuzz Around ‘Design Thinking’. http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/bill-breen/design-thursday-buzz-arounddesign-thinking

Cannell, M. (2009, Nov17) Can Design Think-ing Solve Your Problems and Make YouHappier? http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/michael-cannell/cannell/can-designthinking-be-used-solve-personal-problems

Cannell, M. (2009, Oct 22) 5 Ways DesignThinking Can Raise the Collective IQ ofYour Business. http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/michael-cannell/cannell/managementwars-design-thinking-polarizing-force-your-office

Collopy, F. (20007, Jun7) Lessons Learned –Why the Failure of Systems ThinkingShould Inform the Future of Design Think-ing. http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/

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fred-collopy/manage-designing/lessonslearned-why-failure-systems-thinking-should-inform-future

Collopy, F. (2009, Jul9) Thinking about ‘DesignThinking’. http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/fred-collopy/manage-designing/thinkingabout-design-thinking

Collopy, F. (2009, Mar13) Just What is DesignThinking? – The View from the Blogo-sphere. http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/fred-collopy/manage-designing/justwhat-design-thinking-view-blogosphere

Dziersk, M. (2009, Mar15) Design Matters;Using Design Thinking to gain competitiveleverage. http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/mark-dziersk/design-finds-you/designmatter-using-design-thinking-gain-competitive-leverage

Dziersk, M. (2009, May22) Ten Things toDemand From Design Thinkers. http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/mark-dziersk/design-finds-you/ten-thingsdemand-design-thinkers

Patnaik, D. (2009, Aug25) Forget DesignThinking and Try Hybrid Thinking. http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/dev-patnaik/innovation/forget-designthinking-and-try-hybrid-thinking

Patnaik, D. (2009, Nov10) Reinventing theMBA: 4 Reasons to Mix Business WithDesign Thinking. http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/dev-patnaik/innovation/reinventing-mba

Robischon, N. (2009, Sep28) Living ClimateChange: Design Thinking to Solve theWorld’s Biggest Problem. http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/noah-robischon/editors-desk/ideointroduces-living-climate-change

Tischler, L. (2009, Nov4) What’s ThwartingAmerican Innovation? Too Much Science,Says Roger Martin. http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/linda-tischler/design-times/whats-thwartingamerican-innovation-too-much-science-says-roger-mar

Tischler, L. (2009, Sep23) Want to ImproveDemocracy? Try Design Thinking. http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/linda-tischler/design-times/can-designthinking-improve-democracy

Note: Shaded references are used in the articletext.

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