The way of thinking that treats the problem statement as a first draft. It works on situations that cannot be fully specified in advance, by proposing something, watching how the situation answers back and reframing as it goes.
Change the situation, and learn what the problem was by trying
Design thinking works on ill-defined problems by moving between problem and solution instead of finishing one before starting the other. Its research base is older and more careful than its workshop form: Cross on designerly ways of knowing, Schön on reflection-in-action, Rittel and Webber on wicked problems, Dorst on frame creation. It is strongest when the goal is clear enough to aim at and the path is not. It is weakest when the situation needs understanding more than it needs a proposal.
In ordinary life
Someone moves into a flat with a small kitchen. They do not write a specification. They put the kettle where it seems sensible, cook for a week and notice they keep walking round the table to reach the bin. The bin moves. A month later the kitchen works, and nobody could have designed it on paper on the first day.
That is design thinking at domestic scale. Schön described designers holding a conversation with the materials of a situation. You make a move, the situation talks back and the back-talk tells you what the problem was. Lawson’s studies found that designers learn about a problem mainly by proposing solutions to it, where scientists tend to analyse first.
Rittel and Webber called the problems of planning wicked. They have no definitive formulation and no stopping rule, and every attempt to solve one changes it. Most of the problems a school faces are wicked in exactly that sense. That is the case for a way of thinking built for them.
The educational experience
Every page follows the same Singapore secondary school on the same kind of day. The school wants to give Secondary 1 one afternoon a week for a project that crosses Geography, Science and English Language, and the proposal is due for a decision. The five people and the situation stay fixed. Only the way of thinking changes.
All five, interconnected
The five threads as they were written, interleaved, so the hand-offs between them are visible. Pick a person to follow their day on its own. The people are illustrative, and the same five appear on every way’s page.
07:50
Mr Hafiz, briefing the trial
His brief says “test whether an interdisciplinary afternoon works for Secondary 1”. He expects a yes or a no. Ms Chen asks whether she can change the question after the afternoon. He says yes, slightly warily, and reminds her the decision is due in three weeks.
09:00
Ms Chen, in a free period
She has the laboratory technician for the afternoon and a Science lab with sinks, but no English Language teacher, because nobody could cover a Secondary 3 class. The English Language department has sent a letter template and a note that the letters will not count towards its weighted assessments. She plans for what she has been given.
12:00
Mdm Kavitha, on a phone call
Ms Chen calls the parents of three students in the trial. Mdm Kavitha mentions that Arjun has spent a week in the corridor outside their flat building a gutter out of old foil catering trays. He had not told anyone at school. Ms Chen writes it down.
13:30
The trial begins
Twelve students, one question: where does the rain go when an afternoon storm hits the school, and what would you change? Science brings the water cycle, Geography the site map, English Language a letter to the school’s operations manager. Arjun says nothing in the opening discussion.
14:15
Arjun, at the sink
Given trays, card and a watering can, Arjun builds a working model of the monsoon drain along the school fence in twenty minutes. Other groups drift over to watch. He explains it with his hands and very few words, and two students write down what he means.
14:50
Ms Chen, reading back her notes
The pattern surprises her. The students who led the making were not the ones who usually lead discussion, and the letters were weak because the building took all the time. The useful question is how talk, making and writing are sequenced.
15:20
The reframe
Ms Chen brings Mr Hafiz a rewritten question: what order of talk, making and writing produces work each subject would recognise? He points out that this is a timetabling question, not a yes or a no. She says that is roughly the point, and asks for two more trial afternoons. He can find one, maybe, if it does not clash with CCA.
16:30
Dr Ong, on a visit
Dr Ong asks what the afternoon produced. Ms Chen shows her the models, the thin letters and her notes. Dr Ong can map the drainage work onto the Science syllabus and cannot yet map the letters onto English Language. It is the first trial she has seen that shows its failures as well as its display.
20:15
Mdm Kavitha and Arjun, at the kitchen table
Arjun tells Mdm Kavitha about the drain model, at length, while she portions out tomorrow’s orders. She asks whether he wrote the letter. He did not finish it. She is pleased and worried in roughly equal measure.
The brief asked whether an afternoon works. One afternoon of trying turned it into a question about sequence, which nobody has tested yet. One trial cannot carry a decision about a term, and the English assessment and the cover are both still unsolved. The reframe was worth more than a yes or a no, and it happened because the team was allowed to rewrite the question.
Implications
The same five dimensions for all four ways. This is the part that can be tabulated. The two narratives above are the part that can be argued with.
What people actually do, as opposed to what they report or what the plan assumes. Design thinking pays close attention to workarounds, because a workaround is a user telling you the design is wrong. It notices when the brief itself is the problem, and it treats a failed prototype as information.
Structure that no single user experiences. Watching twelve students closely will not reveal the loop between the timetable and the departments guarding their hours, because no student sees the whole loop. Design thinking also struggles with the long delay. A prototype tested for a week says nothing about what happens in three years.
It can mistake the users in the room for everyone affected. The students in the trial volunteered. The ones who most needed the change probably did not.
Comfort with making something rough and showing it to people before it is good. For students used to being marked on finished work this is hard, and for teachers used to planning thoroughly it can feel careless. The discipline is in the testing, which has to be honest enough to kill a prototype you liked.
Good work shows the reframe and the evidence for it. Weak work shows the final idea and a picture of the process.
In the word "preferred". Simon’s definition of design turns existing situations into preferred ones, and says nothing about whose preference. Buchanan argued that design has no subject matter of its own, which means the values come from whoever sets the brief. A design process run with students but briefed by management has already decided whose preferences count.
The workshop version is five coloured stages, a morning of sticky notes and a solution chosen by the most senior person in the room. It keeps the stages and drops the two things that made the method work: sustained attention to real users, and the permission to rewrite the brief. What remains is brainstorming with better stationery.
Reading
Published works only. Start with the first on the list.
Cross, N. (2006). Designerly Ways of Knowing. Springer.
The research case that design is a distinct way of knowing, collected from Cross’s papers since 1982.
Schön, D. A. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Basic Books.
Reflection-in-action, and design as a conversation with the materials of a situation.
Rittel, H. W. J., & Webber, M. M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sciences, 4(2), 155–169.
Wicked problems, and why planning problems resist definitive formulation.
Buchanan, R. (1992). Wicked problems in design thinking. Design Issues, 8(2), 5–21.
Design thinking as a response to wicked problems, and why design has no fixed subject matter.
Lawson, B. (1980). How Designers Think. Architectural Press.
Designers learn about a problem by proposing solutions to it.
Dorst, K. (2011). The core of ‘design thinking’ and its application. Design Studies, 32(6), 521–532.
Frame creation, and what is worth transferring from design practice to other fields.