After musing for some time, and doing a lot of research, a few ideas began to emerge. As a designer, one is charged with creating for use- that is, we create buildings, products, interiors for use by other people. Our designs are judged successful if they create emotion, or are functional- they are judged not for themselves, but for their impact on a user. A design which is merely beautiful, but completely useless in terms of its intended purpose, becomes irrelevant. As designers, we possess the ability to examine problems at a variety of scales. Contextual analysis gives us insight into the future, as does our ability to see the "big picture". We possess the unique ability to visualise highly theoretical, conceptual problems and offer tangible solutions grounded in reality.
As architects, we also manipulate human behaviour and emotion through texture, lighting, scale, etc, to elicit certain responses, and our actions can define the social landscape through the structures we create. Our work helps to engineer and master-plan how society may function.
The term "Design Thinking" has become some-what of a management buzz-word of late, however it relates to the methods and processes for investigating ill-defined problems, acquiring information, analyzing knowledge and posting solutions often used in the design field. It is generally considered the ability to combine empathy for the context of a problem, creativity in the generation of insights and solutions, and rationality to analyse and fit solutions to the context. Design thinking, it is reported, is less concerned with products that attract customers, and more with those that meet their needs- it is human centered.
Design thinking has been reported as being:
Design thinking has been reported as being:
- Collaborative, especially with others having different and
complimentary experience, to generate better work and form agreement
- Abductive,
inventing new options to find new and better solutions to new problems
- Experimental, building prototypes and posing hypotheses, testing
them, and iterating this activity to find what works and what doesn’t work
to manage risk
- Personal,
considering the unique context of each problem and the people involved
- Integrative, perceiving an entire system and its linkages
- Interpretive, devising how to frame the problem and judge the
possible solutions
Simply put- it is "why not", with an added layer of rationale.
And it seems that all over the world, managers are taking 4 day workshops in design thinking and revolutionising the world, right? Wrong.
There is one element of "Design Thinking" which it seems those who analyse from the outside miss, yet designers (thanks to years of study) understand- design thinking- or what to us is simply know as "design" requires a form of artistry that comes after years of practice. It cannot be learnt through reading or practicing theory, but from actually doing- from actually designing. Designers consider a limited set of alternatives and develop guiding principles, then create a partial solution to a partial problem, and then run through a set of iterations to see what else can be learnt about the problem. Design is messy, not linear, but it is also measured and analysed at every step with a methodology which comes from practice.
So why a designer to create the solution? Well, the answer is simple- we haven't actually figured out the problem as yet, but by running through a number of solutions, perhaps we can further understand our problem. And the designer is one who, as second nature, considers people in their solutions at the outset, not for nobility, not for emotive or sentimental reasons, but because he has been trained to do so from the very outset, and old habits die hard.
I really like the above image, because it encapsulates exactly what we go through, as designers, often subconsciously, every time we design a solution.
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