Origins

The world in which we live is a combination of:

• things that have been consciously designed by people;
• forces of nature that are beyond human control;
• and emergent properties that result from the complex interactions of people, designed things and nature.

It's messy and often unpredictable. The 20th Century saw the rise of a class of professionals, spread across diverse fields, who described themselves as "designers" - people who are able to bring some degree of order to the chaos. This was a powerful idea, and designers like Corbusier and Dieter Rams acquired a cultural significance as the geniuses of modern Capitalism. In the second half of that century, academics began to investigate and question the powers of the designer. There did seem to be something special about what they do and how they work - for good or bad. Designers were having a massive impact on the world, reshaping it almost beyond recognition. This discipline of "design research" formed as a systematic attempt to codify how designers think and work. The term "Design Thinking" appeared in 1959 (first used in John E. Arnold's bool Creative Engineering). Richard Buchanan is credited with the idea that Design Thinking is especially powerful in addressing hard-to-define and almost impossible-to-solve "wicked problems" (Buchanan, 1992), further amplifying the idea that designers have special powers.

Jo Szczepanska has created a great timeline of the history of Design Thinking.

Is there a formula for Design Thinking?

No. Maybe. Sort of! If you look online you might find people advertising Design Thinking systems. These are typically sequences of activities that explore a problem, brainstorm ideas, prototype and test, and implement. Although these formulas can be useful, their simplicity hides the fact that in reality Design Thinking is much more unpredictable and emergent. Designers improvise all the time. But that improvisation is guided by some very precise thinking. There's a definite Design Thinking mindset. It's hard to teach. Best acquired working alongside a good Design Thinker on a real project. It's also not entriely well specified through research. Although we have some strong clues. For example, we know that Design Thinkers are adept at shifting perspectives and ways of thinking. The "four humors of Design Thinking" theory claims that there are four kinds of knowledge (or knowing) that Design Thinkers switch between. Success depends on getting the balance and the flow right.

Design Thinking today

The current wave of interest in Design Thinking dates back to 2008 and a Harvard Business Review article by Tim Brown of the IDEO design consultancy. This marked a radical shift in the idea, away from the notion that designers themselves are special people. Brown's company had hit the limit of what they could do to the companies and organisations they worked with. Their key insight was that they needed to step back from being the designers, and help the real experts become designers and do the designing. So they moved away from designing solutions in their studio, towards being facilitators of designing by collaborations of people. For example, when helping to redesign hospital casualty procedures they brought together doctors, nurses, managers, technicians and patients. They used "design anthropological" methods to help these people to understand their organisation and its processes from perspectives they would not usually get to see. And most importantly, they sought to transfer the ability to do designing, what we call design capability, into the organisations, so that everyone could become a designer, and designing would become a continuous process (and yet many organisations have still failed to make the connection with Continuous Improvement programmes).

This paradigm shift in Design Thinking converged with four other movements:

1. Participatory Design - an approach that emerged from Scandinavian industrial relations, in which workers and management were seen as equal partners in the design process.
2. Everyday Designing - technologies and systems are developing so that everyone may design and redesign the things they use and the world they live in (see Ezio Manzini).
3. The Maker Space movement and the re-emphasis on craftwork - encouraging people to tinker, experiment, invent, become makers.
4. Social and political movements critical of the domination of design and innovation by a white, male, Anglo-American elite (see especially Lucy Suchman, Dori Tunstall, Kenilwe Munyai).

Design Thinking, inclusive design and decolonizing design thinking

Designing may involve imposing choices on other people, within the design process or when a design has been implemented; we need to use that power with care so as not to unfairly exclude, exploit or colonize.

Inclusive design, and the study of how designing excludes people, is one of the main divisions of design research. This has resulted in design techniques and guidelines that we can apply. But we need to go further and cultivate a mindset that continually reflects on inclusivity. Another key division of design research, design anthropology, has demonstrated how cultures of and capabilities for designing replicate colonial power structures. Lucy Suchman has described how the control of the technology industry by a small white American elite has massive impacts on the rest of the world, especially in the global South. Keilwe Munyai (Cape Town) has argued that we need to "design with" communities, rather than for them, so that we develop solutions that work sustainably for them, and develop their design capabilities. This is a central goal to our Design Thinking: don't design for people, help them to become designers.