Fast Co Design posted this article.

Hopefully it’ll inspire a few of us to do what we know we can do best.

The idea of design thinking has been discussed and adopted by a number of organisations that strive to reap the benefits of doing things in ways that are new to them. Roger Martin makes a series of assertions about this topic and while others join in from time to time, he has tried to define and illustrate the process of design thinking and how it can save your organisation from itself. His model is an adequate one, but it describes the process from an organisational point of view. If you are a manager in one of these companies, then it will give you some leverage when discussing staffing or new projects, but the questions remain; how does this take place in your brain and how can you spot this and nurture this in people?
Plenty of scholars have attempted to answer this, Whitfield had a go and there are mountains of unread books regarding creative needlework, creative interiors or creative pets, but they all fall into the same trap that De Bono describes and that is asking someone who has managed to be creative or show some insight is pointless because more often than not they don’t know how they did it. De Bono goes further in his series of books to describe at great length what creativity is and isn’t and how it might be developed in an otherwise creative-less individual. Csikszentmihalyi chips in with some more details about it all but again suffers from lots of writing and not many diagrams, so rather than berating these outstanding thinkers and scholars, here is the suggestion for a new model of the design thinking process.
As a designer find myself engaged in three main activities: analysing, synthesising and creating. These activities can also be described in broad terms as convergent and divergent thinking. Convergent being characterised as deductive reasoning as opposed to divergent thinking which characteristically uses abductive reasoning to bring about the new combinations of elements or new ways of looking at the same sets of information. Wertheimer called this productive thinking and it describes the process of using both methods of reasoning to gain a useful outcome from a period of work. It also describes how I think as a designer, but is useless because I need to understand a great deal of psychological material, often academic, which is outside my field of expertise and may well lead me to a misunderstanding of what I’m trying to find. Here’s how I like to think about my brain when I’m working on new problems:

At one stage I am primarily engaged in convergent thinking. I require facts and I am searching for them to build a picture of the problem so that I can then take an opposing view in order to contextualise and begin the process of divergent thinking. This in turn needs to be limited at some stage; perhaps by the constraints of the brief or customer specification, or simply by time and money, and when this limiting takes place I return to convergent thinking in order to justify and refine my suggestions. One phase without the other is useless. Convergent thinking on its own will get you a Ford Sierra, divergent thinking gets you a Jetson car, complete with bubble and joystick.

Examining this model further though reveals it’s inadequacies. The simple flip flop from one way of dealing with information to another, isn’t enough. Scrutiny shows that the graph is more like a fractal image. A sawtooth line made up of other sawtooth lines, where there is a constant change from convergent to divergent thinking with trends of direction indicated on a macro scale. This model is extremely useful in describing design and the way designers think because it makes much more sense than the words alone, regardless of your NLP preference or hemisphere dominance. It is also helpful as a reminder to myself of the stage or trending sequence I may be in at that moment and by using it I can capture and harness those transitional moments when other less agile thinkers  may not be able to able to respond and make the shift from information processing to information creation and back again.

On the 20th of January, 2011, the government announced its intention to review the national curriculum for education of young people aged between 11 and 16. This could is intended to lead to a reduced number of subjects that are required to be taught at these ages meaning that design and technology will move from a core subject to one which is taught at the discretion of the school. According to the Design and Technology campaign, this would “seriously undermine both the life chances of young people and the country’s economic prospects now and in the future”. This sentiment has driven the development of design and technology education in Britain since the nineteenth century, provided the fuel for the wide spread changes in Design and Technology education as advocated by Ken Barnes (1969), Bernard Aylward (1973) and others at the time and recently instigated the online campaigns by the Design and Technology Association.

What all these arguments fail to do is recognise design as a subject in its own right and the idea that design, independent from technology or anything else, is already an important factor in the success that is so desperately craved. Tim Brown makes this point and the countless graduates from other subjects that have drifted into design only support the idea that design isn’t something that depends on technology and doesn’t depend on maths or science, in fact it requires quite the opposite.

Roger Martin puts forward the notion of abductive logic as a description of design. This is in opposition to inductive or deductive logic or indeed analysis or synthesis; design is something else and requires a new set of skills to be taught. The current National Curriculum doesn’t include this kind of thinking because education as it stands today requires evidence of learning rather than learning on its own. GCSE awards are allocated according to what a student can do to prove he or she has learned a skill which ultimately produces the kind of student that is good at exams or coursework rather than one which has actually learned something, a phenomenon identified all too clearly by John Holt (1964). All this takes place on a daily basis in the UK by teachers in most schools, certainly the ones I have been in, contrary to the fact that young people are predisposed to abductive reasoning (de Bono, 1970) and are more than capable of developing, using and advancing these skills independently of material or medium.

If Design and Technology survives the National Curriculum review, it will to its detriment. To move forward the subject needs to be clear about its aims, its standing and what it has to offer society. Design should not be confused with form, example, evidence or even award, it is a subject that is separate from other subjects and is important in its own right. Technology on the other hand is at the mercy of maths and science and is perhaps the last  holding ground for focussed practical tasks, workshops with window screens separating material ‘areas’ and those skills that are desperately needed in the UK but not provided for in any other arena.

Something I’m sure we’d all like to see more of in the UK and certainly something we should all aspire to get involved in.

Mr Cameron, it’s time to send in the designers

from the Guardian, 11/10/11.