Abstract
In this chapter, the authors propose an empirically supported framework for understanding how small horizontally organized design teams perform radical redesigns or radical breaks. The notion of radical breaks captures what is often thought of as “thinking out of the box”, and reframing problems to find new and unique solutions. A radical break occurs in the course of a redesign when designers make a major departure from the provided artifact.
We introduce three imbricated concepts as a mechanism for understanding how design process determines design outcomes: scoping (what designers take to be the task), behaviors (how designers move through the task), and shared media (drawings, prototypes and gestures). Results of an experiment using small design teams in a redesign task suggests six primary modes of “scoping”, two primary modes of design “behavior”, and two primary modes of “shared media”.
Motivation
The motivation for this work is two-fold.
The first is to craft a coherent theoretical approach to design process and it’s relationship to how radical breaks are produced.
The second motivation is in service of the practitioner. Rather than a top-down model of process, it is our desire to craft a framework that makes sense to practitioners. Our aim is to provide a clear understanding of how process “works” for designers, so they can make informed choices about how to approach redesign tasks “in the wild”.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the Hasso Plattner Design Thinking Research Program HPDTRP for funding this project. We would also like to thank the folks at Stanford’s Center for Design Research (a great place to explore how design is well done) and the Product Realization Lab (a great place where design is done well). A special thank you goes out to the design engineers who made our study possible and meaningful.
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Edelman, J., Agarwal, A., Paterson, C., Mark, S., Leifer, L. (2012). Understanding Radical Breaks. In: Plattner, H., Meinel, C., Leifer, L. (eds) Design Thinking Research. Understanding Innovation. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21643-5_3
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