Abstract
For over a decade, design thinking has been gaining traction beyond design practice and higher education. This is reflected in the growth of varied Internet-based resources that seek to enable design thinking. However, there is neither systemic evidence about nor an analysis of this development, specifically with regard to the claims that underpin the rise of design thinking. This chapter fills this gap and critically maps the proliferation of learning resources through which ‘design thinking’ is configured outside of or on the edges of academia. It reviews the English-speaking landscape of Internet-based design thinking resources and their claims and assesses the links between them. It showcases the intensity of these links in a ‘typology of design thinking resources’. The discussion highlights the homogeneity of Internet-based design thinking resources, despite the diversity of sites and situations they claim to be relevant to. The chapter argues that the implication of this development for professional design practice is a needed shift towards criticality, through stronger connections to higher education and research. The chapter concludes with an extended set of questions to prompt more critical and reflexive research into the growth of design thinking resources online and their wider socio-economic contexts.
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Notes
- 1.
Space does not allow a fuller discussion of the origins of design thinking and the links to product, interaction and service design more generally in particular to developments in Silicon Valley as discussed, for example, in Katz and Maeda (2015).
- 2.
Whilst the turnover of IDEO Inc. for 2017 was $37.5 m (Orbis 2018), specialised ‘design sectors’ within the European Union providing ‘design’ services to other businesses and to consumers accounted for EUR 8.8 billion gross value added in 2011, vis-à-vis the engineering and architectural services sectors of EUR 126 billion (Galindo-Rueda and Millot 2015).
- 3.
Despite advocacy for design expertise by commercial, public sector and intermediary organisations and professional bodies, academic analysis about design being applied to organisations remains partial (Lancaster University 2016); similarly with the more specific case of design thinking. There is a notable distinction here with studies of the application of ‘experience-based co-design’ in healthcare systems, which have strong social science foundations, see for example Robert et al. (2015).
- 4.
We here want to underline that this lens does not preclude devices and platforms used by individuals (including people who think of themselves as designers), nor does it close off the possibility of examining such accounts in search of a general theory of design.
- 5.
Quality Circles involve small groups of employees gathering in work time to identify problems and potential solutions. This organisational practice emerged in Japanese and US businesses and grew rapidly in the 1980s (see Lawler and Mohrmann 1985). However, as discussed by Cole (1998) there was a striking disconnect between academics who thought quality circles had sunk without a trace and practitioners who claimed to have expertise in and success from using them.
- 6.
A report to the European Commission (2014) on new modes of learning and teaching in higher education foresaw a rise in online learning as means to meet the growth in learners from 100 million in 2000 to 250 million by 2025.
- 7.
This would be based on standard mapping studies that are based on an existing database (as, for example, in Krysinska et al. 2017) which in this case is not feasible due to the lack of an existing database of Internet-based design thinking resources.
- 8.
For a deeper exploration of this point within sociology as ‘reflexive science’ and through the body of Pierre Bourdieu’s work, see Robbins (2007).
- 9.
- 10.
For example, Miller and Horst (2012) argue that digital anthropology must be grounded in ‘digital materiality’ as comprised of the materiality of digital infrastructure and technology, the materiality of digital content and the materiality of digital context. Marres (2017) underscores the importance of fine-grained description in doing digital sociology but warns of an inward looking reflexivity that could emerge when building on the new ‘digital ways of knowing society’. This is where the object of investigation becomes the sociological practice itself, rather than the digital ways of knowing society across social life, not just social research.
- 11.
This includes designing, delivering and assessing an elective on ‘Designing Better Futures’ on an MBA programme at Said Business School, University of Oxford since 2005; designing, delivering and assessing a design module within an undergraduate management science degree at University College London between 2015 and 2018; and developing the strategy for, teaching on and assessing a joint MBA run between Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London and Birkbeck College, University of London launched in 2017.
- 12.
This spreadsheet contained the following categories: Name, Type, URL/s, Access Date, Found how, Year started/published, Country, Producer/Publisher, Description, Funder, Partners, Scope, Core concept/s, Format, Main Features, Target Users, Business Model, Number of Participants, Usage/Downloads/Views, Learning Assessment, Accreditation, Contact, Notes. Due to the diversity of the cases, these categories were subject to continuous discussion between the two authors.
- 13.
This dataset of 80 resources was specifically compiled for this study and was the core of the analysis.
- 14.
The types of formats emerged from classifying the resources based on their setup and presentation.
- 15.
- 16.
We focus here on the rationales in the claims made by online resources, which in some cases make explicit reference to design, innovation studies and management literatures. However, it is beyond the scope of this chapter to trace all these in detail.
- 17.
Some of the cases discussed in this section are could not be featured in the table due to the limited scope of this chapter. However, they still were part of the data analysis and conceptual work that went into this chapter.
- 18.
The dominance of this particular image of design thinking is underscored by its prominence in the Internet: a quick image search under the keyword ‘design thinking’ produces endless lists of images featuring people writing on post-its.
- 19.
At this point, it is important to acknowledge that organisational clusters of density and dominance clearly do exist within the landscape of Internet-based design thinking resources. For example, IDEO has significantly shaped the growth of design thinking beyond the corporate realm and has invested in a number of non-profit ventures that promote design thinking for different sectors (the ‘Design Thinking for Educators’ project is a good example of that). However, it is beyond the scope of this study to take into account such links and power structures within the design thinking discourse.
- 20.
Here, we iterated our reviewing, categorising and marking of the resources against the rationales and themes until we reached consensus.
- 21.
Here, the term inequalities is used broadly: to describe the framing of those ‘impacted’ by design thinking in certain areas which can include the development sector; to refer to the way in which communities are framed as those ‘being helped by’ design thinking; to describe the perpetuation of Western-centric tastes within design; to describe the unequal distribution of the severe economic and ecological consequences of the production of products, services and solutions; and to describe the elite position from which the story of design thinking is told and enacted.
- 22.
IDEO is a case that underlines this point very well: throughout our online search, we continually (re-)encountered IDEO design thinking resources, or design thinking resources that IDEO had, at the very least co-authored or sponsored. It is fair to state that IDEO is dominating the design thinking discourse outside of higher education and that this dominance is reinforced digitally.
- 23.
- 24.
See the Liberatory Design Toolkit which aims to develop equity-centred designers, adapted from the Stanford d-school design thinking process which introduces questions of power into the design methods. https://dschool.stanford.edu/resources/liberatory-design-cards. Accessed 25 October 2018.
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Kimbell, L., Sloane, M. (2020). Mapping Design Thinking Resources Outside of Higher Education—An Exploratory Study. In: Melles, G. (eds) Design Thinking in Higher Education. Design Science and Innovation. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5780-4_7
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