It has now been almost twenty years since the first DTRS symposium, and research on design thinking has matured immensely since those early days. It has resulted in a steady and growing stream of publications. Recently a number of books...
moreIt has now been almost twenty years since the first DTRS symposium, and research on design thinking has matured immensely since those early days. It has resulted in a steady and growing stream of publications. Recently a number of books were published that capture design thinking from various perspectives.
In the last few years, the notion of ‘design thinking’ has also become popular outside the design professions—it is a buzzword in the business world (amongst management scholars and professionals), and we can find ‘design thinking’ mentioned as an exciting new paradigm for dealing
with problems in sectors as a far afield as education, IT and medicine.
This creates an opportunity for the design community to be heard and valued in its approach, and for people that were trained as designers to exert their influence outside the traditional design professions.
This success does raise the question what that ‘design thinking’ really is—what it consists of,
—what its strengths and weaknesses are, what skills, abilities and character traits support someone’s capacity to be successful in design thinking, and which key elements of design thinking are transportable beyond the core design disciplines.
While we do not have all the answers yet, the challenge that the DTRS8 organisers see before the design thinking research community is to play a role in interpreting design thinking for other disciplines. In doing so, we will overcome the relative intellectual isolation of ‘design thinking’—traditionally, it has always been defined by distinguishing it from other kinds of thinking and problem solving approaches. Yet defining ‘design ability’ and ‘design expertise’ as separate and exclusive to the inner circle of design graduates limits our ability to engage with other disciplines.
The DTRS8 symposium is built on the premise that our knowledge of the
nature and qualities of design thinking is now strong enough to reach out. The researchers and educators in the DTRS community have developed perspectives on design thinking—some of these are broad and endeavouring to be all-encompassing, others are much more detailed in
focussing on key aspects of design thinking (like the role of creativity, etc). The DTRS8 challenge was to look at what these particular perspectives, insights, theories, models and sets of tools for design thinking can bring to other fields that are seeking to incorporate it.
DTRS8 brought together a rich mixture of eminent design researchers from across the world, in a setting that was quite small (approximately 50 people), resulting in high-quality discussions.
The objective of DTRS8 was to use these conversations to start up a broader intellectual discussion on the nature, strength and value of design thinking.
DTRS8 Organisers:
Kees Dorst
Susan Stewart
Ilka Staudinger
Bec Paton
and Andy Dong
