Introduction

“Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” (Simon 1996)

Simon elaborates by stating that the thought processes used for generating artifacts, diagnosing illnesses, putting together a sales strategy, or drafting a social welfare plan are all derived from one common denominator - design (Simon 1996). Design is about artificial things. Traditionally, science has been about natural things. Natural science is about the way things are. Natural science is declarative. Design is about the way things could or ought to be. Design is more relative and conditional than the absolutes found in nature.

Over the years, many of the disciplines based on the artificial have adopted the rigor and formality of the natural sciences at the expense of design processes. This was predominantly motivated by a desire to gain respectability in academic circles when measured alongside these other disciplines. Design must always appreciate the influence of the natural on the artificial in the design process. After all, an airplane is essentially designed to counter the effect of gravity. However, we cannot abandon the fundamental principles of design which allow us to continue coming up with new ways for how things could be.

During the past six decades, design research has matured and evolved substantially. Design theory is now clarified to the point where these design-based disciplines can once again embrace design and restore it to a place of prominence without compromising rigor or credibility. We are now seeing business (Martin 2009), education (Christensen, Horn, and Johnson 2008), health care (Christensen, Grossman, and Hwang 2009) and many other disciplines use design-based methods to approach the problems they are facing.

Defining Design Problems

Design as a discipline has been formally studied for a little over forty years. Most design researchers consider that it began with the inception of the Design Research Society and the Conference on Design Methods (Jones and Thornley 1963). The technological advances of the past five decades such as solid-state circuitry, personal computing, mobile computing, and the advent of the Internet have provided substantial incentive for design researchers to develop a workable understanding of the characteristics of design.

Innovation and technology have also generated many new sub-disciplines, or specialization, in design related professions. These abstractions have often had the detrimental effect of emphasizing the distinctions between these areas of specialization rather than the similarities. This has escalated to the point where a number of people are allocating quite a bit of energy in an effort to determine which adjectives should precede “designer” on their business cards (Garrett 2009). Fortunately, there have been others who have focused their research on recognizing the “characteristic commonalities which demarcate design from other forms of coping with difficulties.“ (Rittel 1988)

What are design problems? How do we distinguish design problems from non-design problems?

Design problems:

• are under determined (Stolterman 2008),
• wicked (Rittel 1988),
• ill-defined (Cross 2004),
• need to be framed (Schön 1983),
• indeterminate (Buchanan 1992), and
• transdisciplinary (Blevis and Stolterman 2008).

In essence, “Learning what the problem is IS the problem.” (Rittel 1988)

These terms and definitions provide clarification to how design of the artificial is distinguished from the study of the natural. They also supply us with a framework around which we can aggregate the various design-related disciplines. Perhaps most importantly, it provides us with a more common language which we can share and understand, even if we do not have the word “designer” in our title.

Design is the key to adapting

There are many leaders and managers in business, education, health care, government, and other related fields who do not know, understand, or appreciate the fundamental principles of design. As such, they are unaware that most of the problems they are facing are design problems. Today, more than ever, technology and innovation are affecting organizations in all of these fields. Many leaders have not been able to adapt to disruptive innovations that “create an entirely new market through the introduction of a new kind of product or service” (Christensen and Overdorf 2000).These types of innovations usually make products and services simpler, more affordable and available to new, untapped markets.

While many want to blame this shortcoming on leaders that are inept or incompetent, the reality is that most of them have simply abandoned fundamental principles grounded in design thinking. In his keynote address at the Innovation Summit ʼ09, Clayton Christensen stated, “A lot of the problems of managing innovation arise because we as professors of business schools have taught false principles that actually make success very hard to sustain and cause innovation to be a lot riskier than it ought to be.” (Christensen 2009) What these leaders are missing is “a habit of thinking about their organization's capabilities as carefully as they think about individual people's capabilities.” (Christensen and Overdorf 2000) This “habit of thinking” is design thinking.

Design thinking and the design process are about:

• sketching - not only to externalize ideas but also to generate new ideas (Fallman2003) (Buxton 2007);
• exploration of multiple perspectives, producing multiple solutions, iteration, and reflection (Zimmerman, Forlizzi, and Evenson 2007);
• focusing on the particular rather than the general (Buchanan 1992);
• consider the ideal, the true and the real (Nelson and Stolterman 2003);
• are goal-oriented and directed at making things better (Friedman 2003);
• learning through the questioning of norms, policies, objectives and rules using “double-loop learning” (Argyris and Schön 1978);
• utilizing reflection-in-action which allows new information to be used to re-imagine the problem as it manifests itself as a new and unique problem (Schön 1983);
• not having a definitive ending, are considered as being good or bad rather than right or wrong, and have an infinite array of possible solutions (Rittel and Webber 1973);
• are grounded in artistry, craft and connoisseurship (Eisner 1991); and
• are about ensoulment as measured by the dimensions of aesthetics and experience which is manifested through time and place (Nelson and Stolterman 2003).

Conclusion

Design thinking is what allows us to move problems in the world we create from the complex to the simple, along a continuum from mystery to understanding to commoditization and structure. This is the science of design. It should not be confused with the natural sciences.

Design science is still focused upon the way things ought to be or should be rather than the way they are currently. It is not always a linear approach. Innovations, especially those of a disruptive nature, will usually result in gravitation back towards mystery and complexity. Yet one who is equipped with the knowledge, understanding and appreciation of design will be prepared to adapt to the changes that are yet to come.

As long as we find ourselves in a world where we are facing problems directed towards changing existing situations and contemplating what could be or ought to be, we will be working on design problems.

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