Title: How to transfer design thinking qualities to non designers.
Abstract: The concept of design thinking is highly wining ground not only to the design engineering field but also in fields related and associated with business and management. An increasing amount of non designers who use design thinking emerges. Thus, the purpose of this thesis is to transfer design thinking qualities to non designers. Service Science Factory as an example of such organization that uses design disciplines with non designers. Service Science Factory focus on multidisciplinary teams which are quite wide and it comes from different scientific fields outside design scope. Their intention is to create tangible, feasible and reliable innovative services for their clients. The thesis starts with the exploration of the Service Science Factory environment. The participants are approached with two qualitative methods; participant observation and cultural probes. The results of the analysis of the methods reveal issues namely problems in understanding the process and mainly at the begging of the process. The analysis of the results provides a filter which will guides the literature research on design thinking. Furthermore, preliminary design requirements such as the facilitation of the process by the project leader and the need of common knowledge base on behalf of the participants emerge. Next a literature research on design thinking is presented. In terms of the process two concepts are essential: the problem and solution space co evolution and the usage of divergent and convergent thinking in order to reach to a solution. Hence, basic actions on problem framing such as mass, fact and problem finding are essential for exploring the problem space used in order to reduce the ambiguity of the problem. Furthermore, structured reflection is used to improve the design process; an element essential to novice designers and non designers in order to learn or improve their processes. The results of the preliminary requirements as well the results of the literature research set the basis for the concept development. The concept is developed as the literature suggests; by co evolution of the problem and solution space through experiments which lead to the final outcome. The final module is a training tool embedded in the Service Science Factory process. The participants with the help of the project leader participate into inquiries of creative sessions along with individual reflection and collective discussions sequences in order to gain beeper understanding of the content of the project as well as the process they follow. More precisely, two different set of sessions, one to asset the research (mess/data finding) and on to asset the final problem statement (problem statement session) were created in order to help the participants to understand better the content of the given project. Furthermore, reflection of the process is required in order to understand better the overall process of design. As the result, the participants acquire useful knowledge about the design thinking parading because they experience the problem solution space evolution as well as the diverge and converge nature of design thinking through the sessions. Moreover, the sequence of individual and collective discussions makes the team to acquire individual knowledge about the project as well as create the base of share understanding which is important when working with teams.
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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