Abstract
Design thinking—at times described as a mind-set, practice, process, method, methodology, tool, heuristic, and more—is a productive, iterative approach used to engage divergent thinking. Often made up of stages incorporating empathy, definition, ideation, prototyping, and testing, design thinking provides a framework for identifying and approaching problems. Design thinking, however, generally lacks a critical–rhetorical–methodological structure that makes room for what Rebecca Burnett called “substantive conflict,” or “conflict that deals with critical issues of content and rhetorical elements.” This article situates design thinking across the professional and academic spaces in which it is heralded and implemented in order to explore how it can be used in collaborative contexts to support substantive, productive dissensus. The authors lean on the ways in which they engage in design thinking in their different roles to situate the good, the bad, and the ugly of design thinking. They conclude by suggesting a rhetorical methodology for cultivating design thinking that facilitates dissensus, addresses resistance, and considers ideological variables.
As we consider the values of design thinking in composition studies, we have to watch out for exaggerated claims about the potential of design to remove what we might perceive as the underdetermined from what we should accept as the indeterminate wickedness of composing and designing.
More and more, the issues we face as professional and technical communication (PTC) teachers, scholars, and professionals link to the wicked problems we face as humans. These wicked problems are those that transcend any one discipline, institution, or community: for instance, poverty, generational homelessness, obesity, pollution. Some of the earliest work on wicked problems (e.g., Rittel & Webber, 1973) suggests a set of characteristics, including that “wicked problems have no stopping rule” (p. 161) and “there is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem” (p. 166). Indeed, early scholarship in writing studies on design thinking itself characterized design as a wicked problem (see Buchanan, 1992).
Design tasks are framed by ambiguity, require consistent revision and evolution, and are inherently framed, shaped, and influenced by social, cultural, historical, technological, and other variables. No doubt, the similarity of design work to composing processes makes wicked problems and design thinking resonate with writing studies scholars. Marback (2009) has situated the wickedness of design as “more than merely the making of an artifact; it is an embrace of ambiguities in our responses to each other with and through our artifacts” (p. W418). His primary point was that composition scholars should not overreach connections between design and composing or attempt to fix processes or stabilize ambiguities; rather, they should embrace the “wickedness” of design thinking itself. In some ways, our purpose here is to echo Marback’s call (a focus that also emerged in Purdy, 2014), but it is also to draw on the work of R. E. Burnett (1991) as a pivot point to extend current conversations about design thinking and to point specifically to the ways in which we can engage dissensus as a lever for more critical, collaborative, constructive design thinking.
A key argument we surface and support throughout this article is that instead of embracing ambiguity, design thinking has too often been adopted as a seemingly monolithic approach that erases ambiguity and provides shallow solutions rather than prompts plans for deeper problem solving. We take up this claim by situating design thinking and how it surfaces across literatures. Then we situate ourselves, our roles, and the work we do as professional communicators who engage design-thinking approaches. After situating design thinking in existing published work and in our own professional lives, we offer a discussion of its affordances, the good (e.g., how it can support innovative collaboration), before we turn to some of the problems that design thinking does not quite equip us to address, the bad (e.g., problematic competitiveness), and then to that which is inherent to design thinking yet not often enough rhetorically or critically situated and approached, the ugly (i.e., dissensus, resistance, and ideology). Finally, we position design thinking as needing a critical–rhetorical–methodological structure that accounts for making opposing views (i.e., dissensus) visible and useful in collaborative work. We use the good, the bad, and the ugly as scaffolding to interrogate how these issues can allow us to cultivate more rhetorical, critical frameworks for design thinking that help participants feel comfortable working within ambiguity and also increase the transparency of collaborative processes. We conclude this article with a discussion of implications and extensions of what we have proposed for PTC, which we are calling design thinking as rhetorical methodology.
Thinking About Design Thinking
Intended to facilitate brainstorming within interdisciplinary groups, design thinking lives across different bodies of literature as a mind-set, practice, process, method, methodology, tool, heuristic, and more; it is a productive, iterative approach used to support divergent thinking. Often made up of stages incorporating empathy, definition, ideation, prototyping, and testing, design thinking provides a framework for identifying and approaching a range of problems. Recent how-to literature meant to introduce design thinking to broader audiences starts with collections of successful case studies in engineering and management and expands outward (Johansson-Sköldberg, Woodilla, & Çetinkaya, 2013). Because no one technically owns (has trademarked or copyrighted) “design thinking,” a proliferation of versions has emerged. For instance, Change by Design, by Brown (2009), the CEO of IDEO, identifies a structured process most popularly employed in corporate settings (e.g., IBM Loop, the Norman Group). Brown did explicitly state, however, that design thinking can be used for problems outside of management and product development, opening his approaches to deployment in various settings.
In 2009, Lockwood published a collection of essays highlighting successful corporate practitioners who describe how they increased profits by using design thinking for brand building, product and service creation, and customer service. Later in Innovation by Design: How Any Organization Can Leverage Design Thinking to Produce Change, Drive New Ideas, and Deliver Meaningful Solutions, Lockwood and Papke (2017) provided a thick discussion of context before a review of attributes, framing their exploration of design thinking across spaces with the question, “Why is meaningful innovation the most important issue that organizations continue to grapple and struggle with?” (p. 11). In the conclusion, the authors argued that “the true power of design thinking is that it engages the collective imagination” (p. 213) and supports the design of “desired cultures of innovation” (p. 213). In their view, design thinking offers people a framework for orienting toward future exigencies, whether they are visible, emergent, or as of yet unknown.
Several other how-to texts are frequently used by organizations in order to support innovation and divergent thinking through empathizing with people’s experiences. For example, Solving Problems With Design Thinking: Ten Stories of What Works (Liedtka, King, & Bennett, 2013) is one of the most popular books addressing the emotional aspects of design thinking by recounting in-depth case studies of facilitations in corporations such as Toyota, 3M, and IBM, some of which required drastic restructuring of the company itself. Liedtka et al. (2013) described how facilitators dealt with contentious work environments and resistance to their facilitations and explored the use of metaphor in restructuring mind-sets. In the context of the Stanford d.school, B. Burnett and Evans (2016) explained how seasoned facilitators and faculty created a class in which students identify a problem—any problem—at the beginning of the course and “fix” it successfully by the end. Their approach depends on an understanding of the discomfort students feel with ambiguity, and a significant part of the class is designed to teach the tools of divergent thinking to help students embrace ambiguity.
Other how-to texts on design thinking include Heuer’s (2015) Design Thinking in Business and IT, Tonhauser’s (2016) Design Thinking Workshop, Curedale’s (2015) Design Thinking Pocket Guide, Betancur’s (2017) Art of Design Thinking, Yayici’s (2016) Design Thinking Methodology Book, Kumar’s (2012) 101 Design Thinking Methods, Bielenberg and Burn’s (2016) Think Wrong, and Lewrick, Link, and Leifer’s (2018) Design Thinking Playbook. Although we are just scratching the surface of the multiple titles recently published or in production, these texts together address design thinking in a range of contexts and applications.
In the spirit of Brown’s (2009) view of design thinking, corporate and managerial applications often frame design thinking for participants as a single, systematic methodology consisting of a series of steps toward innovative creation and solutions to problems. But it is not uncommon for facilitators of design-thinking sessions to have to clarify which of the hundreds of manual or playbook vocabularies is being used to describe different approaches or drills. A number of individuals who have hired coauthors April and Jess, for example, discovered design-thinking discourse through the popularized IDEO (see https://www.ideou.com/pages/design-thinking for a brief overview) iteration that uses five sequential actions for problem solving. It can be difficult to explain that these discrete steps can also be mixed up, rearranged, adapted, and renamed to suit the rhetorical context and stay consistent with the language of the organization; that one might use modeling clay and pipe cleaner prototyping or ideation drills to establish empathy; or that adaptive learning, productive failure, and continuous improvement can be fairly similar approaches.
The specific phrase design thinking appeared much later than did the scholarly inquiries and practical engineering or design practices that form its foundations. Johansson-Sköldberg et al. (2013) suggested dividing design thinking into two streams: One includes the more accessible, systematic versions like those described in the previous paragraphs—specifically meant for use by managers and entrepreneurs. The other relies on literature examining the philosophical, epistemological, and practiced layers of designerly thinking that draw from anthropology, neurology, and evolutionary science. Even though design thinking emerges as method, tool, methodology, orientation, and more across this diverse literature, we can assemble a handful of key concepts that frame design-thinking approaches that transcend most contexts and are useful in circumstances familiar to professional and technical communicators: innovation, diversity, empathy, productive failure, and ambiguity.
Our Orientations to Design Thinking
In the following subsections, we discuss the unique contexts in which each of us engages design thinking by describing the different activities we pursue in our various roles, and we outline the scholarship and ethical responsibilities that frame our collective analysis of design thinking as a rhetorical, rather than static, methodology.
Benjamin Lauren: Core Faculty Member in the Experience Architecture (XA) Major
XA is an undergraduate Bachelor of Arts degree that situates user experience design in a humanities context. The curriculum of the program is interdisciplinary, seeking to put concepts from rhetoric, PTC, and design into conversation and to draw on approaches and tools from humanities computing while training students to be leaders prepared to work in a variety of social and cultural contexts. Core faculty in the major includes people working in writing studies alongside others working in art and design; students take classes in both areas.
As a core faculty member in XA, I teach a range of courses in areas such as research methods and project management and leadership by focusing on principles of iterative design and information strategy. In these courses, I teach design thinking (sometimes without naming it as such) as an orientation to innovation and creativity, which can emerge as a framework, methodology, and rhetorical practice. Drawing from Sullivan and Porter (1997) and Law (2004), my pedagogical approach intentionally emphasizes a critical understanding of methods and methodology broadly conceived across management structures and design processes. In XA, I hope students learn to encounter design from a systems-thinking view that can support some forms of participation while (even unintentionally) constraining others (see Meadows, 2008). My specific goal is for students to learn that innovation relies on finding pathways for including structurally silenced voices and supporting divergence and dissensus.
As XA students develop an orientation to innovation and creativity as user-experience professionals, I seek to dispel three main assumptions. The first is that design thinking should be used as a road map for developing innovative products and services. The problem with this application is that design thinking is meant to be uncritically followed without reflection. This is a tension that we discuss in our research methods class, where, for example, students explore how methods are contextual to the situation, audience, and purpose of a client, community, or project. In class, students work to understand that good design follows even better research but that research itself is a designed process with the potential for ethical ramifications. For example, rather than having students design a user interface based on templates and heuristics alone, I suggest that they ought to simply talk to the users of the artifact they are designing. I emphasize that how they design these interactions with users is crucial to the kinds of data they collect and, later, to how the data are analyzed and used to support design work. This view is not always intuitive for new user experience students, who sometimes want to rush to design, so using an inherently rhetorical approach that emphasizes empathy for audience, context, and situation can be helpful for them.
The second assumption I seek to dispel is that design thinking is, on its own, an inclusive approach. How design processes are facilitated matters to the outcome of what is being designed and who is involved in the design process. Language and vocabulary matter. This sort of rhetorical practice is most often discussed in the project management and leadership classes I teach, where students critically engage with workplace systems and facilitation techniques. One core approach students learn to adopt in this class is improvisation. We practice language and techniques that forward a “Yes, and…” approach and work through how to manage conflict on teams. Students learn that workplaces are designed systems that can and must be iterated to be more inclusive and equitable. Doing this sort of work requires critical reflection on the language we use to describe the work we do and the development of mechanisms to implement change in larger systems. One assignment in which such issues are raised in the class is the development of a project charter. In this assignment, students learn about the document as both a visual and cultural artifact (see Lauren, 2018,—for a longer discussion of the project—management course). Students develop a template for a charter and then fill it out for an actual project, soliciting input from stakeholders along the way. Ultimately, I want students to see that even the invitation to participate in the development of a charter document is designed through communication streams that are intentional, rhetorically constructed, and situationally responsive to people.
The third assumption I work to dispel is that good design follows a linear process. In this way, students learn design methods as a heuristic (Sullivan & Porter, 1997) that must be critically adapted to the situation and audience. In courses in which I draw from iterative design, for example, I develop a structure for student teams to engage in Agile sprints. I use the sprint as a metaphor to demonstrate the importance of structure in supporting design (see Reinertsen, 1997). In other words, students have to build a capacity for seeing design as a kind of detective work in which logics and exigencies can change or be discovered in nonlinear fashion. In this way, augmenting or adapting parts of design thinking might be appropriate, combining it with other approaches to avoid being heavy-handed or overly presumptuous—particularly when researching and designing to address wicked problems such as housing and food insecurity. For students who do not experience such issues firsthand, their design process must intentionally include interrogation of their own unique positionality (Sullivan & Porter, 1997). Students must learn what they do not know about these important issues—not just produce innovatively designed artifacts, products, or services.
Jessica Knott: Researcher of Technology-Enhanced Education and Manager of Learning Design Teams
I manage a team of centrally supported instructional designers at a large land-grant, Research 1 institution. Although housed centrally in the information technology (IT) department, my team functions and reports across a number of organizational boundaries and expectations. We are considered part of both information–instructional technology services and a newly formed Hub for Innovation in Learning and Technology that serves the entire university. In some cases, we are seen as builders; in others, thinkers; and in yet others, project managers and communications and marketing resources. Like many in PTC, our roles are not fixed; rather, they shift with the needs of the project or initiative. We serve campus, student, and faculty needs, and the functions of our work are of a more critical focus than is our organizational reporting structure. To this end, team members are developed in T- and pi-shaped ways (Wessel, 2013) and have wide-ranging toolkits of generalist skills and deep understandings in one or more specific disciplines. Design-thinking methods offer a way for our diverse group to collaborate toward a common goal in a fundamentally uncommon environment and to navigate challenges related to the organizational structures we work within.
Internally, we have been working on refining our project-management processes. Evolutions in project-management needs within both the larger IT organization and the Hub resulted in the need to restructure planning and reporting methods. While closely tied, the needs and expectations of our two primary reporting units are distinct. The participatory nature of design-thinking methods has allowed us to analyze and critique our existing processes, as well as to surface some of the lingering discontent under the surface of our outwardly content facade. We have learned to be kinder to each other but also to not shy away from disagreement—in some cases, heated disagreements. Our biweekly team roundtable reports surfaced the importance of these difficult conversations, along with the productive change that occurs as a result. Unfortunately, these discussions can sometimes lead to skewed perceptions from one or more parties regarding their role, the importance of their role within the whole, or how their skill set fits. These perceptions require purposeful management and careful resolution.
Externally, we have worked with faculty and staff across campus to identify resource gaps and discuss support needs. For example, some departments on campus have their own internal instructional design staff, leading me to consider how—and if—my team should interface with theirs. Prigogine and Stengers (1984) suggested that “whatever we call reality, it is revealed to us only through an active construction in which we participate” (p. 293). Design thinking is participatory; using design-thinking methods with internal stakeholders within the university to create initiatives such as an instructional design network has enabled us to create a shared reality through active participation, strengthening our ties to other campus resources and building the foundation for a shared community of practice with those outside of our central sphere of influence. By using the same methods with external stakeholders outside of the university, we have built a similar reality and community of practice with other universities around the world.
Admittedly, ever-evolving job expectations for professional and technical communicators, such as performing instructional design work, managing user-experience research activities, and leading both small- and large-scale project management, can make sustained focus and alignments difficult. Design thinking allows my team to remain agile (as distinctly separate from Agile 1 ) and proactively avoid breakdowns in process and execution. But bureaucracies, even academic ones (perhaps especially academic ones), are structured; thus, they purposely and passively impose structure upon the teams and individuals that work within them. Although not inherently bad, these structures are notoriously slow to move and change. Bringing varied stakeholders to the table for design-thinking exercises allows us to create shared realities and proactively surface structural weaknesses in our design and plans, allowing for change.
April Greenwood: Design Methodologist and Workshop Facilitator
My role is to leverage a facilitation framework that specifically addresses resistance to design thinking as a practice and tool for collaboration. I was initially exposed to design-based facilitations as a member of a cultural competency training team. Later, when I implemented those same practices in focus groups I conducted in international development settings, I encountered the need to seriously rethink how I ran my own facilitations. Over time, I began to frame design thinking as a web of cross-cultural interactions. I was hired as a collaboration facilitator by the Hub for Innovation in Learning and Technology (that Jess Knott described) after my research on productive resistance to design thinking revealed what I had been learning over the past decade: that design thinking, as I understood it at the time, was neither universally applicable nor universally enjoyable by all participants. My scholarship is situated in the ethnography of design, so my orientation to design thinking focuses primarily on the interactions between participants and facilitators during design-thinking sessions, specifically to address resistance as a cultural phenomenon. Embracing suspended consensus and resistance to design thinking is an important element in my workshops. According to B. Gaver, Dunne, and Pacenti (1999), recognizing that the best solutions to problems often come from outliers is a foundational belief that differentiates designers from data-driven problem solvers. If facilitators use design thinking as a means to an end, and that end is to produce “data” that can be analyzed to identify overarching “patterns,” that iteration of design thinking underestimates the contribution of dissenting voices that could benefit us all.
In my work, participants experience facilitation from a variety of perspectives. Some of these perspectives come from students and research participants—individuals with whom I have power relationships and ethical obligations. Others are from faculty members whose livelihoods depend on being able to solve problems sitting at computers and in boardrooms and who enter my facilitation session overworked, stressed, and frustrated by the idea that they are about to spend their valuable time playing with pipe cleaners. Any of these individuals might also be neurodiverse, or—in the worst cases—they might have been marginalized and denied the right to ask questions.
No matter where I am facilitating a session, I assume that participants have likely been in other situations in which Westerners or privileged instructors enforced a specific way of framing a problem in participants’ lives. My concern is that these participants might feel compelled to go along with the perhaps unreasonable things that yet another person in power is asking them to do in the moment. Most people in design-thinking sessions intuitively recognize whether participants and facilitators are practicing the same problem-solving culture, but knowing that does nothing if it is not vocalized and opened to discussion. As a facilitator, I believe that my job is not to throw participants into a lake of ambiguity to watch them sink, swim, or walk out. My job is to give participants the tools to float in that lake for long enough to use the ambiguity they have encountered, and if they are still unable to do it, I want to make space for dissent. In my experience, projects involving collaborative writing and communication are not immune to such stress-inducing conditions that encourage structural inequalities or supporting individual accolades over group success (R. E. Burnett, 1991). Although facilitators might still preach the importance of empathy, I believe that those who ignore these underlying reasons for resistance to design thinking not only limit the range of productive solutions to problems but also exhibit an astounding lack of compassion for their own participants. As W. W. Gaver, Boucher, Pennington, and Walker (2004) argued, outliers and others who disagree with practices, approaches, or tools (such as my own) might hold the best answers to the problems their team aims to solve.
In the contexts in which I work, then, arguments over what design thinking is might be less important than the examination of what it does. Facilitated practices—what I and many other facilitators refer to as design-thinking drills (e.g., Bielenberg & Burn, 2016)—still have concrete effects in people’s lives. Many facilitators—myself included—maintain a culturally situated way of thinking about the act of creating something new. This approach can unfortunately come with a dichotomous perception of how our participants currently think, and should think, about problems. It is ultimately these underlying assumptions that create the backbone of dissent that I have encountered in facilitations.
These realizations have brought me to the frustrating conclusion that design thinking becomes wicked when we face the challenges of trying to discuss it. The proliferation of design-thinking iterations might be compared to what anthropologist Asad (2009) used to describe a religion with multiple versions of practice—a “discursive tradition” (p. 20). Design thinking is a tradition because we will always encounter groups of people who agree that what they are doing is design thinking, and it is discursive because we will also always encounter others who disagree with them. In this context, it is no wonder that design thinking is blurred across being a theory, a methodology, a method, an approach, and more.
Dànielle Nicole DeVoss: Core Faculty Member in the Minor in Entrepreneurship and Innovation
For several years, I ran the Creativity Exploratory (CE) at Michigan State University (MSU). The CE was housed in the College of Arts & Letters and was our humanities laboratory space—a creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship incubator specifically for arts and letters students. The space emerged, in part, through the experiences that I and other faculty and administrators had with self-directed, self-motivated students who did not wait for us to develop curriculum around critical issues but instead pursued problem identification and resolution on their own by acting as community and institutional catalysts. We wanted to step out of the students’ way in terms of shaping experiences for them, but we also wanted to create resources to support the work they were pursuing. Our goals were to foster collaborative, creative problem solving; support undergraduate research related to creativity and innovation; and foster undergraduate entrepreneurial initiatives, especially those related to social or cultural entrepreneurship. The CE was a STEAM-oriented space: That is, it situated itself at the university as the arts complementing and serving as connective tissue across and within science, technology, engineering, and math.
Along with wanting to provide space for students to pursue issues, challenges, and opportunities, we had another key rationale for developing the space: Today’s students face an increasingly competitive job market that requires creative problem solving and collaborative teamwork. We recognized that the majority of the jobs that students will hold after graduation perhaps did not yet exist. We wanted to create a space where students could bring projects, work with others, and engage in concepts, ideas, and developments that did not fit into the space of 15-week classes and set syllabi and that prepared them with transcendent skills (rather than tools anchored to a particular job or approach). The project-based pedagogies of the CE were fit to team-based work, brainstorming, collaboration, state-of-the-art technological resources, product-development and presentation skills, critique, and portfolio development.
We had several ideation and iteration spaces, a robust media-production lab, and a maker space that had a plotter printer, laser cutter, vinyl cutter, digital sewing machine, 3-D printer, and other tinker–maker–thinker tools. We regularly hosted special guests and hands-on workshops on a range of topics—for instance, we hosted a zine production workshop that one of our undergraduates pitched and ran and a food and language workshop that another undergrad launched and ran, linked to his love of cooking, interest in languages, and belief that food is a powerful cultural force (our university just recently launched an incubator kitchen for other students to explore food, culture, and entrepreneurship). We also consulted with individuals, units, and organizations on and beyond campus.
To do the work of the CE, early on we innovated a particular design-thinking model, which included processes of communicating, collaborating, investigating, ideating, simulating, creating, activating, and evaluating. What we often found is that the people we worked with engaged some of these steps; for instance, they might communicate (share ideas), collaborate (brainstorm), and create (produce). Or they might investigate (research), ideate (imagine), simulate (design), and activate (launch). We found, however, that a couple of steps in isolation did not necessarily foster or sustain what we argued was necessary for the sound, robust, and durable development of a thing—an idea, an app, a pitch, and so on.
One of the people we turned to for overall philosophical anchoring was Godin (2011), who said this: What we want, what we need, what we must have are indispensable human beings. We need original thinkers, provocateurs, and people who care…we need artists. Artists are people with a genius for finding a new answer, a new connection, or a new way of getting things done. (p. 8)
We often rescripted this to read that “entrepreneurs are people with a genius for finding a new answer, a new connection, or a new way of getting things done.”
One of the aspects that made the CE successful at the time was that we situated ourselves through and by design-thinking orientations and by the people who initially innovated design-thinking approaches, including Brown (2009) and IDEO. What we did not do, however, is adopt design thinking as a lockstep, default approach that could be seamlessly applied across the wide range of contexts and the diverse audiences with which we worked. We saw design thinking as a Swiss army knife rather than a hammer.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Design Thinking
With the wide-ranging definitions of and our various orientations to design thinking as a backdrop, we now turn to a discussion of what we see as the good, the bad, and the ugly of design thinking. We explore this threefold orientation to rethink design thinking as a rhetorical methodology that embraces its own ambiguities and makes space for dissensus.
The Good
Design thinking has cross-disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and codisciplinary functionality. In other words, as Ben suggested, design thinking can be adapted to different audiences, purposes, and situations. We argue that design thinking is effective at (a) providing a playbook for people to approach wicked problems, (b) creating a participatory approach to managing change in organizations and institutions, (c) building empathy in cross-functional collaboration, and (d) serving as a lens for approaching creativity and innovation.
Design thinking as both lens and playbook
Because design thinking is useful for supporting interdisciplinary teaching and learning, we collectively think of it as a kind of Swiss army knife. As Dànielle notes in her discussion of the CE, design thinking affords us pathways and potentialities when thinking about the diverse audiences and purposes we work with as administrators, faculty, facilitators, and students. As a tool that can be applied to many circumstances and contexts, design thinking offers a way of approaching problems, tools, and consultations and supporting creativity in general. In this way, design thinking is a broader lens that can be used by groups of people for approaching creative work. Design thinking can also be applied as a playbook that students can draw from as they do work in user experience. We believe that design thinking provides a useful tool set—unless, of course, facilitators deploy it as a hammer that turns every problem into a nail or as a replacement for research practices that more deeply engage innovation, creativity, and marginalized voices. And as we articulated earlier, design thinking emerged and gained traction with an orientation toward ambiguity; a playbook contains set approaches, but the ways in which we apply those approaches are nimble, flexible, and context dependent.
Design thinking in managing change
Complex organizations and institutions require leaders to carefully navigate both administrative and academic environments, often introducing tensions (if not outright conflict) between competing needs and goals. These tensions can also exist in disciplinary thinking. As Jess explained, managing projects is an exercise in complexity science; it is neither linear nor scripted. Resolving tensions requires productive conflict and, frequently, productive failure through a participatory approach. Design thinking offers a framework through which dissenting views can be made visible in productive ways. For design thinking to work well—to engage what we call the good of the approach—we must see it not as an answer but as an opportunity to take the advice of Law (2004) and “unmake many of our methodological habits, including: the desire for certainty; the expectation that we can usually arrive at more or less stable conclusions about the way things really are” (p. 9).
Design thinking as a tool to intentionally build empathy
Another of the good of design thinking has emerged in the practice of empathy-building drills to foster collaboration and suspend consensus by temporarily removing competition between collaborators. To illustrate, imagine that we are about to collaborate on a project. Just as it is counterintuitive that we must encourage (at least some forms of) conflict in order to reach the best solution to our problem (R. E. Burnett, 1991), it is also difficult to imagine the paradoxical balance that enables us to reach the best solution. That is, when collaborators present an argument, they must feel confident that their view is right but also believe fervently that their collaborator has the right to wholeheartedly disagree. 2 In this scenario, as April noted, a design-thinking facilitator might begin the collaborative process with an empathy-building drill positioning collaborators to develop a vocabulary for defining success across disciplinary boundaries and identities. Designed to elicit imagined rather than factual responses, these drills remove the need to display authority and allow participants to consider other perspectives without feeling threatened. After establishing such precedent, the facilitator can more easily make space for participants to comfortably voice opinions or resist ideas presented during the session. Thus, effective facilitation that incorporates building empathy between team members is one way that design thinking can help groups of diverse people be creative and innovate together.
The Bad
We would articulate the bad of design thinking as when it is (a) seen as a quick and easy fix to complex challenges or (b) engaged without a flexible, nimble, adaptive orientation that is attentive to the various contexts in which it is deployed.
Design thinking as a rulebook
If a goal for design thinking is to present multiple pathways (a playbook) or a lens for supporting divergent thinking and creativity, then one bad of design thinking on its own is the assumption that everyone will participate with the same level of zeal and interest—or follow a set of fixed rules applicable to everyone involved. April implied this problem in her discussion of inclusive facilitation, in which she argues the importance of facilitators making space for dissensus. Design thinking, then, is most effectively deployed in our own work as a practice that requires people to pay attention to how it is working. In other words, design thinking is not a rulebook for creativity. If deployed as a rulebook, design thinking risks fostering bad habits among team members in which one or two collaborators develop the loudest voices in the room and the others follow suit rather than question assumptions and make room for disagreement. We argue that design thinking, on its own, cannot account for the dynamics of a group, organization, or institution.
Rather, as we articulated previously, empathy must play a key role in design thinking, and that role can be obscured if design thinking is deployed as a rulebook. So if facilitators of design-thinking sessions claim to be design thinkers themselves, they should recognize and establish empathy with their own end users: their session participants. For design thinkers, innovating and accepting uncertainty are privileges, as is feeling outrage when others cannot seem to easily buy into our process. The insistence that participants need to experience unease feels uncomfortably close to the neoliberal underpinnings supporting beliefs like Necessity is the mother of invention, which assumes that people are most creative when they lack basic needs. Such insistence also ignores evidence that many innovators are able to embrace risk because they have some safety net. A utilitarian approach to resistance might have facilitators investigate where it comes from and treat it like a problem that needs to be solved in order for the session to take place. A truly empathetic approach, however, might prompt facilitators to encourage modifications so that participants design their own design thinking.
Design thinking lacking flexibility and transparency
April’s research on resistance to design thinking in the classroom indicates that the resistance of students stems from beliefs they have attained over the course of their education, including the belief that there is a right and wrong answer to everything. Design-thinking tasks that upend this assumption sometimes spark what scholarship of teaching and learning recognizes as acts of “disengagement” (e.g., “This is a stupid waste of my time,” Nussbaum & Steele, 2007) and “disidentification” (e.g., “I’m not smart enough to understand the point of this,” Cokley & Moore, 2007). Empathetic teaching would recognize that no matter how much we think our students should trust us and engage, we are not following ethical practice if we assign tasks to students without teaching them the skills to complete the assignment—and without engaging in overt instruction and deliberate practice in which we make clear to students why we are asking them to engage in a task. When tasked with, for example, combining two seemingly unrelated things in order to make something new, such as building a security device out of pennies and a shoestring, many professional designers are taught to respond with a series of questions such as these: What does security look like? What does insecurity look like? What all can pennies and shoestrings do? What all can I do with pennies and shoestrings? And finally, What might a device look like that uses pennies and a shoestring to help people feel secure? Students who have not taken design courses often do not know that they could ask these questions. It naturally follows that if we want students to complete and benefit from design tasks, we must teach them the types of questions they need to ask. If we are not more and overtly transparent in our practices, design thinking goes bad.
The resistance of faculty members, however, stems from a legitimate fear: Their income derives from their ability to solve problems according to institutional norms, and they often come to assume that this ability is the only one they have. April has found that faculty members who say they have no imagination benefit more from a discussion of what imagination actually is than from a facilitator simply telling them they should go with the flow or trust the process. Again, transparency is a key aspect of design-thinking approaches.
The lack of transparency in design thinking follows a “deficit model” similar to that documented in the relationships between sciences and public audiences (Wynne & Irwin, 1996)—the implied split between “expert” facilitators who can handle ambiguity and “ignorant” participants who will benefit from being thrown into it. For this reason, Ben positions design thinking as a methodology that must be effectively adapted to a variety of design situations. Many of the design-thinking approaches mentioned in our literature review teach that answering questions, providing examples, or explaining or legitimizing any part of the process reduces the effectiveness of design thinking because doing so removes participants from the ambiguous space that creates the best solutions. This echoes Jess’s view that management practices change, evolving with organizations and institutions through people’s participation on teams. In other words, ambiguity can be productive with the right kind of leadership or facilitation. Although teaching the mechanisms and principles behind design-thinking drills might limit the scope of possibilities, it also helps participants by giving them mechanisms for coping with uncertainty and guiding them to acknowledge and address deeper problems—sometimes with themselves and sometimes with design thinking.
The Ugly
The ugly is the messiness that we know frames the work we do, yet so often we attempt to cover it up, erase it, or deny its existence. We want to embrace the ugly aspects of design thinking, situating them not as variables to deny but rather as variables to embrace. These variables include (a) ambiguity as a goal, (b) dissensus as an important measure of success, (c) resistance as productive, and (d) ideology as embraced rather than dismissed.
Situating ambiguity as a goal
Although a powerful approach, design thinking can silence participants who feel uncomfortable with ambiguity. Often, as instructors in upper level classes, we find that by the time we teach students in these classes, they have been indoctrinated into particular contexts for learning—often a context in which the instructor is the font of knowledge and their learning is assessed via tools that test knowledge as definitive and set rather than emergent and flexible (these are students who sit through lectures and take multiple-choice exams or perhaps industry professionals who have been subjected to brainstorming as a process of listening to a boss or manager talk through ideas). One of our key roles as design-thinking facilitators is to equip participants to embrace ambiguity. As Ben asserts, instructors cannot just introduce design thinking without creating a classroom environment that values and rewards such approaches as inherent to the learning process itself—what we call productive failures through iteration.
Seeing dissensus as important to success
An inclusive and equitable learning atmosphere—one in which design thinking can be best engaged—is where participants feel as though their ideas are heard, considered, and pursued. This approach was key to successfully using design thinking in the CE, where dissensus could be seen as productive and useful—indeed, necessary—to design thinking. As R. E. Burnett (1991) argued, when groups come to consensus too quickly, certain ideas are sacrificed. If one voice dominates a discussion, other voices are not heard. When agreement happens too early on, opportunities for ideas to surface and collide are squashed. It is not easy to create an environment in which multiple voices are heard and dissensus is engaged and facilitated as a tactic, but we argue that such an environment is critical for deploying design thinking in order to facilitate the multitude of possibilities that generate productive action.
Recognizing resistance as productive
Although recognizing it as such is difficult for us to see in the moment—for instance, in a moment in which participants are not engaging or are directly challenging an activity—resistances are important, productive actions. For example, April facilitated a design-thinking session in which participants were asked to remain silent after receiving feedback about their ideas. One participant was unable to do so and explained her emotional response to others in the room. As an Indian woman from a traditional family in a male-dominated scientific field, she had worked her whole life for the right to speak in front of others. Then the rest of the session turned into an ideation exercise beginning with the recognition that individuals do not all experience design thinking in the same way. The team decided that their colleague should begin by giving feedback to others so that she would remember that she is not alone in her discomfort. The revised approach was that each participant had the opportunity to answer one burning question before the end of the session. Higher education courses are environments meant to support learning, and that environment is very much a designed social and technical system. But we do not often enough directly engage the influence of the environment and its designs on the thinking that happens in these spaces. Indeed, the learning environment itself can be a productive facilitator to demonstrate issues of cultural difference that affect our design-thinking approaches.
Embracing ideology and identity
Particularly in organizational and institutional contexts, a participatory dialogue is essential to examining people’s reactions to change (Suchan, 2006). If we ignore people’s reactions to change, we risk undermining their ability to participate in a change process. This speaks directly to what Jess argues about the need to develop a community of practice in which a variety of stakeholders can participate and initiate change. Although we have made this point earlier, we are also arguing that without embracing ideology and identity, we might be unknowingly submitting to dominant views and ideas. Intentionally overlooking or avoiding discussion is a potential ugly of implementing design thinking in classrooms, learning spaces, higher education leadership, and facilitations. Without making visible the role of dominant hegemonies or interpersonal conflicts in how we approach creativity and innovation, we risk repeating the same patterns of thinking and ways of solving problems.
Design Thinking as Rhetorical Methodology
The work of PTC is an interdisciplinary activity that draws from methodologies and methods of other disciplines—including approaches to design thinking. 3 Spinuzzi (2005), for instance, set out to describe participatory design as a methodology because PTC as a field had been considerably interested in “design-oriented research methodologies” (p. 171). In other words, as Spinuzzi noted, PTC has a history of working with new approaches to design. Sometimes, though, we are in danger of doing this work without more broadly understanding and exploring methodological context. We believe that design thinking is unique to other design methodologies in PTC because of how it has been adopted and implemented across different contexts and because of the rich adaptability it can offer our teaching and practice. But as we noted here, if we adopt design thinking as a fixed, linear practice in isolation from aspects of collaboration, dissensus, ideology, power, and so on, we flatten design thinking and disrupt some of its potential.
Overall, what seems most important to our collective work is how we deploy and support design thinking in practice by making our disagreement—our dissensus—visible in this article. Here, we wish to demonstrate that we each position design thinking in different ways across our different roles at MSU, which is why a critical–rhetorical–methodological structure is so important to using design thinking effectively. We include a working version of this structure in Table 1. Our unique orientations, positionalities, and purposes influence how we think about design thinking and how we use it in practice. To further illustrate, echoing our literature review, each of us approaches design thinking differently and uses varying key terms and phrases to emphasize those approaches. True to form, even in writing this article together, we had moments of dissensus that we chose to capture in the article rather than ignore or eliminate from it; this approach is another example of how useful design thinking can be, as it can be used to make disagreement productive—even necessary.
Characteristics of a Critical–Rhetorical–Methodological Orientation.
Here are some examples of our dissensus in practice. Ben uses the term playbook, arguing that design thinking is more or less a methodology that can and must be adapted to different design situations. This approach makes sense because Ben teaches in a program that must cover a range of user-experience design approaches. Jess situates design thinking as useful to participatory approaches to managing people and projects. Given Jess’s role at the Hub for Innovation in Learning and Technology, this view of design thinking is also appropriate. April is more concerned about making space for dissensus, zeroing in on what happens during meetings and the role of facilitators in implementing design thinking effectively. Once again, this is an effective approach given her role and work with design thinking. And finally, as director of the CE, Dànielle sees design thinking as a lens for approaching creative work.
Although we deploy and define design thinking in different ways, we also think none of us is wrong. In fact, we believe it is essential to realize that we are all right and wrong; this is the type of productive dissensus, attentive to situation, ideology, and context, that design thinking should embrace. As R. E. Burnett (1991) argued, teams and people can make diverging ideas visible to each other rather than work toward immediate consensus. Such an approach invites a different kind of expectation for the creative process and requires a variety of communication spaces (written and otherwise) that support disagreement. In collaborating on this article, we made space for dissensus in its outcome, and we believe others can do the same while considering their own unique contexts, audiences, purposes, and processes.
If we want to foster creative, problem-finding approaches that engage the best habits, tools, and possibilities offered by design-thinking approaches and if we want students and participants and clients and others to approach wicked problems, then we must think less of design thinking as a monolithic, fixed practice. Instead, we might—drawing from Marback (2009)—reorient toward design thinking as flexible practice framed by a deep responsibility not to fixed steps but rather to audiences, designs, and compositions. This reorientation toward design thinking requires empathy and self-actualization as essential to design-thinking practice. And this approach must be rhetorically anchored—attentive to critical, cultural, historical, and ideological variables that shape the work we do and influence the people with whom we work. So our work with design thinking is already rhetorical, but making visible the rhetorical underpinnings is essential to our success in implementing it as a practice. If design thinking is a way of working, acting, and making, then we must be attentive to the always-already dynamics in which our work, actions, and makings occur.
Footnotes
Acknowledgment
Benjamin Lauren would like to thank colleagues Dawn Opel and Liza Potts for sharing their syllabi and projects for research methods in experience architecture, as these materials helped him imagine and stage the classroom discussions mentioned in this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.