1.1 Introduction to Design Thinking and Maker Culture

An introduction to the concepts and practicalities behind design thinking

1.1.1 What is Design Thinking?

Design Thinking
This unit was authored by Susan Schreibman with the assistance of Stephanie Ochiel.
Design thinking is many things to many disciplines. It is a method, a process, and a way of thinking. To some, it seems almost a religion. Above all, it is a user-centred approach to design.  Designing what, you might ask? Well almost anything, from software and other digital projects, to buildings, to museum exhibitions. It is used in a wide variety of disciplines, from engineering to heritage studies. It embraces an iterative rather than a linear approach to project management, does not shy away from missteps or failures, particularly in early iterations of the design process, and encourages prototyping and testing.

Taking a design thinking approach requires a project team to define the problem to be solved, and be sure the problem being solved is the one needed by the community it is being designed for. And while this sounds intuitive, it always isn't. How many times have you heard of a product being created for a demographic that does not have a need for it, or a bridge in a city centre for designed for vehicular traffic, but nobody thought that pedestrians and bicyclists would also want to use it, or software that is so anti-intuitive impossible for its users to understand without significant training.

Traditionally designers were brought into the product or process life-cycle towards the end, to  'make an already developed idea more attractive to consumers'. A design thinking approach brings not only designers, but a range of individuals together early in the design cycle to 'create ideas that better meet consumers’ needs and desires'. As Tim Brown notes, the 'former role is tactical, and results in limited value creation; the latter is strategic, and leads to dramatic new forms of value' (Brown 1). This course is about bringing that strategic value to the arts, culture, and humanities.

Design thinking is not new, although in the last 20 years it has been embraced by a  wide variety of disciplines. Its roots can be traced to the 1950s to engineers such as John Arnold, a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Business Administration at Stanford University who was one of the first to use the term in his 1959 monograph Creative Engineering.Here Arnold advocated balancing the more customary analytical approach to engineering with more creative processes and practices. Another early advocate of using design principles as a 'way of thinking'  was  Herbert A Simon in his 1969 book The Sciences of the Artificial. Simon advocated that all design is artificial, and as such, should be concerned with how things ought to be to maximise design and functional goals.

During this period Buckminister Fuller was a key figure in the development of Design Science, an allied approach in designing knowledge-oriented solutions. While a Professor in the School of Art and Design at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, he created teams of multidiscipliary specialists to help solve what we now term grand challenges, or what he termed 'problems of humanity'. These problems resonate with us today: finding renewable sources of energy, bringing education to a greater majority of the world population, and creating inexpensive, energy-efficient housing.
Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House


Around the same time what is known as the Scandinavian Design School was developing. While it had similarities to the movement in the United States, it differed fundamentally by adopting a more participatory, co-operative approach than that practiced by US-based academics. In this approach people at all levels of an organisation or community are invited to solve problems and/or create solutions. Here designers frequently take the role of facilitators, encouraging 'designing-by-doing', which resonates with the ethos of maker culture.


Many of the methods, techniques or 'tools' (as they are typically called) that we will be using in this course come out of the Scandinavian approach. For example, mock-ups, prototyping, and ethnographic field research as a means to generate new ideas or improve services or products that currently exists. This flow of activity, iterative, experimental, and by and large collaborative, takes as its starting point what the consumer wants or needs in user-centred design (See User-Centred Design later in this lesson). For more details on the history of design thinking, see The Design Lifecycle in Unit Three of this course (3.1.2).

#dariahTeach, What is Design Thinking? (YouTube)


Rikke Toft Nørgaard's image of designing as in a dance with a problem field in the video above, encompassing both possible solutions and the people you are engaging with, is a useful image. You may expand this image to a dance with methods and tools, at least this is a useful advice when you delve into the method tool boxes: The right methods or right tools depends on the field and on the challenge, which underpin the process of diverging and converging, we find methods that are diverse in approaching how to discover, define, develop and deliver (for more on the Double Diamond model of diverging and converging, see The Design Process as a Double Diamond, 3.1.5). These methods may, at first, feel less rigorous than traditional methods, such as doing interviews or creating focus groups, but methods common to design thinking, from performing a burning question, doing cultural probes, observing user journeys, doing diary studies or mapping a field in video and images have been shown to provide results, as is exemplified in the case studies in this course.

To this end, design thinking has been increasingly embraced by a wide variety of disciplines: not only engineering where it has its roots, but  computer science, business management, education, and of course in the field of design. It promotes a creative, playful approach to problem solving in team-based settings. Although design thinking leverages the creativity inspired by the interaction of the team, one can still take advantage of the tools and methods working alone or in twos.  Yet, it would be a mistake as the designers of the IGNITE course believe,  to think of design thinking as an approach best practiced in fields like engineering or business. As Richard Buchanan reminds us: 

Despite efforts to discover the foundations of design thinking in the fine arts, the natural sciences, or most recently, the social sciences, design eludes reduction and remains a surprisingly flexible activity. No single definition of design, or branches of professionalized practice such as industrial or graphic design, adequately covers the diversity of ideas and methods gathered together under the label. Indeed, the variety of research reported in conference papers, journal articles, and books suggests that design continues to expand in its meanings and connections, revealing unexpected dimensions in practice as well as understanding. This follows the trend of design thinking in the twentieth century, for we have seen design grow from a trade activity to a segmented profession to afield for technical research and to what now should be recognized as a new liberal art of technological culture (p.5)




Exercise: read the statements below and select either "true" or "false"

Please scroll (up, down and to the right) on the exercise window if the questions are not fully displayed on your screen.





References