Compilations are usually a mixed bag, with some great papers and a few that leave you scratching your head. Design thinking research is like that. For example, “Preserving Access to Previous System States in the Lively Kernel” in Part 4 is basically about change control in a web platform. It’s great for people using the platform, but it has nothing to do with design thinking as far as I could tell. And what is design thinking? The book’s preface and introduction don’t say, but other sources describe design thinking as a process that lets teams of engineers, designers, anthropologists, and what-have-you work on “wicked” problems or, in other words, problems without straightforward solutions.

The design thinking approach is to start with a goal (a better future) instead of a specific problem (a better mouse trap). Practitioners research the goal from every point of view possible, especially the clients’, develop a solution, create a prototype, test it in the real world, pivot if necessary (retain what works but leave behind what doesn’t), and iterate until they find something that meets the goal. Stanford University’s d.school and its sister institute, Hasso Plattner Institute for Software Systems Engineering, teach design thinking, and this book collects research about design thinking from teachers and researchers at both locations.

Design thinking research does contain some intriguing papers. In Part 1, one is “Talkabout: Making Distance Matter with Small Groups in Massive Classes.” The authors ran a peer discussion system with students from around the world, and they found that the more geographically diverse the discussion group, the better students did on later quizzes (the authors imply that the students probably paid more attention because they were exposed to different ways of thinking). The title of the next paper, “Improving Design Thinking Through Collaborative Improvisation,” is dry, but the experiment itself is not. The authors wanted to see how people reacted to and interacted with expressive robots. So they built three: a roving ottoman that invited people to put their feet up, dresser drawers that opened to help a subject solve a puzzle, and a trash barrel robot that wiggled to invite cafeteria goers to drop in their trash.

The papers in Part 2, “Creativity and Creative Confidence,” address how to judge whether a team is creative, a wicked problem in itself. “Designing a Creativity Assessment Tool” collects information about the assessments already available and their uses and limitations, and proposes a half-hour case study that uses the d.school’s design project structure (condition evaluation, condition identification, need distillation, and so on, up to debriefing at the end) to test students’ grasp of the concepts.

In Part 3, “Measuring Design Thinking,” the value of “Measuring the Impact of Design Thinking” and “Developing Design Thinking Metrics as a Driver of Creative Innovation” is that both sets of authors collected information from companies that use design thinking. They found, however, that even though their respondents perceived some kind of impact, only a few tried to measure it. “The metrics of those who do measure design thinking’s impact vary considerably, but customer feedback and satisfaction is a recurring theme” (p. 157), the authors of “Measuring the Impact” say.

The point of this book seems to be to collect the experiences of as many teachers and research associates teaching design thinking as possible. Based on their experiences, can creativity be taught? Can it be evaluated? Is design thinking a reproducible methodology? In short, can design thinking be “professionalized,” as Leifer and Meinel suggest in the first essay, “Manifesto: Design Thinking Becomes Foundational”? “Imagine that in time there will be professional schools of design thinking, much as we have schools of engineering, schools of medicine, and schools of business” (p. 3). Perhaps, but it might be helpful if the d.school experts considered other movements that use essentially the same processes: for example, collective impact, which addresses social issues, and the lean startup approach, which entrepreneurs use to find new products and services. Research by MIT’s Eric von Hippel on the sources of innovation and Google’s design sprints are two other manifestations of the same idea: hire a cross-disciplinary team, research the problem with the people affected by it, synthesize the results, propose solutions, test, pivot, and repeat.