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Design thinking research : building innovation eco-systems
Leifer L., Plattner H., Meinel C., Springer Publishing Company, Incorporated, Cham, Switzerland, 2014. 275 pp. Type: Book (978-3-319013-02-2)
Date Reviewed: Jul 11 2014

I first reached for this book because I have always wanted to know if there is anything structured in the otherwise chaotic process of inventing. The book approaches this problem from the point of view of collaborative design. It is a collection of 15 chapters written by researchers from the Hasso Plattner Institutes, in Potsdam, Germany, and Stanford, California, based on their work on design thinking.

There are many definitions of the term and various understandings of design thinking activities. Inquiry-based learning, typical in science, excellent in itself, is a bit outdated. The book asserts multiple times that we need to take a step forward and teach future generations how to approach the world from the perspective of creativity: not only how to discover, but also, based on discovery, how to change the world creatively. This conjecture boils down to a distinction between science and engineering. Although both terms significantly overlap, I would say (simplifying the relationship a bit) that science is mostly about discovery, while engineering is all about construction; that is, it is about building systems based on scientific knowledge. Thus, design processes and design thinking are fundamental to the progress we make as a society, as fundamental as science itself.

The book is divided into four parts, each comprising three to five papers related to design thinking. Interestingly, the titles of all parts are full sentences, informing the reader of specific design thinking activities. Part 1, “All Design Activity is Ultimately Social in Nature,” refers to the idea, which is reiterated across all other chapters, that working in teams is essential for achieving success. It examines how collaborative work improves the chances of success and how to organize such work, with available tools and potential pitfalls. Part 2, “Design Thinkers Must Preserve Ambiguity,” gives a very good account of the realm designers are facing, with essays on creative capacity building, acting creatively, and approaching solutions of “wicked problems.” With this, the reader is well equipped to venture into Part 3, “All Design Is Redesign,” which enforces design concepts presented previously by adding sections related to prototyping, collaboration, and user interaction.

My major focus, though, was on the papers in Part 4, “Make Ideas Tangible.” Its subsections discuss connecting design and engineering (making a product) activities, the integration of design theory and software development, agile software development in the context of design thinking, evaluation of performance in programming activities, and using design thinking in large software projects. Being a software engineer by profession, I found the reading exciting and the views expressed in these papers extremely interesting. It does not mean that I agree with most of them, but I appreciate and enjoy the breadth of ideas. For example, the value of agile methods, such as Scrum, is overrated here; they are just another way to produce good-enough software, lacking in quality, and being successful for the development of business software. They are unlikely to be adopted for developing safety-critical or cyber-physical systems.

Overall, illustrating design thinking processes is an essential contribution of this book, which shows how they may work in practical situations. I would recommend it to engineers, managers, and designers for afternoon reading, as well as to scientists who want to grasp the virtues of engineering processes, which actual scientific discoveries may lead to. Although the book gives no recipes for success, it may be very useful for shaping our own ideas about solving innovative problems and processes. I would have enjoyed a conclusion section to summarize the accomplishments and to point to future research on design thinking.

Reviewer:  Janusz Zalewski Review #: CR142498 (1410-0848)
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