As part of my research on design as collective and embodied practice, I am excited to participate in the 11th Design Thinking Research Symposium (DTRS11), which will be held at the Copenhagen Business School 12-15 November. DTRS has been consolidated as one of the most important venues in design research in general, and the referent venue for design thinking research in particular. Through the years, DTRS has followed a unique setup where a shared dataset provides a common frame of reference to a international academics with a mutual interest in Design Thinking. Selected researchers analyze the shared video based dataset, covering design practices in an organizational setting, using diverse perspectives and methodologies. As part of this privileged group, I have written, co-authored by Wolff-Michael Roth, an article titled "Design {Thinking ı Communicating}: A Sociogenetic Approach to Reflective Practice in Collaborative Design". In the paper, we advance a theoretical and methodological perspective on the relation between Design Thinking and Design Communication that is based on a Marxist, Vygotskian framework for the study. As we elaborate in the paper, the perspective has implications for the way in which creativity can be conceptualised and fostered in interdisciplinary collaborative design. All articles accepted for the symposium will form part of an edited book on Design Thinking to be published by Taylor & Francis/CRC Press, and selected articles will be included in special issues in the Co-Design and the Design Issues journals. Here the abstract of our contribution:
Design {Thinking | Communicating}: A Sociogenetic Approach to Reflective Practice in Collaborative Design.
Alfredo Jornet (University of Oslo) and Wolff-Michael Roth (University of Victoria)
The social nature of reflective practice in design thinking research has been emphasized at least since Bucciarelli’s and Schön’s pioneering studies. A challenge remains, however, to theorize design thinking without having to begin from the individual in order to arrive at the social. In this paper, we describe a sociogenetic approach, which theorizes design thinking as a communicative, semiotic process that is generative of its individual aspects, rather than the other way around. Accordingly, there is but one design thinking practice that generates both persons and contexts. We use this approach to examine the reflective practices of a design team aiming to develop a design and marketing concept-package for a company targeting the Chinese market. The analyses focus on the joint work the participants produce to generate, frame, and re-frame insights and concepts as they reflect upon prior co-creation workshops throughout the design trajectory. Our findings reveal constitutive features of design thinking as social process, including (a) the dual nature of descriptions as instructional devices, (b) the irreducible receptive aspect inherent to social relations, and (c) the unity of thinking and affect. Our analyses on the generative nature of communication in design work allow us to discuss design thinking not so much as a form of natural intelligence—as it has been defined—but as a form of natural intelligibility, a view that has implications for how researchers and practitioners may approach their own reflective practices.