The core of design thinking and its

application
Kees Dorst, Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building, University of
Technology Sydney, PO Box 123 Broadway NSW2007, Australia
Department of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology,
Eindhoven, The Netherlands
In the last few years, Design Thinking has gained popularity e it is now seen
as an exciting new paradigm for dealing with problems in sectors as far a eld as
IT, Business, Education and Medicine. This potential success challenges the
design research community to provide unambiguous answers to two key
questions: What is the core of Design Thinking? and What could it bring to
practitioners and organisations in other elds?. We sketch a partial answer by
considering the fundamental reasoning pattern behind design, and then looking
at the core design practices of framing and frame creation. The paper ends with
an exploration of the way in which these core design practices can be adopted for
organisational problem solving and innovation.
2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: reasoning, framing, problem solving, design practice

Corresponding author:
Kees Dorst
[email protected].
au

he term Design Thinking has been part of the collective consciousness of design researchers since Rowe used it as the title of his 1987
book (Rowe, 1987). The rst Design Thinking Research Symposium
was an exploration of research into design and design methodology, viewed
from a design thinking perspective (Cross, Dorst, & Roozenburg, 1992).
Multiple models of design thinking have emerged since then, based on
widely dierent ways of viewing design situations and using theories and
models from design methodology, psychology, education, etc. Together,
these streams of research create a rich and varied understanding of
a very complex human reality. Nowadays, Design Thinking is identied
as an exciting new paradigm for dealing with problems in many professions, most notably Information Technology (IT) (e.g Brooks, 2010) and
Business (e.g. Martin, 2009). The eagerness to adopt and apply these design
practices in other elds has created a sudden demand for clear and denite
knowledge about design thinking (including a denition and a toolbox).
That is quite problematic for a design research community that has been
shy of oversimplifying its object of study, and cherishes multiple perspectives and rich pictures.

www.elsevier.com/locate/destud
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2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

521

There are many good reasons to be interested in design, and consequently different people have picked up on Design Thinking in dierent ways. This paper addresses one particular strand of enquiry; the interest in Design
Thinking expressed by the business and management communities, who feel
an urgent need to broaden their repertoire of strategies for addressing the complex and open-ended challenges faced by contemporary organisations (Stacey,
Grin, & Shaw, 2000). Studying the way designers work and adopting some
designerly practices could be interesting to these organisations because designers have been dealing with open, complex problems for many years, and
the designing disciplines have developed elaborate professional practices to
do this. The challenge of dealing with these open, complex problems leads
to a particular interest in the ways designers create frames, and the way design organisations deal with frames in their eld of practice.
This paper starts out by using a model from formal logic to describe the key reasoning patterns in design. This provides a basis for understanding how design
deals with open, complex problems. We will then explore which, out of a very
broad and complex repertoire of design practices, could be most interesting
for adoption in organisations that operate in other professional elds. The creation of frames is singled out, and the complex relationship between framing
practices and organisational problem solving is investigated in more detail.

The challenge: abduction

To understand the complex and sometimes puzzling eld of design practices

we have to realize that they have been developed in response to a particular
need. It would be impossible to really understand design or even to nd commonality in the incredibly diverse array of design practices without rst referring back to the core challenge of design.
To build up a conceptual framework that is fundamental enough to anchor the
variety of approaches that designers take, and connect the many descriptions
of design thinking that have arisen in design research, it may be strategic to
temporarily suspend the generation of rich descriptions of design and instead
take a sparse account as our starting point. Logic provides us with a group of
core concepts that describes reasoning in design and other professions. A
sparse description derived from logic will help us to explore whether design
is actually very dierent from other elds e and should provide us with
some insight on the potential value of introducing elements of design practice
into other elds. In this paper we will move from these spartan beginnings to
richer descriptions of design.
To get to the heart of design thinking we build on the way fundamentally different kinds of reasoning are described in formal logic, in particular the way
Roozenburg has described the work of Peirce in the context of design
(Roozenburg & Eekels, 1995). We will describe the basic reasoning patterns

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that humans use in problem solving by comparing dierent settings of the

knowns and unknowns in the equation:

In Deduction, we know the what (the players in a situation we need to attend

to), and we know how they will operate together. This allows us to safely predict
results. For instance, if we know that there are stars in the sky, and if we are
aware of the natural laws that govern their movement, we can predict where
a star will be at a certain point in time.

Alternatively, in Induction, we know the what in the situation (stars), and we can
observe results (position changes across the sky). But we do not know the how,
the laws that govern these movements. The proposing of working principles
that could explain the observed behaviour (aka hypotheses) is a creative act.

This form of reasoning is absolutely core to the context of discovery in the

sciences: this is the way hypotheses are formed. Within the sciences, these hypotheses are then subjected to critical experiments in an eort to falsify them.
These rigorous tests are driven by deduction. Thus, in the sciences, inductive
reasoning informs discovery, while deductive reasoning informs justication. These two forms of analytical reasoning help us to predict and explain
phenomena in the world.
But what if we want to create value for others, as in design and other productive professions? Then the equation changes subtly, in that the end now is not
a statement of fact, but the attainment of a certain value.

The basic reasoning pattern in productive thinking is Abduction. Abduction

comes in two forms e what they have in common is that the outcome of the process is conceived in terms of value. The rst form, Abduction-1, is often associated with conventional problem solving. Here we know both the value we wish
to create, and the how, a working principle that will help achieve the value we
aim for. What is missing is a what (an object, a service, a system), that will give

The core of design thinking

523

denition to both the problem and the potential solution space within which an
answer can be sought.

This is often what designers and engineers do e create a design that operates with a known working principle, and within a set scenario of value
creation. This is a form of closed problem solving that organisations in
many elds do on a daily basis (see Dorst, 2006). The other form of productive reasoning, Abduction-2, is more complex because at the start of
the problem solving process we ONLY know the end value we want to
achieve. This open form of reasoning is more closely associated with
(conceptual) design.

So the challenge in Abduction-2 is to gure out what to create, while there is

no known or chosen working principle that we can trust to lead to the aspired
value. That means we have to create a working principle and a thing (object,
service, system) in parallel. The need to establish the identity of two unknowns in the equation, leads to design practices that are quite dierent
from conventional problem solving (Abduction-1). As the challenge that is before the actor in Abduction-2 is most closely associated with design
(Roozenburg & Eekels, 1995) and best represents the open, complex problems
for which organisations are seeking new approaches, Adbuction-2 will be the
focus of this paper.

The response: design reasoning

There are many ways to respond to the challenge presented by Abduction-2:

for example, students and other novice designers can be seen to almost randomly generate proposals for both the how and the what, and then seek
to nd a matching pair that does lead to the aspired value. But experienced designers tend to have much more deliberate (and ecient) strategies to tackle
the complex creative challenge of coming up with both a thing and its working principle that are linked to the attainment of a specic value. These strategies involve the development or adoption of a frame. In terms of our logical
framework, a frame is the general implication that by applying a certain
working principle we will create a specic value.

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Framing is a term commonly used within design literature (since (Sch

on, 1983))
for the creation of a (novel) standpoint from which a problematic situation can
be tackled (for an example of framing see Section 4 of this paper). Although
frames are often paraphrased by a simple metaphor, they are in fact very complex
sets of statements that include the specic perception of a problem situation, the
(implicit) adoption of certain concepts to describe the situation, a working principle that underpins a solution and the key thesis: IF we look at the problem situation from this viewpoint, and adopt the working principle associated with that
position, THEN we will create the value we are striving for.
Performing the complex creative feat of the parallel creation of a thing (object, service, system) and its way of working is the core challenge of design
reasoning. This double creative step requires designers to come up with proposals for the what and how, and test them in conjunction. The most logical way to approach this complex problem situation is to work backwards,
as it were, starting from the only known in the equation, the value that
needs to be created, and then adopt or develop up a frame. This initial framing activity is actually a form of induction, reasoning back from consequences. Once a credible, promising or at least possibly interesting frame
is proposed, the designer can move to Abduction-1, designing a thing (object, system, service) that will allow the equation to be completed. Only completed equations can be tested on their merit. The next step then is
a reasoning forward, using deduction to see if the thing and working principle combined actually perform well enough to create the value. Until this
test, the frame-as-proposed is just that: a possible way forward, that cannot
be accepted as denitive until the whole equation has been lled in by the
creation of the design, and that design has been shown to lead to the aspired
value.
This comparison establishes the designing professions as reasoning in ways
fundamentally dierent from the reasoning in elds predominantly based on
analysis (deduction, induction) and problem solving (Abduction-1, see also
(Dorst, 1997, 2006)). But the distinction is not very clear-cut, as we have
seen that design is not one way of thinking: it is a mix of dierent kinds of
thinking, building as it does on induction and problem solving. It also inherently contains quite a bit of strict analytical reasoning, as rigorous deduction is
needed to check if design solutions will work.

The breadth of design practice

As a response to the challenge of working in problem situations that require

this second, open kind of abduction, designers have developed and professionalised specic ways of working. This is an important point: although
many of the activities that designers do are quite universal, and thus it would
be inappropriate to claim these as exclusive to design or Design Thinking,
some of these activities have been professionalised in the design disciplines in

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525

ways that could be valuable for other elds. The value then is not so much to
be found in a general adoption of something as amorphous as Design
Thinking, but it lies in the application of these specic professional design
practices.
To quickly get a sense of the broad repertoire of design practices, we can turn
to the overview given in Lawson and Dorst (2009), based on three dierent categorisations; distinguishing between kinds of design activities, levels of design
expertise and layers of design practice. Starting with the kinds of design activities, Lawson and Dorst distinguish ve general groups: Formulating, Representing, Moving, Evaluating and Managing. The second distinction is
between seven levels of design expertise: Nave, Novice, Advanced Beginner, Competent, Expert, Master and Visionary. These roughly correspond with seven dierent ways of operating in design practice, namely
choice based, convention based, situation based, strategy based, experience
based, creating new schemata and the redenition of the eld. These seven approaches each come with their own practices. A third and, in the light of this
paper, very signicant distinction is made between three layers of design practice: project, process and what we will here call the layer of the eld (after
Bourdieu et al. (1999)). The rationale behind this categorisation is that design
is not just an activity within projects, but that experienced designers develop
up their own processes that work across projects within a rm or professional
practice. The third layer, eld then is the organisational, intellectual and
physical environment in which a type of design practice can take shape (hence
the term, as Bourdieu sets out the playing eld of a social group). The reality
of the concept of the eld for professional designers can be illustrated by this
interview quote from Ken Yeang. He is an eminent architect, describing his
work on creating the eld in his big internationally operating architectural
rm:
.Im trying to develop a new form of architecture. We have this climatically
responsive tropical skyscraper agenda and each project we try to see whether
we can push an idea a little bit further.I give every new member of sta the
practice manual to read when they join. They can see not just past designs but
study the principles upon which they are based. We work these out over time,
over many projects.. I do competitions more as an academic exercise.
I treat competitions as research projects..it motivates the oce e gets
them excited - lets the mind develop new thoughts and themes. I put all the
drawings together an publish a book. its research, it develops ideas.
(Lawson & Dorst, 2009, p. 63)
The repertoire of frames that the design rm regularly works with are a key
element of the eld that holds their professional design practice together. In
Lawsons book, top designers report dierent strategies to manage the eld
and to adopt, maintain, develop and express the frames of the organisation.

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This is an interesting area of organisation-level design practices that could be

relevant for adoption in other professional arenas (Dorst, 2009, p. 64).

A core design practice: frame creation

We have seen that the creation and use of frames is inherently linked to
Abduction-2. Framing is the one step in the Abduction-2 process that is particular to design practice: the processes in Induction, Abduction-1 and Deduction are part of the conventional problem solving repertoire of many
organisations. Thus in our aspiration in this paper to concentrate on the
core, special thing that design practices could bring to organisations that are
struggling with open, complex problem situations, it is a natural choice to concentrate on framing.
The process of design reasoning as it was described in Section 2 looks quite
complex, and if spelled out in its logical principles it is. However, framing can
be a simple, routine, lightning-quick process within design practice. If the
problem situation is familiar, and the designer has dealt with such matters
before, a frame will be an integral part of the way the designer is reading
the situation, and will come to mind straight away. The more elaborate
multi-step process described in Section 2 only comes into play when the problem situation presents a real paradox to the designer. The word paradox is
used here in the sense of a complex statement that consists of two or more
conicting statements e true or valid in their own right, but they cannot
be combined. The core paradox is the real opposition of views, standpoints
or requirements that requires a renewed framing of the problematic situation. In her writings on ethics in engineering, Caroline Whitbeck ags the
way designers deal with paradoxes as a key element of design practice
(Whitbeck, 1998).
. The initial assumption (within moral philosophy) that a conict is irresolvable is misguided, because it defeats any attempt to do what design engineers often do so well, namely, to satisfy potentially conicting
considerations simultaneously (Whitbeck, 1998, p. 56).
Framing in response to paradoxes in the problem situation is a key and rather
special element of designs problem solving practices. As we are interested in
the transfer of core design practices into other problem arenas, we need to
now focus on understanding the capacity of design practitioners to create
new frames. The rough description of design reasoning in Section 2 only describes how frames are used, but not where frames originate.
Experienced designers can be seen to engage with a novel problem situation by
searching for the central paradox, asking themselves what it is that makes the
problem so hard to solve. They only start working toward a solution once the
nature of the core paradox has been established to their satisfaction. In a study
that observed the subsequent process in detail, it was found that the best expert

The core of design thinking

527

designers do not address the core paradox head-on, but tend to focus on issues
around it. They search the broader problem context for clues. New frames with
which to tackle the central paradox then arise (or emerge) from this engagement
with the broader problem context (Dorst, 1997). A very deliberate strategy for
frame creation has recently been proposed by Hekkert and van Dijk (2011) e
here we will describe the broader principle of frame creation itself.
In creating new frames, what expert designers are engaging in is a subtle process of analysis that has much in common with phenomenological methods of
analysis, through which a complex situation is read in terms of themes (Van
Manen, 1990, p. 89). In phenomenological method, a theme is the experience
of focus, of meaning. Themes are essentially a sense-making tool, a form of
capturing the underlying phenomenon one seeks to understand. They are
not clearly positioned in either the problem space or the solution space; their
status is unclear until it is determined (retrospectively, after the frame is proposed) where they belong. Distilling themes from a complex situation is described as a process of insightful invention, discovery and disclosure. In
design practice we see that themes which could (from a problem solving perspective) be judged peripheral to the central paradox, become the triggers for
the creation of new frames that allow the central paradox to be approached in
a new and interesting way.
Although new frame creation is an important element in professional design
practice, it often looks to be a largely informal activity. Designers refer to getting close to the situation, they talk about the importance of the richness of
the problem area, and they do stress the merit of getting rst-hand experience
of the problem situation. While this sounds vague and their behaviour may
look quite hit-and-miss, we would argue that they are exploring the broader
problem situation, gathering clues that can lead to the emergence of themes.
These themes inform the development of a frame that articulates a response
to the central paradox of the problem situation. This is a deliberate strategy,
not a random process. There is some method to their madness, after all.
An example of theme exploration and frame creation in a complex problem
situation might help to illustrate this practice.
The problem situation centres on entrenched and seemingly intractable issues
associated with an entertainment quarter in a metropolis. This particular
area with its bars and clubs attracts about 30,000 young people on a good
night. The issues include drunkenness, ghts, petty theft, drugs dealing
and, later in the night, sporadic violence. Over the years, the local government has been using strong arm tactics, increasing the police presence
and putting in CCTV cameras. Clubs have been required to hire security personnel. All this visible extra security has made for a grim public environment,
and the problems have persisted.

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Designers from the Designing Out Crime centre (see (Lulham, Camacho
Duarte, Dorst, & Kaldor, 2012)) quickly realized that the issues presented to
them were framed by the local council as law-and-order problems, needing
law-and-order solutions. The designers took a broader approach and studied
the behavior of the revelers in detail. Key themes that emerged were that the people concerned are overwhelmingly young people (non-criminals) wanting to
have a good time (the value to be achieved), and that they were becoming increasingly bored and frustrated as the night progressed. Paradoxically, they
were not getting a good experience at all e a problem exacerbated by the security measures in place. The designers framed what were originally presented as
crime issues dierently by studying these themes and proposing a simple analogy: that this problem could be approached AS IF they were dealing with organising a good-sized music festival. This analogy immediately allows further
exploration: WHAT would one do IF one were to organise a music festival?
This metaphor triggers new scenarios for action, as well-run music festivals provide for needs that have not been taken care of in this public space. Just to name
a few, out of about 20 design directions that were sparked by this single frame:

- Transportation. When organising a music festival one would make sure that
people would be able to get there, and also leave again when they want to. In
this entertainment quarter, the peak time of young people coming into the
area is about 1AM, and the last train leaves at 1.20AM. Getting a taxi
takes about 2 h, later in the night. So once you are in the area you cannot leave
without diculty until the trains start running again at six in the morning.
That leads to boredom, frustration and aggression. Apart from putting in
more trains, the designers proposed as a fall-back position a system of temporary signage on the pavement, helping the party-goers to get to a dierent
train station (a 20 min walk) that has trains running throughout the night.
- Crowd control. In organising a music festival, one would also create chillout spaces and continuous attractions, to make sure that peoples experience
does not completely depend on what happens on a single big stage. As it happens, this entertainment quarter has a few big clubs that form the main attractions. Youngsters that have visited a club and go back out on the street
might nd that the queue for the next one is too long, and so wander on the
streets with nothing to do. The designers proposed that this problem can be
minimized by providing a smartphone app, allowing them to check the waiting time for the next club before leaving the one they are in. It was also suggested that some of the laneways around the central street be opened up as
rest areas, with water fountains and a more relaxed lounge atmosphere.
- Safety and waynding. In organising a music festival, one would plan for
sta to be around to help people and keep an eye on safety. Over the years,
the clubs have hired more and more sinister-looking security personnel and
bouncers. The designers proposed a system of very visible young guides in

The core of design thinking

529

bright T-shirts, who would help people nd their way through the area and
also would be approachable when help is needed.
This example shows how a hitherto paradoxical and open, complex problem
situation can be approached in an original manner. The designers created
a frame, based on the themes that emerged from their investigations. Through
this process, the designers moved away from the frame in which the problem
was originally expressed and the limitations in the working mechanisms that
were implied in that frame.

Frame creation and organisational change

As stated in the introduction, interest in Design Thinking has been sparked

by organisations having trouble dealing with open, complex problem situations. This is where the way design practice deals with themes and frames in
the context of open, abductive reasoning could be particularly useful. For organisations, these really serious and potentially paradoxical problematic situations arise when their conventional problem solving fails, when the equation
(what plus how leads to value) that an organisation has been operating under somehow doesnt work any more. In these situations, it can be very hard to
fathom whats wrong: should the what be changed, the how could be wrong,
the frame that drives the implication could be faulty or maybe the organisation is misreading the values in the world?

There are several dierent ways of enlisting designerly practices for dealing with
this problematic situation. (1) Organisations often initially react in a way that
requires the least eort and fewest resources: they set out in a conventional
problem solving manner (Abduction-1) to create a new something that will
save the day while keeping the how, frame and value constant. We have
seen in the example above that this is often the nature of the problem situation
as it is rst presented to a designer, implicitly framed by the client organisation
(see also Paton and Dorst, this issue). Often, the problem-as-presented rst
needs to be deconstructed (Hekkert & van Dijk, 2011) before it can become
amenable to solution. We then progress to (2): if the Abduction-1 approach of
creating a new what doesnt help, the organisation may need to go into
Abduction-2 mode, that also requires them to create a new how. The organisation might do this simply by applying one of the other frames that it already
has in its repertoire, in its eld. (3) Alternatively the organisation might hire
an external consultant that uses his/her experience to bring a new frame to the
problematic situation. That frame could be added on to the practice of the organisation for this particular project, quite supercially, or it might become
more important than that and enter the eld of the organisation, as an integral part of the organisations own problem solving capability. (4) We have
seen that a new frame can also be developed from scratch through exploring
themes in the broader problem situation. When this happens within the organisation itself, the new frame (and all the knowledge gained in the theme

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investigation) could become part of that organisations eld. (5) Ideally, this
would result in the designerly ability to investigate themes and create new
frames that can be embedded in the organisation. If this crucial step is
made, the organisation will be able to better deal with its open, complex challenges in the future. This is the most potent possibility for organisations that
adopt the core design practice of frame creation.

Conclusion

We set out to investigate how design practices could be enlisted to help organisations deal with the new open, complex problems they are facing in the
modern world. This paper has concentrated on frame creation as a core practice that is particular to the designing disciplines, and explored how that design
practice could interface with an organisation. We have seen that design practices can relate to the practice of an organisation on at least ve dierent levels:
as the design practices that address problems within an existing frame
(Abduction-1); as design practices that involve framing (Abduction-2), where
the frame originates from the existing company practice; as the adoption of
a new frame that has been brought or developed by an outsider; and as the
creation of a new frame through the investigation of themes, in a deeper transformation of the organisations own practices. This last level is where designbased practices and organisational innovation are most intimately linked. This
is where design practices and the knowledge that has been built up over almost
50 years of design research can directly relate to processes that have been
described in terms of entrepreneuring (Steyaert, 2007) and eectuation
(Sarasvathy, 2008) in management literature.
Often, in popular literature, many disparate, vaguely creative activities are
combined under the label of Design Thinking. We hope to have shown in
this analysis that the design professions stand for quite specic and deliberate
ways of reasoning, and that design practices can interface with organisations
on dierent levels, requiring the application of dierent kinds, levels and layers
of design practice (see Section 3) each requiring specic designerly abilities.
Confusion about these application levels seems to be partly to blame for the
general confusion about both the nature and the merit of Design Thinking.
This confusion has now reached a crisis point, with eminent design researchers
rallying against using the term Design Thinking at all, vocally pronouncing
its death. In this paper we have tried to demonstrate that specic elements
of design practice, like the way professional designers create frames out of
the investigation of themes in the broader problem situation, could really benet organisations and practitioners in other elds. In order to realise the true
value that Design Thinking can have for these practitioners and organisations, we need to articulate these practices with subtlety, clarity and in much
more detail than has been achieved in this brief paper. They are the key contribution that design practitioners and design researchers could bring to a professional world that really needs them.

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531

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