Interactions - March/April 2011

sional designers. Their goal is not to design the work but to do the work. Furthermore, design thinking cannot be explained such that people can then be ready to practice design; practicing design differs from the theoretical understanding of what design is. Learning design thinking therefore requires actual participation in designing in which experts can “coach, not teach, learners,” to use Schön’s phrase. On one hand, design thinking is a general skill that everybody possesses—many people can write coherent, well-crafted prose, cook a creative new dish, or arrange a living room nicely. Yet not everyone can learn to become a competent designer.

Technologies play a crucial role in this learning, although, as we’ve emphasized, technologies are only a means, not an end. We therefore need to broaden the role of technology. Technology can be a tool for learning design thinking and facilitating cultural change. This is one area in which we see HCI as offering a somewhat limited purview. As an outgrowth of engineering, HCI tends to treat technologies as an end. In the case we presented earlier, members of the organization acquired design thinking experientially, initially by working with the practitioner and designing with simple intranet tools. Gradually, they started proposing new tools and new ways to organize the work. Instead of designing abstractions such as roles, communication paths, and strategies, they designed tangible artifacts. We believe this played an important role in helping them acquire design thinking.

Therefore, to help acquire design
thinking, as practitioners we need
to constantly challenge people’s
assumptions. In this relationship,
we are always conscious about
our relationship with the client.
We do not take our relationship
with them for granted and instead
try to design the relationship as
part of our project. Inherently
we become part of the situa-
tion that we seek to change.

nizational frame, taking into fuller account how organizations actually change (e.g., cultural change and power relations), and one that still emphasizes the valuable roles of technology, communication, and coordination. Just as HCI was highly successful in its goal of improving the relationship of a user to a computer by integrating multiple disciplines, this new research will also require many disciplines. Social scientists have a larger role to play here, one that’s much more important than finding ways to make technology more useful: We also need to better understand the broader role of technology and its design. We need to understand not only usability and the usefulness of a technology for a certain work practice, but also the interactions the technology affords in transforming human conditions and learning.

Research Agenda

While practitioners like us can talk about many folk theories as to how to help clients transform their organizations, we feel that more grounded theories to guide us in practice are needed. There is a lack of existing theories that could guide us through the clients’ learning process. It is not clear in what process clients acquire such skills as design thinking while they initially have no idea and become defensive. Furthermore, while theories emphasize the political nature of organizational change, little guidance is available as to what specifically practitioners can do. We require theoretical insights more substantive than participatory design methods, such as future workshops, card sorting, and games.

For this reason we would like to call for research that is sensitive to the issues practitioners really face. We propose a research agenda that incorporates a broader orga-

End notEs

[ 1] Schön, D. A. The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Basic Books, New York, 1983. [ 2] Cross, N. Designerly Ways of Knowing. Springer, London, 2006. [ 3] Lawson, B. How Designers Think: The Design Process Demystified. 4th ed. Elsevier, Oxford, UK:, 2006. [ 4] Buchanan, R. Rhetoric, jumanism, and design. In R. Buchanan and V. Margolin, eds., Discovering Design: Exploration in Design Studies. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1995.

About thE Authors Barton Friedland is managing partner of Luminous Group Consulting LLC. He is a veteran of Apple and NeX T, and was director of engineering for Spoken Yutaka Yamauchi is a senior lecturer at Kyoto University’s Graduate School of Management. His ethnographic studies of tech-nology-rich workplaces include IS design, troubleshooting complex technologies, and product design.