In an attempt to better disentangle the continued discussion on the role of systems thinking or ‘logical processing’ in ‘design thinking’, as continued here and here yesterday. I’ve had a crack at boiling it down to basic principles – in true systems fashion!

Phrased in Aristotelian terms ‘design thinking’ or more generally any problem solving exercise, consists of three cyclical phases. Depending on the view to which you subscribe, these three phases are not mutually exclusive, but the overall process could be initiated by beginning with any one of the following processes:

• Abductive Phase – Idea -  The guess or hypothesis, that intuitive or highly creative leap, the game changing, out of the box idea. A highly skilled and intuitive phase of the design process. The quality of this phase is often assessed depending on the quality of it’s rhetoric or presentation (the design pitch). Highly context specific in the sense that you will need to have a good understanding of the context in question in order to make such an intuitive jump.

• Deductive Phase –  Development –  The logical scientific part of the process where it is ascertained whether this creative leap is in fact valid or appropriate. This is the bit where you have to convince the engineers and money men. My feeling is that it is this context independent phase of the design process that is the area where systems thinking may be most valuable.

• Inductive Phase - Testing – Another context dependent phase where ultimately the ideas and that processes that you have used to realise it are tested and evaluated. This could either be formal user testing or this could occur informally whilst the product is in the market place. 

As it stands above it is probably more akin to a traditional ‘ego-design’ process, whereby the designer thinks that the strength of his idea alone is enough to justify the end result. As I perceive it, many more recent service and human-centred design processes and arguably the ‘design thinking’ approach as practiced by IDEO themselves might run as follows:

• Deductive Phase (Rule Based) (Context Sensitive) - Understanding the context and user requirements, what familar ‘rules’ (or methods) are applicable in this domain?
• Inductive Phase (Knowledge Based) (Context Independent) – Prototyping and testing of chosen ‘rules’ to assess validity to identified problem as well as other engineering and financial constraints.
• Abductive Phase (Skill Based) (Context Sensitive) – Leading to final design proposal or creative leap (with associated user involvement, empowerment and motivation).

Thus it is clear to from this definition how ’systems thinking’ or Jaimes Nel’s ‘black box’ i.e. the deductive, rule-based phase of the deisgn process can help deduce appropriate design ideas and solutions to design problems – arguably the true value of ‘design thinking’.

My own feeling from this definition however, is that it is purely the deductive phase of ‘design thinking’ to which any form of systems thinking or conceptualisation should be directed. Attempting to apply it to the other context and skill based parts of the process would as Collopy warns undermine the essence of ‘design thinking’.

What do you think?