Making as Catalyst for Intuition in Design Thinking Bertha Patricia Barrera Garza Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology

Abstract

Design thinking has become a buzz word in the last decade or so and has been an approach to solve complex problems when the traditional solving methodologies seem to have limitations. However, its origins are not in the business world, but in the area of design, where research explores the internal process that a designer follows in order to fulfill a design brief. Our aim is to understand the role of making and intuition during a design thinking process. Based on my own previous experience facilitating design thinking workshops, the thesis aims to explore the opportunity of making as driver for enhanced participation, engagement, and intuitive judgment in design thinking activities. Design thinking is a group of mental processes that have the ability to help solve difficult or wicked design problems. Intuition and intuitive judgment are important to design thinking as participants engage a design challenge to explore potential solution ideas. Making, which has always been represented in design thinking, is positioned through reference to constructivism, constructionism, and embodied cognition. This then provides an operational definition that I apply across four empirical studies, studies A-D. The first two studies, A and B, explore design thinking workshops, which follow the traditional design thinking methodology. The workshops test the role of making in enhancing intuitive judgment in design thinking and presents the results of a workshop study that investigates the impact of making on both designer and non-designers' ability to use their intuition in design thinking sessions. The study found that making at the beginning of the design thinking workshops increased the frequency of high-level, intuitive decisions as an indicator of the application of intuition regardless of the participant's status as a designer or non-designer. In study C, I conduct an expert interview approach to interview 16 design thinking facilitators from around the globe. The analysis of interview responses provides a broader understanding of intuitive judgment in design thinking and how practitioners view the opportunity to make. Emergent themes include storytelling, play, and safe-space as important aspects of making in design thinking. Our final study, Study D, employed an autoethnographic approach, whereby participation in an international design thinking workshop provided opportunity to further explore the concept of safe-space, emergent from the expert interview study. With the use of a diary as my data collecting tool, I apply the LICW (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) approach to analyze the resulting diary entries. The study indicates how emotion and intuition are related; the more negative emotion is present the less opportunity for intuitive judgement, being instead replaced by rational thought. This result correlates with the experts in their definition of safe-spaces in design thinking. The study suggests how, and it what ways making may be applied within design thinking contexts to enhance engagement and support intuitive judgement, for both designer and non-designer. Findings may contribute to understand where and how to apply making in support of design thinking. Results also have implications for understanding the relationship between making, design thinking, and intuitive judgment. Keywords: Design Thinking; Making; Design Intuition; Design Process; Design Making