Design Thinking @ College of Design
Recommended Resources on Design Thinking
April 2013
Books
Warren Berger, CAD Monkeys, Dinosaur Babies, and T-Shaped People: Inside the World of
Design Thinking and How It Can Spark Creativity and Innovation, Penguin Books, 2010
Tim Brown, Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires
Innovation, HarperCollins, 2009.
Roger Martin, Opposable Mind, Winning Through Integrative Thinking, Harvard, 2009.
Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, Penguin, 2006.
Articles
Design Thinking …. What is That, Fast Company, 2006
http://www.fastcompany.com/919258/design-thinking-what
Design Thinking, Tim Brown, Harvard Business Review, 2008
http://hbr.org/2008/06/design-thinking/ar/1
Design Thinking for Social Innovation, Tim Brown & Jocelyn Wyatt, 2010
Stanford Social Review
http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/design_thinking_for_social_innovation/
Websites
IDEO: https://www.ideo.org/
Design Revolution: http://www.d-rev.org/
Mass Design Group: http://www.massdesigngroup.org/
Public Interest Design: http://www.publicinterestdesign.org/
Stanford Dschool Resources: https://dschool.stanford.edu/groups/dresources/
Stanford Dschool Methods : http://dschool.stanford.edu/use-our-methods/
Videos
Innovation through Design Thinking by Tim Brown (IDEO) at MIT
http://video.mit.edu/watch/innovation-through-design-thinking-9138/
Design Thinking CBS, 60 minutes
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50138327n
Design Thinking can be learned, David Kelley on BusinessWeek
http://www.businessweek.com/videos#video=xhNXBrMjqu9x8m5wJL8yo8-79_pIMSxF
Design Thinking Process Example, IDEO’s Sopping Cart Redesign ABC Nightline
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M66ZU2PCIcM
Selected Definitions on Design, Design Thinking and Design Process
What is Design?
Design involves a range of human activities involving planning, organizing, and envisioning
something that doesn’t yet exist. Underlying almost everything we employ in our daily lives, from
the attire we wear to the furniture we use to the fixtures we operate, design obviously plays a key
role, but we rarely apply the word “design” to non-physical things, to systems, organizations,
operations, conceptions, and methods, even though they, too, have been designed, sometimes
very badly. (Designing to Avoid Disaster, The Nature of Fracture-Critical Design, Thomas Fisher,
Routledge, 2012, p. 150)
What is Design Thinking?
Design Thinking is an emerging field, rooted in the tools and processes used traditionally by
design disciplines (architecture, landscape architecture, graphic design, interior design, and
others). It is a catalyst in creating innovative solutions to address complex, systemic problems
that affect our global society in these times of rapid change. (College of Design, University of
Minnesota)
Design thinking involves practical imagination to conceive of new and better ways of doing
something. It uses both the left and right sides of the brain to see the world as not just the result
of logical, rational decision-making, but as also an emotional and deeply cultural response to
reality. Most changes occur as piecemeal reactions to problems, while design thinking helps us
understand the whole and how the parts fit together.
What is the Design Process?
The design process involves a rigorous process of envisioning the world as it could be and then
figuring out how to create it. To do this, designers often use analogies and metaphors to imagine
something new by likening it to what we know from the past and present, involving a lateral,
expansive, speculative, iterative, and skeptical form of thinking that can handle high levels of
ambiguity and uncertainty and that uses analogies to look for something new based on its
similarities with what we already know.