Design Thinking

by Nigel Cross

  This case study provides a detailed record of one example of Victor Scheinman’s design process, in which his concern with product usability features prominently. Although the study comes from an experimental and artificial situation, there are some interesting observations that somewhat parallel those from the previous two case studies of expert designers.

  The Experiment

  Protocol analysis relies on the verbal accounts given by subjects of their own cognitive activities. One of the most direct ways in which we can try to know what is going on inside people’s heads, is by asking them to tell us what they are thinking. Of course, this is fraught with difficulties. People do not necessarily know what is going on inside their own heads, let alone have the ability to verbalise it. Also, there may well be side-effects of the verbalisation, such that it actually changes the subject’s behaviour and cognitive performance. Or the subject may, quite unintentionally, give irrelevant accounts, reporting parallel but independent thoughts to those that are actually being employed in the task. These disadvantages weigh particularly heavily on the validity of protocol analysis in studying design thinking, where non-verbal processes are a significant feature of the relevant cognitive activities, and where the use of sketches and similar externalisation of thought processes seems to be fundamental.

  Nevertheless, people do normally find it relatively straightforward to give a verbal account of what they believe they are thinking, or what they were thinking recently. Retrospective verbal accounts (i.e., recalling what one was thinking recently) offer one means of getting at cognitive activity which is frequently used not only in research but also in everyday interchanges, such as ‘What were you thinking when you were doing that?’ Concurrent verbal accounts (i.e., ‘thinking aloud’) offer researchers the hope that they really do externalise – or allow insight into – at least some of the subjects’ cognitive activities. Of all the empirical, observational research methods for the analysis of design activity, protocol analysis is the one that has received the most attention and application. It has become regarded as the most likely method to bring out into the open, at least to some extent, the somewhat mysterious skills of design thinking.

  For this study, Victor Scheinman was invited to participate in a research project into design thinking. He was told that the research would involve him undertaking a short (2-hour) design exercise, within his familiar engineering design domain. The experiment was conducted in a design room supplied with table and chair, drawing pad, pens and pencils and whiteboard, and equipped with video and audio recording facilities. Also in the room were a mountain bicycle and the backpack to be used for the design assignment. An experimenter was present in the room, and had a file of various pieces of relevant information and data that Victor could ask for if he wanted to. At the start of the experiment, the design assignment given to Victor was as in Figure 5.1.

  Design in Action

  In the following analysis of Victor Scheinman’s design process, quotations are taken from the transcript of his ‘think aloud’ comments, preceded by the timestamp for the quotation. After some preliminary remarks and questions, the substantive experimental session began at timestamp 00.15 minutes.

  Quite early in the session Victor began to identify particular features of the problem that would influence his approach to developing a design concept. For example, commenting on the (deliberately rather poor) preliminary design that had been developed for the purposes of the experiment, and was available in the information store together with a user evaluation report on that design, he surmised that:

  5.1 The design brief for the experiment.

  (00.22) it probably says the backpack’s too high or something like that, and that bicycle stability’s an issue.

  He was also able to draw on some personal experience that helped him to formulate some of the implicit requirements for a good design solution:

  (00.26) Having used a backpack on a bike in the past and having ridden over many mountains, unfortunately not on a mountain bike but I can imagine that the situation is similar, I learned very early on that you want to keep it as low as possible.

  He then continued by calling for advice from others. In the information file held by the experimenter were examples of some commercially available bicycle luggage carriers and racks, including those of the Blackburn company, which Victor asked to see. But it seemed that Victor would normally also make use of personal contacts. He commented:

  (00:33) All right here’s what I would do at this time if – I would get on the phone, call up some friends. I have a friend who happens to have worked in the bicycle business for many years, and I would probably call him and pick his brain a bit. I happen to know that the Blackburn company is local, so I will call them up.

  Victor telephoned the company and said that he was seeking advice about what sort of bicycle luggage carriers he should use for carrying a backpack on a mountain bike. For example, he asked:

  I wanted to know what’s the trade-off between carrying panniers on the front versus the rear, which is better on a mountain bike? …

  What happens if the centre of gravity is pretty high up above the bike, do you have a stability problem? …

  What happens if you put it in the front, it looks like you could put things high in the front, or is that worse? That’s the worst, OK.

  Within a ten-minute telephone conversation, Victor gained valuable knowledge of existing solutions to the design problem type, advice about the implications of some options (such as front versus rear mounting), and confirmation of some of his own prior knowledge.

  He also drew upon his own personal experience to make the final decision that the location for the backpack would be over the rear wheel:

  (00.51) My first thought is, hey the place to put it is back here; there’s another advantage by the way of having it in the back I can see immediately, and that is it’s off the side in the front, and if you’re on a mountain bike trail and you hit something you’re out of control in the front wheel.

  (00.52) With downhill work on mountain bikes, I know you want to keep your weight back rather than forwards.

  Victor’s personal experience of biking with a backpack also led him to identify an issue that only someone who has had such experience might be aware of:

  (00.55) When I biked around Hawaii as a kid that’s how I mounted my backpack … and I have to admit if there’s any weight up here this thing does a bit of wobbling, and I remember that as an issue.

  So the view that Victor began to form of the problem was that of the total task that encompasses the dynamic system in use of the rider plus bicycle plus backpack, and the issues of control of the bicycle that arise in the situation of riding over rough terrain with a heavy backpack attached to the bicycle. This is a different situation to that of everyday, smooth-surface, level-grade riding, and it accentuates the needs to position the backpack low and to the rear. The view that Victor had of the design task was significantly different from a view that might be formed from considering the bicycle and backpack in a static situation, or without considering the effects on the rider’s ability to control the bicycle with a mounted backpack. Victor’s understanding of the dynamic situation therefore enabled him to formulate a broad view of the design task.

  From this overview of the total dynamic system of rider + bicycle + backpack, Victor identified stability as a key issue, and framed the problem as ‘how to maintain stability’. Given that a heavy backpack had to be carried over the rear wheel of the bicycle, and given his experience of the ‘wobbling’ that can occur in the riding situation, this problem-framing and his prior experience led him to conclude that he must design a rigid carrying device:

  (00.59) The biggest thing that I remember in backpack mounting is that it’s got to be rigid, very rigid.

  He then developed this viewpoint into the requirement that the structural members of any carrying device must be stiff:

  (01.06) Making the carrier stiff enough for holding the bac
kpack, that seems to be a big issue.

  So, at about halfway through the session, Victor had derived a framing of the problem which directed him to design a stiff, rigid carrier, mounted as low as possible over the rear wheel. Having established a need for rigidity, Victor was able to utilise his knowledge of structural engineering principles as he developed a concept design for the carrying device – in particular, knowledge that a triangulated structure is inherently rigid. At this time, Victor began to develop his design concept through a series of drawings, shown in Figures 5.2, 5.3 and 5.4.

  While sketching a rear view of the basic position and layout for the device (Figure 5.2), Victor commented:

  (01.07) One of the problems with a bicycle carrier where the frame is mounted out here and it goes to that, is that you end up with a parallelogram – bad thing, bad thing!

  His knowledge of structural design principles led him to avoid designing a rectangular, parallelogram structure, which was the form that rather naturally seemed to arise from considering the basic shape of the carrier and the location of its supporting structure on the bicycle. Here we can see that Victor, like other designers, is using the act of drawing as ‘a process of criticism and discovery’.

  He expanded on this critical comment, emphasising his concern with stability as a key requirement:

  (01.08) If I were to make a frame that looked like this, that would be a very poor design because basically what I’ve got is, I’ve got a parallelogram which has very little lateral stability.

  He then drew a triangular form onto the layout, introducing the structural design principle of triangulation, which offers inherent stiffness:

  (01.09) It would be nice if I could, for instance, run these rods up here to some point and therefore create a triangle, this would give me great stiffness – good idea!

  Soon after, a secondary viewpoint emerged, which arose from considering the client’s needs as well as those of the user (which had dominated Victor’s thinking so far). The client for the design task was a manufacturer who wanted to sell the carrying device in conjunction with their already-existing backpack. The device therefore needed to have unique selling points that differentiated it from other, similar products. During the development of his design concept, Victor kept in mind that he needed the product to have a ‘proprietary feature’. He used the client’s requirement of a unique selling proposition to help guide and to reinforce his decision to seek a design based on triangular structures:

  (01.10) That is going to be our proprietary feature, a triangular, rigid structure with no bends in it; these rods are then going to be in tension and compression, no bending.

  The principle of triangulation subsequently guided Victor’s generation of the basic form and the detailed design features of his carrier. As he drew his design in more detail, he commented:

  (01.16) We’re going to have this as a triangular structure here to provide the lateral stability.

  5.2 Victor Scheinman’s early sketch, in which he identified triangularity as a key structural principle.

  As he continued to develop his design, he constantly referred to structural principles, seeking to avoid ‘bad’ configurations and to generate ‘good’ ones, making comments such as:

  (01.42) My detail here is going to have to be something like this because my forces along this tube are this way … good, this is good; and then this detail is going to be, er, let’s see … all right that’s bad, that’s bad … that’s bad, so I’m going to need something like that.

  5.3 Victor’s later sketch, as he develops the overall concept.

  At the same time, as noted above, Victor also used the client’s requirement of a unique selling proposition to help guide and to reinforce his decision to seek a design based on triangular structures:

  (01.41) I want to make sure that this rod here comes to a point, not stop right there … that’s to a point; that’s going to be my feature.

  In his comments, Victor demonstrated that he regarded the pronounced triangular form at the rear of the carrier as something to be retained as a feature that would help give the product an attractive and distinctive appearance. His design for the carrying device was therefore based on an integrated concept in which user requirements are addressed through the problem frame of stability, leading to the use of triangularity as the guiding first principle, which he then also used to address the client’s goal of having a proprietary, unique selling feature to the product.

  5.4 Victor’s final design sketches.

  Discussion

  Having the benefit of a ‘think aloud’ transcript, we can see that Victor’s creative strategy involves addressing issues at several levels of generality – forming a broad, system’s view of the required product in its situation; from that, developing a particular perspective or problem frame for guiding the solution concept; using that perspective to identify relevant first principles of engineering design to embody the concept; and also maintaining in mind the satisfaction of the client’s goal of a successful consumer product. This strategy seems remarkably similar to what we identified as common to those of Gordon Murray and Kenneth Grange.

  First, all three designers develop a broad, high-level, systems view of the problem that they are given, in many senses ‘going beyond’ the basic problem and its initial narrow criteria. For Victor Scheinman the broader view was that of the whole situation of using the product, of the dynamic system of rider + bicycle + backpack.

  Secondly, all three designers explore the problem and formulate a particular perspective in order to frame the problem in a way that stimulates and helps to structure the emergence of design concepts. Victor Scheinman used a distinct usability perspective in his problem structuring for the backpack carrier, for which, like Kenneth Grange and the sewing machine, he drew upon his personal experience of using such a device.

  Thirdly, all three designers use the problem frame to identify basic design principles that trigger the origination of their concepts and assist in the detailed development of those concepts. For Victor, it soon emerged that ‘bicycle stability’s an issue’, and so ‘it’s got to be rigid, very rigid’. Victor then relied strongly on the basic structural principle of triangulation to achieve the rigidity and stiffness that he considered important in the design of the backpack carrier. This led him to the triangularity of his design concept, which he then used to establish a distinctive appearance for the product, to satisfy the client’s need for a unique selling feature. Victor’s design concept integrated the user’s need for a stable, rigid product with the client’s commercial need for a product that had some distinctive marketing feature. As in the sewing machine example we also see here an example of how the designer’s personal problem framing and use of first principles led to a concept that reconciled the designer’s goals (on behalf of the user) with the more commercial goals of the client.

  It is perhaps surprising that there appear to be such major commonalities between the case studies we have examined, which vary across real-world accounts and experimental observations, as well as across very different design domains, from racing cars to bicycle luggage carriers. But perhaps this does suggest that there are indeed some underlying, fundamental aspects that reveal the skill of design thinking.

  6

  Designing Together

  The case study in this chapter is based on the same experiment as the previous one, but provides a quite different perspective on the design process. In this experiment, a small team of three designers tackled the same design problem as did Victor Scheinman in the previous one, a carrying/fastening device for transporting a hiker’s backpack on a mountain bicycle, and in the same 2-hour experiment situation. However, this was not a ‘think-aloud’ protocol study, but all the team’s actions and natural conversation verbalisations were recorded for analysis. Because it involves teamwork, the design process in this case study has some strong differences from that in the previous study, and some useful new emphases emerge, such as collaboration and
persuasion. Teamwork is of considerable importance in normal professional design activity, and has become of even greater importance as design becomes a more integrated activity involving collaboration among many different professions. Understanding how design thinking operates in a teamwork context is therefore clearly fundamental to future development. The designers in this team were all experienced engineering product designers from the California office of an international, renowned product design practice.

  Teamwork versus Individual Work

  Working as a member of a team introduces different problems and possibilities for the designer, in comparison with working alone. Some of the areas of difference can be surmised from the practical necessities of the situation, such as the need to communicate with other members of the team, and some others can be noticed from observation of the particular team recorded in this experiment.

  An obvious difference from single-person work is that the team members have roles and relationships within the team, relative to each other. In a normal work situation, some of these roles and relationships may be formally established; for instance, there may be seniorities of position established within the team, there may be a team leader appointed by a higher authority within the organisation, there may be particular job roles.

  Whether working alone or in a team, it would seem necessary to have to plan one’s activities to fit within the available time. This may be easier for an individual than for a team, but in fact explicit planning of activities is not always evident either in individual or team work. Furthermore, it seems to be necessary in design for unplanned, ad hoc exploratory activities to be pursued when they are perceived as relevant by the designer. This particular team did explicitly plan its activities, but if unplanned, exploratory activities are a normal feature of design activity, it becomes interesting to see how planned and unplanned actions are handled within a team.