Design Thinking

by Nigel Cross

  Generating and Adopting Concepts

  Clearly it was necessary for the team to generate design concepts, and jointly to build those concepts into a specific design proposal. The team therefore had to develop initial concepts into more detailed and robust versions, and it had to decide to adopt certain concepts from among the several that were proposed.

  A design proposal may begin life as a rather vague concept that has to have a lot of development work put into it. Concepts need to be built up, with additions and variations being developed to turn the initial idea into something more robust. There were many examples of this concept-building by the team members, co-operatively adding to and refining an initial concept.

  Bike Lock/Bike Stand

  In this example, Kerry suggested adapting the carrier to be used also as a form of integral locking mechanism, and this concept was further developed by the other two team members into a device for supporting as well as locking the bike:

  K: Maybe if you could flip it out and it becomes a bike lock, ’cos you know, lock up your bike while you go on a hike, that would be kind of a neat feature so you could justify some extra cost maybe

  I: Right, right

  J: Kick-stand alternative

  I: Pull it around your tyre and now you can stand the bike up

  Shoulders/Child/Manikin

  In this example, the team began to brainstorm from an idea that the carrier or rack device could ‘wear’ the backpack, and proceeded into flights of fancy:

  K: What’s kinda neat about their thing – it’s not really a bag that this rack goes up inside, those um webbing details in the back

  I: Right, that are already there

  K: That kinda envelops it – it doesn’t sit down on this, which we could add, but it’s kind of a nice nesting feature

  J: Maybe the rack wears the backpack straps just like we wear the backpack straps

  K: Sure

  J: (laugh)

  K: Why not, see, like you mount shoulders back here

  J: Yeah, yeah, just maybe, maybe you just mount a child seat back there and you give them a child (laugh) and make him wear the backpack

  I: Or a manikin

  K: A manikin … Harry the backpack holder

  One concept appeared that was eventually adopted as the key concept that drove their final product design proposal – forming the carrier as a plastic tray. After generating some random concept-lists, the team then reviewed each list to eliminate unsatisfactory concepts and identify their preferred ones (Figure 6.4). One of the significant issues that the team had identified was that the backpack’s shoulder straps, etc. could become hazardous if they dangle down into the bicycle wheel. As they went through their pack-to-rack connector subset list, a ‘bag’ concept was stressed as a solution for holding all the loose straps, and then the ‘tray’ concept suddenly appeared:

  I: We’ll just call it that for now, er bag, put it in a bag, we’re gonna need some sort of thing to do something with those straps

  K: To get this out of the way

  J: Yeah

  I: Yeah either the

  J: So it’s either a bag or maybe it’s like a little vacuum-formed tray kinda for it to sit in

  I: Yeah a tray that’s right OK

  J: ’cos it would be nice I think, I mean just from a positioning standpoint, if we’ve got this frame outline and we know that they’re gonna stick with that, you can vacuum form a tray or

  I: Right, or even just a small part of the tray or I guess they have these

  K: Something to dress this in

  J: Yeah

  I: Or even just em

  J: Maybe the tray could have plastic snap features in it so you just like kkkkkk snap your backpack down in it

  I: mmmm I was thinking of er

  K: Snap in these rails

  J: It’s a multifunction part

  K: You just snap in these rails

  J: Yeah snap the rails into the tray there

  K: mm mm

  I: OK

  J: It takes care of the rooster tail problem on your pack

  I: uh uh, what if your bag were big, er what if you’re on er, if this tray were not plastic but like a big net you just sorta like pulled it around and zipped there, I dunno

  J: Maybe it could be part, maybe it could be a tray with a with a net and a drawstring on the top of it, I like that

  I: Yeah, I mean em

  J: That’s a cool idea

  I: A tray with sort of just hanging down net, you can pull it around and zip it closed

  K: It could be like a window shade so you can kinda, it sinks back in so it just

  J: Oh yeah

  I: It retracts, yeah

  K: You pull down, it retracts in

  J: A retracting shade

  I: Right, right

  K: So that’s not dragging in the spokes if you don’t have anything attached

  J: So what we’re doing right now though is, we’re coming up with like again classifications of solutions, kind of all, they’re all either-or things, I mean like, we wouldn’t do the net and the shade and the snap-in with the tray, either or any one of those will probably

  I: Yeah, OK

  In this 2-minute period, we see the key concept for their final product design, the tray idea, being proposed, accepted, modified, developed and justified. As well as securely holding the backpack, the proposed concept solved two particular problems: the dangling straps problem and the ‘rooster-tail’ problem, which would dirty the backpack unless it is protected. The conceptual strength of the tray idea seems to lie in the way it embodied a potential solution form that, once it had been expressed, recognisably satisfied certain key problems and also recognisably could be modified and refined to accommodate other problems and requirements in a satisfactory way. Interestingly, when John introduced the concept, at one hour and twenty minutes into the session, it was the first instance of the use of the word ‘tray’, and from then on ‘tray’ was repeatedly used as the defining concept for the team’s design proposal. The word ‘tray’ subsequently occurred 35 times in the last 40 minutes of the session, thus emphasising the key role that it played in defining the product design (Figure 6.5).

  6.4 The team’s final ‘Concepts-joining’ list.

  As well as co-operating in the building and refining of concepts, team members may find it necessary to persuade the others of the value of a concept they particularly favour (usually a concept they generated themselves). It is common for designers to become committed to particular concepts, even to the extent of becoming emotionally attached to a concept. There were two clear examples within this team of the need to persuade others to accept a preferred concept. In the first, John persuaded the others that his ‘tray’ concept was the best to adopt; in the second, Ivan and Kerry persuaded John to accept the use of the fixed, brazed-on mounting points already on the bike frame.

  6.5 The team’s design proposal sketch.

  As we have seen, the ‘tray’ concept was quickly adopted and discussed, with ideas being added to it, but John took care to ensure that it was added to the public list of solution concepts:

  J: I think tray is sorta a new one on the list, it’s not a subset of bag

  John also confirmed that he was emotionally attached to the concept:

  J: Yeah I, I really like that tray idea (laugh)

  Later, when it became time to proceed with one preferred concept, John was quick to nominate the tray idea:

  J: Well OK, well we know we like this tray idea, right?

  The second example of persuasion was based around using the brazed-on mounting points on the bike frame. This was strongly supported by Ivan and Kerry; John had some reservations, but deferred to Kerry’s ‘expert knowledge’:

  J: I guess my point is, I think if you designed it specifically around mounting points, known mounting points on this bike, you might get yourself into trouble by limiting your market

  K: But these are pretty standard though

&nbs
p; J: The lower ones I would agree, but the uppers?

  K: That’s pretty standard too

  J: The uppers are?

  K: It’s getting to be, yeah, I mean it’s not on this; but actually some mountain bikes are pretty scoopy and weird, but

  J: We can assume Kerry has expert knowledge

  When it came to the team finally making a decision, Kerry conveyed her commitment and attachment to the braze-ons with an enthusiastic response:

  I: We’re gonna go with the rack, let’s go with er, talk about braze-ons – these braze-ons?

  K: Yeahhh!

  It is quite normal for designers to become emotionally involved with their ideas; their design concepts are not merely abstract ideas, but personal insights that emerge as a result of some considerable cognitive effort. It is no wonder that these conceptual ‘babies’ are defended against other, competing concepts. This emotional commitment has to be recognised and allowed for in teamwork; creative design is unlikely to happen without it. However, team members also have to be able to recognise that some suggested concepts are just jokes (‘Harry the backpack holder’), or half-serious ideas that are intended to help the creative process along and to which the originator has no serious commitment.

  Avoiding and Resolving Conflicts

  It is probably inevitable that disagreement will arise between members of a design team. We have already seen that disagreement arose within this team over whether to use the existing brazed-on mounting points. More serious disagreement might have arisen if there had been competing design concepts to which different members of the team were committed. However, provided that a team collectively desires to reach an acceptable conclusion to their design task, it will have to find ways of resolving, or perhaps avoiding conflicts. In this team, there were instances where the team members acquiesced in a kind of non-committal ‘agreement’ until one of them found an argument that closed the disagreement, and where they postponed agreement and seemed to ‘agree to disagree’. For example, a disagreement became evident over designing for adjustability in the rack. John proposed that the support legs of the rack should be adjustable, but Kerry felt sure that this was not necessary:

  J: You know one of the things that seems problematic, and it would be great from a manufacturing standpoint if you could get around it, is this distance is going to vary with frame size

  I: Right

  J: But so, y’know, we were talking about maybe those legs could extend before so that you could get some adjustability on your rack, maybe you need that anyway just so that you can adjust to different rack styles – like a telescoping tube here

  I: mm mm

  K: I don’t think you really need it

  I: (laugh) OK

  K: Because this is a twenty-six-inch wheel, or whatever, it’s pretty standard and so if this distance – you’re right it does vary a lot, but what’s gonna change is maybe your angle on your rack is gonna change, what really is gonna happen is this is gonna be a fixed distance because if we go onto a braze-on or something down here, and you want to make sure that there’s clearance here, and then as the bike grows it might pivot up a little bit more

  Later, John returned again to the adjustability issue, appealing to the authority of ‘good human factors’. Both Kerry and Ivan made rather non-committal ‘agreement’ responses; Kerry just shrugged her shoulders, Ivan said ‘OK’. Their doubt was evident to John, who admitted that what he was suggesting was ‘opinion not fact’. Ivan resolved the issue for the time being by suggesting that they can ‘look at ways of making it adjustable’ when they are finalising their design:

  J: I think good human factors says it should be adjustable so that people can find the position they like (K shrugs)

  I: OK

  J: um, that’s my opinion

  I: Whatever idea we come up with I think we can

  J: Opinion not fact (laugh)

  I: We can look at ways of making it adjustable

  But the non-committal ‘agreement’ over adjustability was not permanent. At a later point John proposed a way of incorporating adjustability into the design, but Kerry came up with an argument that resolved the disagreement in her favour: if adjustability were necessary then it would feature in the already commercially-available products of the Blackburn company:

  J: One way to get that adjustability for the seat post height and all that stuff is if this, say this was a single bar and it went like this

  K: mm mm

  J: And it could slide along here, that way if you need to come up more, y’know pivots around the braze-ons if it needs to come up more for a taller person or for better wheel clearance or whatever, you just kinda slide it forward and put little lock-downs on it

  K: Yeah yeah, I don’t think you need to change this length ’cos the wheel is fixed enough that you can rotate about the braze-on, and I mean if you really need adjustment I think all these Blackburn racks would have adjustments

  These examples of deferred agreement or non-committal apparent agreement reflect normal aspects of human discussion and verbal interchange. But team members need to be aware of when they are close to reaching actual agreement, and when they are just deferring a committed agreement. Even when there is no overt disagreement, individuals may still nurse a contrary viewpoint and return to it when the opportunity arises.

  Discussion

  The picture that emerges from this study is probably typical of normal team design activity. We have seen how the design process proceeds by sequences of both planned and unplanned activities; how frequently there may be mistakes and misunderstandings of the brief and external information sources; how the design problem becomes understood in terms of solution concepts that are proposed and developed in a mixture of personal and co-operative endeavour; how emotional commitment becomes attached to design concepts; how conflicts of ideas arise between team members, and how such conflicts are resolved or deferred.

  It is clear that teamwork is a social process, and therefore social interactions, roles and relationships cannot be ignored in cases of design activity performed by teams. It is a collaborative process and, in this study, the conventional whiteboard and drawing paper tools allowed, and were used for, shared drawing and listing activities, including different team members drawing and re-drawing over shared sketches. This sharing of representations seems fundamental to collaborative design activity.

  Given the apparent inconsistencies and difficulties in the progress of this design team, it is perhaps important to conclude with the observation that this particular group of designers was actually a very good team. They worked productively, and reached a relatively successful conclusion to the set task, within the prescribed time. Despite some of the observations made about the roles, relationships and social interactions within the team, there were no overt signs of frustration or dissatisfaction within individual members of the team. In the de-briefing after the experiment they reported that they were reasonably happy with what they had achieved in the available time, and that ‘it was fun’.

  In the next chapter we will make some comparisons of how the team and Victor Scheinman worked on the assignment in their different ways, and draw some general conclusions about working procedures within the design process.

  7

  How Designers Work

  In the previous two chapters we have looked quite closely into the details of how designers actually tackle a design problem. This was made possible through the use of laboratory ‘protocol study’ experiments that were in many senses far removed from the reality of everyday design practice. In this chapter, we will develop a broader summary and comparison of these two experimental studies, and try to draw evidence and conclusions about the way designers work when confronted with a design task. The fact that these two experimental studies have been the subjects of detailed analysis by several researchers will help to make the comparisons and summaries, but first we must acknowledge the problems and limitations of such studies.

  It was cle
ar in some of Victor Scheinman’s ‘think aloud’ statements that he felt constrained in the experimental situation; for example, he referred to what he ‘would do’ in a normal situation, such as call an expert friend, but which wasn’t possible to do in the experimental situation. (He did manage to go ‘outside’ of the experimental situation, and do something that surprised the experimenters, when he telephoned for advice from a company making similar products.) However, there were other, more subtle clues within the recordings of the experiment that indicated that we cannot rely totally on ‘think-aloud’ statements as records of mental processes. Some researchers have pointed out that non-verbal thought seems to be intrinsic to design thinking, and that the forced verbalisation of protocol studies must interfere with non-verbal thought processes. It was also clear that there were many points in Victor’s stream of comments where his verbalisations stopped for more than a few seconds. On one occasion, he had to be prompted by the experimenter to resume his thinking aloud. Peter Lloyd and his colleagues suggested that ‘it seems obvious that in these short periods of silence [Victor] is thinking deeply about something’, and that these silent periods ‘seem to be points of value where decisions are made, but we have no idea of the thinking behind these decisions’.

  So we have to be careful about drawing very strong conclusions about deep cognitive processes from such experiments, in which a designer works alone and tries to verbalise his or her thinking. The second experiment, in which the three-person team of designers worked more naturally, although still within tight experimental constraints, obviously also contains many gaps in the individual verbalisations, where again we can make little assumption about what the individual was thinking. However, there are lots of useful observations that can be made from such experiments as these, and in fact both these experiments have been analysed quite considerably by a number of researchers.