Teaching Design Thinking

Business901 Podcast Transcription
Implementing Lean Marketing Systems

Teaching Design Thinking
Guest was Dr. Charles Burnette

Related Podcast:

A Platform for Teaching Design Thinking

Copyright Business901


Charles Burnette received his BA, MA and PhD degrees from the
University of Pennsylvania where he was also a Research
Associate doing research on the uses of
information during design. A licensed, award
winning architect, he became Director of the
Philadelphia AIA, founding Director of the
Center for Planning Design and Construction
in Philadelphia, and Dean of the School of
Architecture, University of Texas at Austin.
He returned to teaching to become the
Director of the Industrial Design Department
at the University of the Arts, both while co-
directing the Design Based Education K-12 Program. The
graduate program was conceived and implemented to explore the
design thinking model and to demonstrate its potential in a
computer support system for interdisciplinary design.

Dr. Burnette has been a frequent speaker in European design
schools and at the European Union’s Cumulus Program on Design
Education, and is widely published on topics such as design
management, design systems, ecological design and design
education. He is now writing a book about the design model, its
foundations in cognitive science and its application.

The seven principles of Dr. Charles Burnette’s IDeSiGN:

1. I is for intending 5. i is for Innovating
2. D is for Defining 6. G is for Goal getting
3. e is for Exploring 7. N is for kNowing
4. S is for Suggesting


Transcription of Podcast

Joe Dager: Welcome, everyone. This is Joe Dager, the host of
the Business 901 podcast.
With me today is Charles Burnett. Charles is a licensed,
award-winning architect, design researcher, frequent speaker and
teacher of Design Thinking. A storied career in design and I'm
honored to have him on the program.
Charles, could you update with me, with what you are doing
presently?
Charles Burnett: I'm primarily writing, at the moment, about
Design Thinking. I talk a bit, but not that much, now. Barcelona
was the last time in November that I was really overseas with it.
I'm really doing what I should have done a little earlier, which is
get it all in writing in a way that's digestible to people.
Joe: Is there a book in the making?
Charles: Yes, but it's been in the making for a number of years.
Don't count on publication tomorrow.
Joe: What intrigued me about your background is your teaching
in Design Thinking and especially with younger people. You
developed a design-based education K through 12 model. What
prompted that at the beginning?
Charles: Basically, that's where we have to start. We have to
start with kids and teach them the value of Design Thinking and
the critical thinking that comes with it. Design is just a lot of fun.
Kids really need that in their daily educational experience, too.
They need to have a goal-directed kind of efforts, their own
goals, mostly, fulfilled in ways that they have actually brought
about. They really need to learn by doing, and it's a nice way to
get Design Thinking out there.


Joe: Is the program still being utilized?

Charles: Here and there, and every now and then there's an
interest to start it going again, for example, in India and
Colombia and places like that. Korea. I'm no longer at the
university, which is where most of my work, in this area, was
done in the K through 12.
I got very interested in what the design council in England was
doing to bring design into the national curriculum, which it
succeeded in doing. We set about to bring design into the
classroom around the university and move from there on to
teaching teachers and statewide programs and things like that.
It was very important to me, to simply influence a younger
generation to take over and go with it. Take advantage of what
powers it offers.
Joe: Design Thinking seems to be the rage now with IDEO and
Service Design Thinking. You seem to have done a large part of
your work beforehand. How do you think Design Thinking has
evolved and why the popularity, now?
Charles: I think people realize that just doing things the same-
old way isn't necessarily the right way to go. The problems are
different. They have to improve the circumstances they confront.
Problems are more complex.
There are a whole lot of reasons, more or less; design has to
come into play now. It's not just the pretty little detail on a
product or even the product itself anymore. It's the bigger issues.
Service Design is a common one in a very strong way. A lot of
other recognitions are coming out.
Business schools are realizing that they have to have a way to
improve circumstances. Design is that way. It's a broader, more
general thing than most people think of.


Joe: I find your iDesign model intriguing, and you related it to
purposeful thinking so much. So many people think design, is the
artsy type stuff, is all about the free spirit; it's not purposeful
thinking, but you look at it that way.
Charles: To me, Design Thinking really extends purposeful
thinking in a way that makes it more innovative and more aimed
at higher values; improving the world, improving any problem
that you address. Coming up with a new scientific answer, or
even a new song, is a creative act, and it involves Design
Thinking, whether people understand it that way or not. You can
design anything. You can design a house. You can design a
product, and you can design an experience.
You still use the same mental skills, and attitudes, and ways of
working to do that. They're specialized by discipline or goal, by
and large, but they're still there. The same mental capacities are
involved.
Joe: What have you found the best way to introduce teaching
Design Thinking to someone?
Charles: Getting them engaged in the process of designing,
getting them engaged in a collaborative design process. What I
mean by that is, working with other people to design something
using a formal, structured method, the one that I call the
"iDesign" model.
The reason it's formal in structure is that it gives people
something to hang on to and to talk through. It's sort of a
language. It's a way of saying, "Oh; I'm talking about this now,"
and you're only talking about one aspect of the problem. It's an
aid to communication; it's an aid to thinking. It's also necessary.
You have to do all the things in the model to really do anything
purposeful.


Crossing a street is one example I like to use because it's so
simple. You never think of it as involving design, purposeful
thinking, or Design Thinking, but it truly does. To give you an
idea, or a quick summary, you have the need and desire to cross
the street. You have to get the information about the conditions
on the street and your relationship to them. Then you have to
decide what critical relationships are. How fast are cars moving?
When's the light going to change?
All of that and then you have to come up with some plan, a
proposal of what you're going to do. You have to do it, and then
you see as you do it, whether you've done it well or you need to
make a course correction in the process. Then you'd evaluate it
and say, "Well, I'll never do it that way again, or I'll wait for the
light instead of running across."
All of those things are different ways of thinking about the same
thing, just crossing the street.
Joe: Did you develop the "iDesign" methodology?
Charles: Yes. It's actually based on my PhD dissertation. It was
basically a computer approach to architectural communications,
but in order to explain the approach I came up with a problem
solving method. A way of getting people involved in the process
because it was just evident, to me, that they wouldn't understand
what I was talking about unless they experienced how it worked.
That led to the teaching of models and using it at college levels
and experimentally, even with companies.
I've used the model in many countries, in different schools and
things like that. It's been a very interesting way to go from a
study of architectural communication, in effect, to actually
problem solving.


Joe: Do you feel that there's a difference in the "iDesign" model
versus let's say PDCA or the typical scientific methodology in
problem solving?
Charles: It's interesting because the scientific model is another
form of the Design Thinking model. You can't really disclose or
write a scientific report, without using every distinction in the
model.
You have to explain what your goals were. You have to say what
the facts of the case are. You have to come up with the
relationships you're going to consider. Y have to describe the
experimental situation and the actual way you conduct the
experiment and your findings and what their significances are.
All of those distinctions are just the same ones you use in Design
Thinking. Science and design are not that far apart. Business and
design aren't that far apart, either.
Joe: How would you approach adults differently? Do you use the
same basic methodology as you do with the K through 12 model?
Charles: Sure. There's one way in which I've used it to teach
teachers. What I mean are university professors in ways to
collaborate and use the Design Thinking model. One of the ways
that I do it sometimes is with table cards. Where there are seven
people that sit around a table and each one takes the role of a
certain way of thinking, and they're responsible for it. They have
to come up with things that relate and solve the problems that
they all mutually decide to address.
Each one actually plays out the role that their cards represent.
Other people see what their role is and they contribute to it.
Before long, they're talking and helping one another. They're all
using the system to design.


If you take a team in business, and you put together seven
disciplines, all of them really distinct from one another with
responsibilities for their own discipline and they start trying to
solve a problem together. You're going to do better than just one
person from one discipline. That's part of the whole idea.
Joe: Kind of the Edward De Bono type of six thinking hats there.
Charles: De Bono's done a lot of things that are quite related to
this, the hats, for example. Every person wears the hat
representing a different mode of thought.
I think what the iDesign method and the way of working with the
role--oriented problem-solving approach does, is it brings it all
together in a very, usually understood way. Even kids can
understand the ideas behind it and use it.
In Korea, we developed a whole website to support early-
childhood learning, perhaps a little too early, from my point of
view. The idea there is they have a lot of time with the kids after
school, and the parents want them to learn all the time, all day
long. So, there's a real demand for that over there, where there
isn't in the US, possible to develop a computer-based thing in
which interactive role playing was part of it, and showing how
each role contributed to the solution of a problem.
Joe: This can be done and learned virtually?
Joe: Oh, yes. I don't know exactly what's happened in the
Korean model anymore because my former student, who
launched me into it, left the company. They pulled down the
animation from level to such a point that I'm not sure they really
implemented it, as well as she had done when we started it off.
I'm not sure exactly where they are now, is what I'm trying to
say, but it's a very big program.


Joe: I always think of engineers. Should they receive more
training in this type of design, or something similar to this model?

Charles: I think everyone comes close to it. How can I say that
without sounding totally arrogant? What I mean to say is,
Engineering Design is Design Thinking. They have their own way
of doing it, but if you really get down at what they're doing, you'll
find that in all of it, these things are there. They're just not drawn
out as clearly, I think, as the model does.
Joe: The reason I ask that question is because much of today is,
it's gotten so cheap to prototype, so inexpensive to iterate and to
solve problems by bringing the customer in with the different
tools and methods that we have nowadays. Sometimes, less
expensive to go out there and say, "Let's try it," or "Let's show it
to a customer," versus completing a complete model and making
something very formal. That is at the essence of most Design
Thinking is prototyping and involving the customer.
Charles: Absolutely. That's part of the model as well. In other
words, just whole idea, though, is that you don't even get a
rough model unless you have some idea of what you're trying to
make it represent. All the thought processes go into even the
crudest thing, and if you prototype faster, terrific. That's really
good because it communicates well, three dimensionally, and
often scales.
In fact, I used to teach industrial design, and ran a department
and a graduate program in Industrial Design. Part of the
processes was that we taught were very much the kinds of things
that you're talking about. We even created new ways of blending
different elements of the design quicker, so that we could see
where we were going and what we could integrate, and all those
things.
The issues in design are not...You don't really make the final
thing anymore, the first shot. Everybody knows that. The

modeling methods can go from anything, paper. Frank Gehry's an
excellent example of an architect who uses every single way of
representing his ideas that he can come up with, the most
sophisticated computer representations, usually at the end of
things rather than at the beginning.
Joe: I was a young engineer, probably 26, 28, out in the field
working on a product, and I did not appreciate what some guy
told me at the time. He had years of wisdom, an older guy. He
says, "Engineering really never starts until you turn the key." It
took me years to understand that. It was part of my maturity
lesson, but it's something that I always remember. I think that is
so true, is that until it gets in the customer's hands, until you see
actually how it's used...
Charles: Absolutely. Also, going back to the education thing a
bit, kids need the opportunity to fail without it being something
that hurts them. Design, because it entertains failure so often,
really is a good way to go. If you're trying to do something that
hasn't been done that way before, you always have a chance of
not doing it well enough. That's the chord here. That's your point,
I think.
Joe: Yes, and I think the other part is that now that we've been
moving from a goods--dominant type logic thinking, a product-
-centric thing; into a service economy, design has also moved
from the rear of the process to the front of the process; it seems
to me. I think more people need to be trained in design. That's
what intrigued me, because there should be simple methods that
you can introduce to people.
Charles: I think that once they see the issues involved, people
learn really quickly. If you can get them to collaborate while they
learn, extend it into their institutions or companies, then that's
even better.


We used to bring teachers for a summer institute to teach them
for a couple of weeks the processes of designing that related to
their lesson plans and everything else. The next year, we'd get
them to bring five of their colleagues back for the same thing,
and help them get grants and things to keep on going.
But trying to institutionalize the whole process, it's very hard
work. It is very discouraging. Because it's hard to just get it into
the minds of people that control the curriculums in schools. Same
thing in companies, people who are used to being successful in
one way continue to be that way without realizing that they could
improve what they do.
Joe: I'm a sales and marketing guy. I look at Design Thinking,
and the tools as great tools for sales and marketing people to
learn, because you stop looking at yourself internally a to the
external, the customer so much better. In your background, your
experience, have you seen where this makes good evidence for
sales and marketing to learn Design Thinking?

Charles: My opinion is it ought to permeate the company, all the
way from the main office right down to the janitor or whatever.
Toyota taught us that everybody on the assembly line could
contribute new ideas, and I think that's really true. It's not just
sales. It's everybody that ought to learn about Design Thinking,
but sales definitely.
If you look at sales and marketing, they're right at the hub of
Design Thinking, how you communicate what it's all about, what
your product or your service or whatever you're trying to market
or sell is.
We have a little character in the animations in Korea called Mary
Media. She was basically the person who explained everything to
everybody. If that's not sales and marketing, I don't know what
is.


For sure, the central part of design is coming up with the
representation of what you want to do for the thing itself. Today
communicates very well to their intended audience, the customer,
whatever.
So, it's key for sales. It's key for production. It's key for
accounting. It's the key for resource specification. Everything that
one does to create a product or service could benefit from Design
Thinking.
Joe: Could you briefly go over the iDesign model and what it
stands for?
Charles: The iDesign model, you can explain it in as complicated
a way as needed, or as simple a way as needed. The first part of
the model is intentional thinking. What it is, what’s your goal?
What are you concerned about? What do you want to do?
The next part of the model involves referential thinking. What
kind of resources? How do you describe them? How do you define
them? How do you find them? You really are looking for the
things that might help you reach your goal. If your goal is to
make something that won't show stains, then it depends on what
the problem is, but it runs all over the place. Stainless steel is a
resource for some things, and so forth.
The third part of the model is analogical thinking. It's associate
thinking. It's centered all the things that brings ideas out as
networks and is expressed in networks or linkages between one
thing and another, and that's called relational thinking in the
model.

There are seven parts, and I'll tell you why in a minute but the
fourth one is formative thinking which is how you express your
thoughts and how you express your proposals and the
conclusions that you think you'll reach, how you project the word
to the audience, how you use the media that are available to you.

I mean, language is one medium but so it television and what
have you. You have to represent your ideas for the medium and
the audience, of the user that you're addressing.
Then there is procedural thinking, a kind of time sequence. What
do I do next? How can I be a better craftsman? How can I reach
the state of flow where I'm doing everything at the best of my
ability and being challenged all the time?
After that there is evaluative thinking, where you're constantly
judging what you've done with respect to your intentions and the
situation that you're in. Evaluating what you achieved and going
with it that way.
Then the final one, the seventh one is reflective thinking where
you commit your prior thoughts to memory, you edit them, or
you assimilate them into what you already know. When you come
around again to a new situation which always occurs in the
formative thought, your perceptions then you use reflective
thinking to call on what you know to interpret what you're
experiencing.
So, that starts the whole process and usually if you want to keep
on going with that train of thought once you have interpreted
your situation from reflective thought, and nothing is wrong. You
understand it because you're there and then there's no real
stimulus for intentional thinking because you already have the
knowledge that you need.
But if you went into a slight need or desire of any type, then
that'll kick intentional thinking and the process starts going again.
I don't know if I gave you a model of the kinds of thinking but
also a bit of a clue about how they work together or get started
and kick one another off.
Joe: Oh, I think you do, and you mentioned in there, why are
there seven?

Charles: Well, it is short-term memory, or you have seven plus
or minus two, the magical number seven plus or minus two.

One of the things I did early on was to get every sort of
categorization that I could find of things that attempted to be
comprehensive. All of those invariably you could map them into
seven plus or minus two distinctions. Nobody wants to pay any
attention to more than that.
Joe: What would you like someone to take away from this
conversation as far as from Design Thinking? If you could leave a
message with someone, what would you like it to be?
Charles: Well, try it out. Go to Idesignthinking.com and pretend
you are who you are and just use the information, whether you
are a teacher, a student, or anything, and you'll find that it's
useful. Or if you can get seven friends to sit down and role play
then do that.
I have a set of table cards that I often send to people, which are
great because on one side they say what you're supposed to do
and what you're responsible for. On the other side, they say the
same thing, but they are pointed towards the other people in the
group. The group can teach themselves to use this model just by
themselves.
Say going into a company that decided they started a little side
exercise in Design Thinking but just do this with seven people
who wanted to do it and have a little group and then a larger
group.
I have done it with 50 people at a time so anybody can use it just
to think with or to write with, to structure their writing or to
collaborate with others or to compute with. It is very computer-
oriented. It started with computers to begin with.


Joe: If someone wanted to learn about iDesign, is the website
the best place to learn about it?

Charles: Unfortunately, now it is. I have a bunch of papers that
I have been putting on academia.edu deal with different aspects
on it that I'm trying to address in this book. There are papers on
emotions, on philosophy, on things that have to be in any theory
of Design Thinking and a short version of design theory itself,
which was prepared after I went down to do a talk or to a
workshop in Australia.

I think there are issues when you come to a conference on
Design Thinking you think you understand Design Thinking, and
your mind isn't open to any kind of systematic approach to it. It's
more open to what you think about it.
It takes a bit of doing to get people to open their mind to the
possibility that the little seven-part theory could help them get
into the swing of things with Design Thinking.

Joe: I have to ask you one other question that came to my
mind. I look at engineers, and I look at the other disciplines of
what I would call design, and it seems that architecture always
are the people that really dig into design and talk about Design
Thinking. The others talk about engineering or the other kind of
stricter disciplines. Why do you think that's so? Why do you think
architecture has always been out there with the Design Thinking
concepts?
Charles: I think it's because architects get the broadest
education conceivable in any discipline because they tend to have
to deal with all the problems in construction, and they have to
deal with all the problems with landscaping. It's a broader culture
that they have to have. They have to understand art. It's a broad
discipline that touches a lot of the bases, one of the best
educations in the world; I think.


I'm a former dean of the School of Architecture, so I hope you
don't mind if I say that.

Joe: No, not at all. I also think that architecture has a tendency
to be more of a people discipline versus engineering. Would you
agree with that?
Charles: Yes, I really would. Engineering tends to have a
mindset in the procedural thinking way of Design Thinking. In
other words, they are interested in function, process, production,
and things that are important. Don't get me wrong.
Engineering design can be fabulous. They can come up with
things as creatively as anyone else. I mean, just look at the
Segway Scooter, for example. That's almost a purely engineering
achievement and there are many others too like that. I think they
can be as creative as they want to be from their disciplinary point
of view.
I do agree with you that they tend to be more focused on the
product and getting it out than on the people who use it, and
that's where architecture can't be. I mean, they sometimes are.
They sometimes get wrapped up in their own pursuit of style, and
they really have to consider the occupancy of the building that
they are so busy creating.
But as well as they should I think they consider it, but it's one of
so many things that they have to consider.
Joe: I enjoy you using the example; I don't know if it was on
purpose or not, but using the Segway example because from an
engineering perspective, it was a marvel, from a design
perspective it never addressed the uses of it well enough to be
able to be a popular product. I'd say it could've used more of a
design approach in it.


Charles: Well, I wouldn't go as far as to give it that bad of a rap
because it was up against cultural obstacles too. For example,
where do you use a Segway? Is it on the street, a sidewalk, or
both? If you were limited to that speed, 12 miles per hour or
something like that. Isn't that too fast for the sidewalk and too
slow for the streets?
There were a lot of conflicts because there was no infrastructure
to support the Segway. So when you get it doing things like
police patrols or guided tours or scooting around a factory to find
things then it's in its element. I mean, again no it wasn't an
innovation where the infrastructure issues are well respected. It
was an invention where you have to have a whole new
infrastructure.
I think it was an engineering marvel, and Raymond Loewy had a
saying that the "most advanced yet acceptable." Well, yet the
acceptable part wasn't quite up.
Joe: Well, I'd like to thank you very much Charles. I appreciate
it. Again, the website on this is idesignthinking.com. This podcast
will be available on the Business 901 blog site and also the
Business 901 iTunes store. Thanks again, Charles.



Joseph T. Dager
Lean Marketing Systems
Ph: 260-438-0411 Fax: 260-818-2022
Email: jtdager@business901.com
Web/Blog: http://www.business901.com
Twitter: @business901
What others say: In the past 20 years, Joe and I
have collaborated on many difficult issues. Joe's
ability to combine his expertise with "out of the
box" thinking is unsurpassed. He has always
delivered quickly, cost effectively and with
ingenuity. A brilliant mind that is always a pleasure to work with." James R.

Joe Dager is President of Business901, a progressive company providing
direction in areas such as Lean Marketing, Product Marketing, Product
Launches and Re-Launches. As a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt,
Business901 provides and implements marketing, project and performance
planning methodologies in small businesses. The simplicity of a single
flexible model will create clarity for your staff and as a result better
execution. My goal is to allow you spend your time on the need versus the
plan.

An example of how we may work: Business901 could start with a
consulting style utilizing an individual from your organization or a virtual
assistance that is well versed in our principles. We have capabilities to
plug virtually any marketing function into your process immediately. As
proficiencies develop, Business901 moves into a coach’s role supporting the
process as needed. The goal of implementing a system is that the processes
will become a habit and not an event.

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