The attached narrated power point presentation explores the merits and limitations of team work in design thinking. The material will be useful for KTU second year B Tech students who prepare for the subject EST 200, Design and Engineering.

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Design Thinking in Teams
MEC

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Contents
• Importance of Team Work.
• Conflicts in Team Work.
• Design Process Plan.
• Planning and Changing Activities.
• Gathering and Sharing Information.
• Generating and Adopting Concepts.
• Avoiding and Resolving Conflicts.

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Design Thinking
“Design thinking is a versatile approach
to problem solving, involving design
techniques like user empathy, ideation,
rapid prototyping, and testing, that
helps teams tackle complex business
and/or organizational problems.“

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Team Work
• Important in a normal professional design
activity.
• Needed when design becomes a more
integrated activity involving collaboration
among many different professions.
• Each member has roles and relationships
within the team, relative to each other.
• Need to communicate with other members
of the team.

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Team Work
• Need to observe what other teams do.
• There may be hierarchies and particular
job roles.
• There may be a team leader appointed by
a higher authority.
• Explicit planning of activities not always
evident in individual or team work.
• Necessary to plan the activities to fit within
the available time.

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Team Work
• Exploratory activities a normal feature of
design activity.
• Both planned and unplanned actions to be
handled within a team.
• Unplanned, adhoc exploratory activities to
be pursued when perceived as relevant by
the designer.
• Need to interpret and re-formulate the
problem given as the task.

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Team Work
• Information relevant to the task to be
gathered from a variety of sources.
• Need to make explicit and observable
some aspects of the necessary gathering
and sharing of information that any team
would have to undertake.
• Information on aspects of the problem may
be kept in a file and given to the designers
when asked for.
• User evaluation reports a source of useful
information in case of redesigns.

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Team Work
• Analysing and understanding the problem
a part of the design process.
• Individual designers can form their own,
possibly idiosyncratic interpretation of the
problem.
• Teams to reach some shared/commonly
held understanding of the problem.
• Team work permits generation of greater
number and variety of concepts and ideas.
• Need to communicate and share such
concepts, ideas and activities.

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Team Work
• A social process, may be multidisciplinary.
• A collaborative process, need sharing of
representations.
• Social interactions, roles and relationships
cannot be ignored.
• Team to work productively to reach a
relatively successful conclusion to the set
task, within the prescribed time.

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Conflicts in Team Work
• Conflicts may arise between team
members.
• Members may have equal previous design
experience and similar job roles within the
firm.
• Members may be of equal hierarchy in the
normal work situation.
• There may be informal/no predetermined
roles that the members brought with them.

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Conflicts in Team Work.
• Roles and relationships to be established
and played within the team.
• Different interpretations or understandings
of the problem may become evident.
• Different members of the team may favour
different design concepts.
• May find difficulty in getting the team to
proceed in a way any one member would
prefer.

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Conflicts in Team Work.
• Identifying, avoiding and resolving conflicts
inevitable part of team work.
• Roles and relationships not always fixed
and simple.
• Role playing behaviours will emerge in any
team activity.
• Role play might depend on personality,
experience, and the task in hand.
• Team members to show more sensitivity to
each other’s preferences.

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Design Process Plan
• May be derived from conventional models
of a design process.
• Steps may include:
1. Quantify the problem
2. Generate concepts
3. Refine concepts
4. Select a concept
5. Design
6. Present

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Planning and Changing Activities
• Team to be conscious of planning the
design process.
• Team members to be aware of planning
the activities and of keeping the activities
to a schedule.
• Design activity, especially at a conceptual
stage, is unplanned, intuitive and adhoc.
• Team to prepare a schedule of activities.

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Planning and Changing Activities
• Tacit and unplanned, drifting and
discontinuous changes of activity.
• Not always easy to track what is actually
happening in teamwork.
• Some of the activity naturally becomes
more like a conversation than a formal
debate.
• Topics may drift in or out of conversation.
• Team volunteer to draw attention to the
schedule and time when needed.

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Planning and Changing Activities
• Designer to show opportunistic behaviour
in case of deviation from current or
planned activities.
• Opportunistic behaviour allows flexibility to
deal with design problems & opportunities
that emerge in the design process.
• An opportunistic deviation initiated by one
member may be seen as irrelevant by
another.

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Gathering and Sharing Information
• Relevant information to be gathered in any
design task.
• Information to be extracted from its source
and shared among the team.
• Use of user evaluation report to gather
information.
• May also rely on personal experience and
knowledge of members.
• Approach to information gathering can be
informal.

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Gathering and Sharing Information
• Possibility of misunderstandings and
errors if no formal role assigned for
information gathering.
• Team members could misunderstand what
were apparently shared concepts.
• Errors and misunderstandings might
suggest that the team does not have a
very effective strategy for gathering and
sharing information.
• Shared understanding cannot always be
assumed in team work.

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Generating and Adopting Concepts
• Necessary for the team to generate design
concepts.
• To build the concepts into a specific design
proposal.
• To develop initial concepts into more
detailed and robust versions.
• Must decide to adopt certain concepts
from among the several proposed.

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Generating and Adopting Concepts
• Design proposal may begin as a vague
concept with a lot of development work put
into it.
• Concepts need to be built up.
• Additions and variations turn initial idea
into something more robust.
• Generate some random concept-lists, the
team to review each list to eliminate
unsatisfactory concepts and identify the
preferred ones.

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Generating and Adopting Concepts
• Team members to persuade others of the
value of the most favoured concept (called
the tray concept).
• Tray idea, the key concept, will be
proposed, accepted, modified, developed
and justified.
• Designers may be emotionally involved
with their ideas, may defend their own.
• Design concepts not merely abstract
ideas, but personal insights that emerge
from cognitive efforts.

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Avoiding and Resolving Conflicts
• Disagreement may arise between
members of a design team.
• More serious disagreement might arise if
there are competing design concepts.
• Team to find ways of resolving, or perhaps
avoiding conflicts.
• Team members to be aware of when they
are close to reaching actual agreement.

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Avoiding and Resolving Conflicts
• Deferred agreement or non-committal
apparent agreement reflect normal
aspects of human discussion and verbal
interchange.
• Individuals may nurse a contrary viewpoint
and return to it when opportunity arises,
even when there is no overt disagreement.

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Design Thinking Teams
“Design thinking teams are highly
collaborative, multidisciplinary project
teams, comprised of people from different
backgrounds, including design,
engineering, research, and business, that
jointly apply human-centered design
strategies to solve problems.”

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Design Thinking Teams
• Seek diverse perspectives.
- multi-disciplinary in composition.
- seek out diverse perspectives to help
devise better solutions.
- leverage internal expertise.
- seek out a variety of perspectives
outside of their team.
- attempt to build a holistic understanding
of the customer needs and experiences.

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Design Thinking Teams
• Co-design.
- should have a participatory approach.
- participate in the definition, design, and
creation of value for customers or end-
users.
- co-design internally as a team and
externally with customers or end-users.
- solicit feedback from customers or end-
users throughout product development
cycle.

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Design Thinking Teams
• Experience radical empathy.
- dedicate resources to speak directly to
or observe customers in real world
contexts.
- find what is the customer life like today
and how to make their lives easier?
- try to know customer goals, needs, and
pain points.
- develop customer-centric solutions that
genuinely resonate with end-users.

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Design Thinking Teams
• Iteratively re-frame problems.
- know that the problem is rarely precise
enough from the get-go.
- know that the problem requires constant
reframing as the team learns.
- understands the problem space more.

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Design Thinking Teams
• Get paint on the walls.
- make ideas tangible.
- understand the value of externalizing
ideas, be it a sketch or a prototype.
- facilitate a culture of enlightened trial
and error that empowers teams to build
on successful ideas or pivot when
something isn’t working.

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So What Design Thinking Offers?
“Design thinking offers a shared way of
working that fosters transparency, human-
centered thinking, and a bias towards
action. Design thinking prompts a designer
to look at how his/her team operates today
and considers what he/she could be doing
differently.”

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References
• Nigel Cross, “Design Thinking :
Understanding How Designers Think and
Work”, Berg, New York, 1st Edition, 2011.
• https://smashingideas.com/5-things-
design-thinking-teams-differently/

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Ready
for
Team
Work?