Design Thinking

Do the design arts provide an essential underappreciated approach to thinking itself? Does the creating, building and doing inherent in design thinking evoke a special more incisive way of living, thinking and being in Universe? How does design thinking differ from our other thinking traditions such as critical, rational, deductive, inductive (scientific), intuitive, poetical, literary, spiritual, mystical, moral, economic, and political thinking? Or is design just a "glorified" form of problem-solving?

Has philosophy overlooked this dynamic approach to thinking and understanding? Ought we all enrich our lives by practicing design and design thinking more deliberately? Maybe we should first ask what is design and what is its role in society? What is the significance, if any, of design thinking?

Could our design capability be the purpose of humans in Universe as R. Buckminster Fuller speculated? Might it be that design is, in fact, the most human quality of our experience, of our being, and of our thinking? These and related questions will form the basis for this discussion to explore design thinking from many perspectives.

I recently took an exquisite, free, on-line class Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society (given by Karl T. Ulrich of the University of Pennsylvania) (https://www.coursera.org/course/design) which got me thinking about Design in a deeper way. Ulrich's 8 week course will be offered again starting April 29th. I highly recommend it.

Resources:

Karl T. Ulrich's book Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society (http://ulrichbook.org/) gives a nice short introduction to his thinking. Victor Papanek's 1971 book "Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change" gives an important but somewhat dated take on the subject. The Buckminster Fuller Challenge (http://challenge.bfi.org/) provides the highest award for socially responsible design and stands as a testament to Buckminster Fuller's vision of the preeminent importance of Design in society. This paper on "Systems & Design Thinking" that provides a nice history of design thinking and its relationship to systems thinking (http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1009&context=od_working_papers&utm_source=buffer&buffer_share=b75bb). My essay on "Society and Our Technology Built World" (http://blog.cjfearnley.com/2011/06/02/society-and-our-technology-built-world/) discusses design in the context of technology and society.