Isn't design thinking just... thinking? There may be different design methodologies you apply in different domains (e.g. civil, aeronautics, automotive, electronics, software), but once you abstract that away, what you get is thinking. I once attended a design thinking workshop many years ago, and no one there was able to adequately explain what design thinking was, except by means of jargon, metaphor, or example. My understanding of the subject has not advanced much further in the intervening years.

Can you give an analogous example for data science? I confess ignorance here, and always took the term at face value. Is the issue that "data science" tries to be agnostic about the source of the data? (I'm not claiming that that is true, just guessing)

> people think that they can just come in and ...

SOC2 is like this: a collection of security ideas thought up by a group of CPAs, so they can partake in software engineering. It's beyond bizarre.

when Idea Guys™ never get told to buzz off

Design thinking, at least in its formal STS approach, is essentially applied sociology; it's about using various toolkits to build a sufficient understanding of a domain from the "inside out" (using desk and field research) so that you can design valuable experiences that build upon the expertise of those actually inside the domain. In this, it's a bridge between UX/product and users/stakeholders (technical stakeholders are admittedly too often an afterthought, but that's a process problem). If anyone comes in and attempts to blindly shove workshops at you without first conducting in-depth research, interviews, and field studies in your domain, then they are (without resorting to the One True Scotsman) not doing design thinking, they're doing cargo-cult brainstorming. (It's also a process orthogonal to agile development, since by definition it's a linear process that needs to be conducted prior to developing the actual product features and requirements.)

The books and papers the OP cites are solid (Rittel and Webber, Buchanan, etc., though TRIZ, I think, is rather oversold), but in my experience the problem with most design thinking practitioners is that they aren't qualified sociologists and ethnographers, so a lot of design thinking is basically a reinvention of the last century of sociological middle-range theory and ethnographic principles, without being strongly informed by either, likely due to the field's foundation in early software requirements studies.

Uhh… What does Design Thinking have to do with UX? Sure, it could be used to come up with novel ideas for user interfaces but DT (nowadays) is an approach that's several orders of magnitude more general.

I've used The Design of Everyday Things in many classes I teach. I would agree that it's not practical, but that's not its goal. Instead, it gives you frameworks for thinking about things as well as vocabulary for talking about those things.

Off the top of my head, some of the key ideas include:

* Affordances, that objects should have (often visual) cues that give hints as to how to use things * Mental models, that every design has three different models, namely system implementation, design model, and user model, and that the design model and user model should try to match each other * Gulf of Evaluation (the gap between the current system state and people's understanding of it) and Gulf of Execution (the gap between what people want the system to do and how to use the system to do it) * Kinds of Errors and how to design to prevent and recover from them, e.g. slips (chose the right action but accidentally did the wrong thing, e.g. fat finger) vs mistakes (chose the wrong action to do)

What's particularly useful about Norman's book is that these key ideas apply for all kinds of user interfaces, from command-line to GUI to voice-only to AR/VR to AI chatbot. I'd encourage you to think about this book in this kind of framing, that it gives you general frameworks for reasoning and talking about UX problems rather than specific practical solutions.

I was gifted this book my a CIO when in college. She had a dozen copies in her office to hand out to various people.

It took me a few tries to get up the will to actually read it. It was years ago, so I don’t remember a lot of details. My main take away was to make controls logical for the thing being controlled. “Norman doors” are the big one, but I often think about it while I’m in my car trying to do something on a touch screen, when all I want is a knob, button, or switch.

In the modern era of web design I think it would point to these websites (like most of Apple’s product pages), that make users scroll through indulgent animations, just to get to the content. It may be cool the first time, but is very annoying for repeat visits, and it feels like it breaks my scrolling expectations. Not to mention all the horizontal scrolling thrown in there, which becomes a headache for those without the hardware to do it easily, and confusing to change scroll direction all the time.

It tells lots of things but you can takeaway a few things.

One of the key takeaway example for me was that if you make an approachable flat surface, people will put things on it. This is a small example but tells a lot about design of common things.

Another was that I shouldn't be blaming myself for failing to use an everyday thing, I should be blaming its design.

After reading the book I now keep seeing so many design flaws in so many things around. It also made me appreciate good design similarly. I probably think a bit more about users of code etc now, doesn't mean I write better, but it has changed perspective quite a bit.

"Bible of design" might be a bit excessive. It's a good design 101 book. Definitely longer than it should be, and kind of fumbles the explanation of "affordances", which the author had to clarify later. It's representative of "design thinking" as a historically well-situated concept in design, but that's not necessarily a good thing in itself.

It really depends what you're looking for. If you want something deeper, more abstract, I would recommend going straight to something like Notes on the Synthesis of Form by Christopher Alexander, which I think typically appeals to the more abstraction-oriented part of the mind of engineers. If you want to get more actionable, practical day to day recipes, Refactoring UI as suggested somewhere else in the thread is a decent suggestion.

The Norman door was a powerful example for me, as it emphasises that the user is not the problem but the push door with the handle is the problem.

And if you’re designing the door, it is your responsibility to think deeply and observe behaviour, to design an intuitive interface.

I do agree that it’s rather academic, but I did leave with that one takeaway.

Still more on the psychological and even philosophical side than being about how to do design, I really enjoyed Jenny Davis, "How artifacts afford". It takes consideration of 'affordance' to a new level. If that rings bells, you'll love it.

For me the real capability unlock from The Design of Everyday Things was that it made me start noticing and thinking deliberately about design decisions, which pushed me to begin evaluating everything through that lens. In general it comes down to looking at something and asking "what is good / effective and what is bad / annoying about this". If you keep doing that enough you develop your own taste and a greater appreciation of the world. Donald Norman isn't handing you a map, he's teaching you how to build your own.

I read it and thought it contained several good ideas, but was excessively wordy and would have benefited from being half as long.

For Devs/Engineers and even many designers, things some of us tend to take for granted were amazing to them. So, my first recommendation is to read Refactoring UI end-to-end and keep a copy handy at your desk.

https://www.refactoringui.com

PS. Refactoring UI is from the guys who created TailwindCSS.

Like you say, it's old and I'm nostalgic for the time that I associate reading it with. I think that explains some of the love folks (or at least me) have for it.

I've never revisited the book and thanks to your comment I might not ever now ha

my take on this book is that 1) it contains a lot of foundational knowledge/wisdom about design as interpreted broadly that is very useful across contexts, and 2) it is itself, ironically, an example of poor design. Not in the visual sense, but in that it's structure and writing do a pretty bad job actually conveying that knowledge to the reader and being navigable.

I tried reading it and hated it, then I came back knowing bits and pieces of its contents from elsewhere and was like "yup, this is the only place I've seen all of this together".

i also picked up the book with high hopes and dropped off about where you are at. useful concepts like affordances and signifiers but felt like a lot of filler.

I took a Computer Science class decades ago that used that book as the core of the class material. I don't remember a single thing about that class now except that I hate that book and the professor bragging about designing cockpit instruments or some such. I learned more out of a cognitive psych class.

I have similar experience and agree with your book recommendations. Depending on your vertical I would add the Toyota Way later to understand factory design and efficiency. It’s interesting to read back to back.

Yes I agree, and the replies don't really make it any more clear.

The biggest differentiator of design thinking is really addressing the XY problem. In 95% of cases clients will come to you to design their solution. Ie they already think they have a solution to their problem and now they want it to look good.

Design thinking is basically more like root cause analysis, or the 5 why's.. and an emphasis on taking to end users (the people with the problem) without having a solution.

Once you understand the problem more fundamentally is only when you start cooking up with a solution.

And the result of that process might not even be a traditional design, but perhaps just a tweak to something, like moving your onboarding to later in the ca process..

In practice however.. 95% of designers who say they practice design thinking disregard this, and just want to design wherever the client asks for

I was confused when I first heard about 'Design Thinking' as a thing because as a designer it sounded just like the standard design process that I already knew inside-out and backwards.

After a while I realised a few things about it:

1. Yes it is the standard design process, but with a fancy title.

2. It's been given a fancy title as that helps sell books and launch consulting careers

3. It's actually useful as it gets clients and stakeholders involved in the design process. They start thinking about the problems they want to solve and who they want to solve them for - and more importantly have a personal stake in the outcomes. Moves the conversation from 'I want this' to 'here's the problem'.

I've run design thinking workshops with everyone from primary school children to CEOs and they've all loved it.

I think that's the point. The underpinning exhortation is to "think about design" where the outcome is something that successfully addresses users needs, is feasible to create, and commercially viable.

"Design Thinking" as a brand has codified that in several ways - not all successful. But the underlying principle is sound: there are plenty of examples of products/services that failed to address one or more of the 3 dimensions.

I found this quote from the linked article [0] more helpful:

> Design thinking can be described as a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.

[0]: https://www.designorate.com/design-thinking-guide-what-why-h...

it is not - just a way to position design and untie it from the visual output that is also called design. Design thinking will not make you a logo (but a logo designer could pretty much do design thinking...)

It doesn't claim to be different? It puts more emphasis on the design part.

I was surprised this wasn't on there, even with a caveat that it's for online sources like you note.

Ha ha, I love even the cover photo of “The Design of Everyday Things.”

+1 agreed, Creative Confidence is an insipiring book.

Nice collection, "Weniger, aber besser" by Rams will suffice and is at home on any shelf.

This isn't really a tasteful collection. It is just a bunch of popular books, all of which that I have read being about minimalism.

If that's what you want you can just use Apple as a case study because that's what you end up getting if you want "modern" and minimal. Even just drop the CSS file from source into an LLM and go through how it is implemented.

This looks like a really nice collection of books. Thanks for sharing!

Wow excellent thank you

Someone tried to explain systems thinking to me with respect to a planning effort we had.

I have to admit that it was very hard to me to follow what they were saying.

Maybe I’m dumb, maybe the person didn’t explain it well, or, maybe system thinking is really complex and thus hard to convey and use.

Design thinking on the other hand is easy to understand and apply.

Design Thinking (and more broadly, human-centered design) is a pragmatic framework for doing product design in an effective and productive manner. Systems Thinking is a massively more general superset. I'm not really sure how you'd operationalize that on a design project, except by following first principles, which would essentially get you to DT / HCD.

I improved my doodling skills from that book, but I'm not sure I learned anything generalizable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence