Before Design Thinking — Five Influential People You Should Know.

Humans have always designed, developed and built but the idea of ‘design thinking’ as a process only really took off in the last few years. What can we learn from designers to bring into our thinking process and who led the way?

As early as 1972 Robert McKim, professor of engineering at Stanford wrote Experiences in Visual Thinking, described as ‘an experiential approach to the development of new thinking skills [which] investigates the kinds of visual images that are the primary vehicles of visual thinking, materials, and environmental conditions conducive to visual thinking, and the significance of ideas.

McKim’s new book gave flow diagrams of strategic choices and ‘visual-thinking’ strategies.

This came out only a few years after Herbert Simon, the American political scientist published The Sciences of the Artificial which “Made the idea easy to grasp [that] objects (real or symbolic) in the environment of the decision-maker influence choice as much as the intrinsic information-processing capabilities of the decision-maker” and explained “the principles of modelling complex systems, particularly the human information-processing system that we call the mind.”

Herbert and McKim were both adding knowledge to the subject of design as a way of thinking with their discussions on the human decision-making process and visual images as vehicles of thought.

Professor Brian Lawson joined Sheffield University in 1974. Having studied architecture and psychology, he specialised in the design process and applied design thinking to the architectural discourse. A prolific author, he is best known for his book How Designers Think.

With design thinking being present in psychology, engineering and architecture, Nigel Cross brought design into the field of critical thinking in education. A professor of design studies at The Open University, he was responsible for developing the first distance-learning courses in design in the early 1970s and helped to clarify and develop the concept of design thinking (or “designerly ways of knowing”).

The first significant use of the term ‘design thinking’ came when a professor of architecture and urban design at Harvard, Pete Rowe, published the now seminal book on design theory in 1987, Design Thinking.

Rolf Faste, professor of industrial design at Syracuse University from 1971 to 1983, is credited with putting design thinking into the curriculum with a ‘whole person approach to problem-solving centred on the perception of needs’.

With all this development over various different disciplines, it was then David Kelley of IDEO who then adapted design thinking to business.