Analysing Design Thinking: Studies of Cross-Cultural Co-Creation

The scientific analysis of design thinking is of considerable interest to academic scholars and design practitioners across many disciplines. This research tradition has generated a growing corpus of studies examining how designers think when creating innovative products, although there has been limited analysis of how designers think when creating less tangible deliverables (e.g., concepts and user-insights). This book brings together 28 contributions from internationally-leading academics with an interest in design thinking who examine professional designers working on a project that not only involved soft deliverables, but where a central role was played by co-creation across multiple, culturally-diverse stakeholders. This collection of detailed, multi-method analyses gives a unique insight into how a Scandinavian design team tackled a four-month long design task within the automotive industry. All papers draw upon a common, video-based dataset and report analyses that link diverse academic disciplines including psychology, anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, architecture, management, engineering and design studies. The dataset affords multiple entry points into the analysis of design thinking, with the papers demonstrating the application of a wide range of techniques that generate distinct yet complementary insights. Collectively these papers provide a coherent framework for analysing and interpreting design thinking ‘in vivo’ through video-based field studies.