Elsevier

Design Studies

Volume 32, Issue 6, November 2011, Pages 588-607
Design Studies

Being a professional: Three lenses into design thinking, acting, and being

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2011.07.004Get rights and content

This paper presents three lenses for interpreting design thinking: a framework on learning to become professionals, and two interpretations of this framework that speak broadly to aspects of ‘design thinking’. The first lens draws on a framework for ‘an embodied understanding of professional practice’ and provides a way to describe how professionals form and organize their knowledge and skills into a particular ‘professional-way-of-being’. The second and third lenses provide examples of using this framework to interpret existing results from phenomenographic studies on ways of experiencing design and ways of experiencing cross-disciplinary practice. We conclude with a discussion of how these three lenses contribute to a working synthesis of design thinking and learning.

Highlights

► We examined activities of designers through a becoming a professional framework. ► Phenomenography was used to analyse data on experiences of designing and cross-disciplinary practice. ► Critical variations in design and cross-disciplinary practice were identified as ways of thinking, acting, and being.

Section snippets

Becoming professionals

‘Learning to become a professional involves not only what we know and can do, but also who we are (becoming). It involves the integration of knowing, acting, and being in the form of professional ways of being that unfold over time’ (Dall’Alba 2009b, p. 34)

The process of becoming professionals is always open-ended and incomplete. It entails developing and refining an embodied understanding of professional practice that integrates knowing, acting, and being in the world (Dall’Alba, 2009a). This

Ways of experiencing ‘design’ practice across disciplines

Daly, 2008, Daly, 2009 and Daly et al., 2008, Daly et al., in press investigated the ways design has been experienced by professionals within and outside engineering fields to better understand what it means to design and be a designer. By focusing on how professional designers experience design, the study made visible how professionals give meaning to, and approach design – filling a theory gap in linking ‘how’ professionals design with ‘what’ they come to understand about design. By exploring

Ways of experiencing ‘cross-disciplinary’ practice in engineering contexts

For the third perspective, Adams and Mann investigated the ways cross-disciplinary practice in engineering contexts is experienced and understood (see Adams et al., 2009b, Adams et al., 2010). Here, the term cross-disciplinary is used to characterize a collection of practices associated with thinking and working across disciplinary boundaries such as multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary (Adams, Mann et al., 2009, chap. 19). Rather than focus on group behaviors and

Discussion

The three lenses presented in this paper open up a conversation space for conceptualizing a ‘working synthesis’ of design thinking (Cross, 2010) with the potential to renew an integrated understanding of what it means to be a design professional, how designers become professionals, and how educational programs should help prepare aspiring design professionals for the challenges of practice.

The lens of ‘becoming professionals’ provides a theory-based framework for supporting a working synthesis

Concluding remarks

The purpose of this paper was to respond to two challenges: (1) the lack of a working synthesis for understanding what it means to be a design professional, how designers become professionals, and what it means to prepare aspiring design professionals, and (2) a need for interpretive frameworks for design thinking that can speak within and across disciplinary perspectives. We addressed these challenges by presenting three lenses, or frameworks, for interpreting ‘design thinking’: a theoretical

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank our participants for sharing their experiences. We would also like to thank Tiago Forin and Saranya Srinivasan for their input on characterizing ways of thinking, acting, and being. Aspects of this work were supported by a National Science Foundation grant (EEP-0748005).

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