The document outlines the importance and dynamics of teamwork in the design thinking process, highlighting the roles, relationships, and conflicts that can arise within teams. It emphasizes the need for effective communication, information sharing, and a structured design process to facilitate collaboration among multidisciplinary team members. Additionally, it discusses strategies for conflict resolution and maintaining focus on user needs and iterative problem reframing.

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Design Thinking in Teams
MEC

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Contents
• Importance of Team Work.
• Conflicts in Team Work.
• Design Process Plan.
• Planning and Changing Activities.
• Gathering and Sharing Information.
• Generating and Adopting Concepts.
• Avoiding and Resolving Conflicts.

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Design Thinking
“Design thinking is a versatile approach
to problem solving, involving design
techniques like user empathy, ideation,
rapid prototyping, and testing, that
helps teams tackle complex business
and/or organizational problems.“

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Team Work
• Important in a normal professional design
activity.
• Needed when design becomes a more
integrated activity involving collaboration
among many different professions.
• Each member has roles and relationships
within the team, relative to each other.
• Need to communicate with other members
of the team.

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Team Work
• Need to observe what other teams do.
• There may be hierarchies and particular
job roles.
• There may be a team leader appointed by
a higher authority.
• Explicit planning of activities not always
evident in individual or team work.
• Necessary to plan the activities to fit within
the available time.

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Team Work
• Exploratory activities a normal feature of
design activity.
• Both planned and unplanned actions to be
handled within a team.
• Unplanned, adhoc exploratory activities to
be pursued when perceived as relevant by
the designer.
• Need to interpret and re-formulate the
problem given as the task.

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Team Work
• Information relevant to the task to be
gathered from a variety of sources.
• Need to make explicit and observable
some aspects of the necessary gathering
and sharing of information that any team
would have to undertake.
• Information on aspects of the problem may
be kept in a file and given to the designers
when asked for.
• User evaluation reports a source of useful
information in case of redesigns.

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Team Work
• Analysing and understanding the problem
a part of the design process.
• Individual designers can form their own,
possibly idiosyncratic interpretation of the
problem.
• Teams to reach some shared/commonly
held understanding of the problem.
• Team work permits generation of greater
number and variety of concepts and ideas.
• Need to communicate and share such
concepts, ideas and activities.

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Team Work
• A social process, may be multidisciplinary.
• A collaborative process, need sharing of
representations.
• Social interactions, roles and relationships
cannot be ignored.
• Team to work productively to reach a
relatively successful conclusion to the set
task, within the prescribed time.

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Conflicts in Team Work
• Conflicts may arise between team
members.
• Members may have equal previous design
experience and similar job roles within the
firm.
• Members may be of equal hierarchy in the
normal work situation.
• There may be informal/no predetermined
roles that the members brought with them.

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Conflicts in Team Work.
• Roles and relationships to be established
and played within the team.
• Different interpretations or understandings
of the problem may become evident.
• Different members of the team may favour
different design concepts.
• May find difficulty in getting the team to
proceed in a way any one member would
prefer.

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Conflicts in Team Work.
• Identifying, avoiding and resolving conflicts
inevitable part of team work.
• Roles and relationships not always fixed
and simple.
• Role playing behaviours will emerge in any
team activity.
• Role play might depend on personality,
experience, and the task in hand.
• Team members to show more sensitivity to
each other’s preferences.

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Design Process Plan
• May be derived from conventional models
of a design process.
• Steps may include:
1. Quantify the problem
2. Generate concepts
3. Refine concepts
4. Select a concept
5. Design
6. Present

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Planning and Changing Activities
• Team to be conscious of planning the
design process.
• Team members to be aware of planning
the activities and of keeping the activities
to a schedule.
• Design activity, especially at a conceptual
stage, is unplanned, intuitive and adhoc.
• Team to prepare a schedule of activities.

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Planning and Changing Activities
• Tacit and unplanned, drifting and
discontinuous changes of activity.
• Not always easy to track what is actually
happening in teamwork.
• Some of the activity naturally becomes
more like a conversation than a formal
debate.
• Topics may drift in or out of conversation.
• Team volunteer to draw attention to the
schedule and time when needed.

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Planning and Changing Activities
• Designer to show opportunistic behaviour
in case of deviation from current or
planned activities.
• Opportunistic behaviour allows flexibility to
deal with design problems & opportunities
that emerge in the design process.
• An opportunistic deviation initiated by one
member may be seen as irrelevant by
another.

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Gathering and Sharing Information
• Relevant information to be gathered in any
design task.
• Information to be extracted from its source
and shared among the team.
• Use of user evaluation report to gather
information.
• May also rely on personal experience and
knowledge of members.
• Approach to information gathering can be
informal.

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Gathering and Sharing Information
• Possibility of misunderstandings and
errors if no formal role assigned for
information gathering.
• Team members could misunderstand what
were apparently shared concepts.
• Errors and misunderstandings might
suggest that the team does not have a
very effective strategy for gathering and
sharing information.
• Shared understanding cannot always be
assumed in team work.

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Generating and Adopting Concepts
• Necessary for the team to generate design
concepts.
• To build the concepts into a specific design
proposal.
• To develop initial concepts into more
detailed and robust versions.
• Must decide to adopt certain concepts
from among the several proposed.

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Generating and Adopting Concepts
• Design proposal may begin as a vague
concept with a lot of development work put
into it.
• Concepts need to be built up.
• Additions and variations turn initial idea
into something more robust.
• Generate some random concept-lists, the
team to review each list to eliminate
unsatisfactory concepts and identify the
preferred ones.

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Generating and Adopting Concepts
• Team members to persuade others of the
value of the most favoured concept (called
the tray concept).
• Tray idea, the key concept, will be
proposed, accepted, modified, developed
and justified.
• Designers may be emotionally involved
with their ideas, may defend their own.
• Design concepts not merely abstract
ideas, but personal insights that emerge
from cognitive efforts.

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Avoiding and Resolving Conflicts
• Disagreement may arise between
members of a design team.
• More serious disagreement might arise if
there are competing design concepts.
• Team to find ways of resolving, or perhaps
avoiding conflicts.
• Team members to be aware of when they
are close to reaching actual agreement.

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Avoiding and Resolving Conflicts
• Deferred agreement or non-committal
apparent agreement reflect normal
aspects of human discussion and verbal
interchange.
• Individuals may nurse a contrary viewpoint
and return to it when opportunity arises,
even when there is no overt disagreement.

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Design Thinking Teams
“Design thinking teams are highly
collaborative, multidisciplinary project
teams, comprised of people from different
backgrounds, including design,
engineering, research, and business, that
jointly apply human-centered design
strategies to solve problems.”

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Design Thinking Teams
• Seek diverse perspectives.
- multi-disciplinary in composition.
- seek out diverse perspectives to help
devise better solutions.
- leverage internal expertise.
- seek out a variety of perspectives
outside of their team.
- attempt to build a holistic understanding
of the customer needs and experiences.

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Design Thinking Teams
• Co-design.
- should have a participatory approach.
- participate in the definition, design, and
creation of value for customers or end-
users.
- co-design internally as a team and
externally with customers or end-users.
- solicit feedback from customers or end-
users throughout product development
cycle.

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Design Thinking Teams
• Experience radical empathy.
- dedicate resources to speak directly to
or observe customers in real world
contexts.
- find what is the customer life like today
and how to make their lives easier?
- try to know customer goals, needs, and
pain points.
- develop customer-centric solutions that
genuinely resonate with end-users.

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Design Thinking Teams
• Iteratively re-frame problems.
- know that the problem is rarely precise
enough from the get-go.
- know that the problem requires constant
reframing as the team learns.
- understands the problem space more.

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Design Thinking Teams
• Get paint on the walls.
- make ideas tangible.
- understand the value of externalizing
ideas, be it a sketch or a prototype.
- facilitate a culture of enlightened trial
and error that empowers teams to build
on successful ideas or pivot when
something isn’t working.

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So What Design Thinking Offers?
“Design thinking offers a shared way of
working that fosters transparency, human-
centered thinking, and a bias towards
action. Design thinking prompts a designer
to look at how his/her team operates today
and considers what he/she could be doing
differently.”

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References
• Nigel Cross, “Design Thinking :
Understanding How Designers Think and
Work”, Berg, New York, 1st Edition, 2011.
• https://smashingideas.com/5-things-
design-thinking-teams-differently/

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Ready
for
Team
Work?