Book Summary : ‘Design thinking’ (2011) by Nigel Cross.

If you are someone who is curious about how designers actually design, this book is a perfect read for you. The primary focus of the book is understanding how designers think and work.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The author Nigel Cross is a British academic, a design researcher and educator. Cross helped clarify and develop the concept of design thinking as a domain independent discipline. ‘Designerly ways of knowing’(2006) and ‘Engineering Design Methods’(2008) are few of his other renowned books.

SUMMARY

The book provides knowledge for better understanding rather than rules. Through evidences from case studies of designers and their prominent designs we get a detailed insight into high quality design thinking.

“This is not a ‘methods’ or ‘how-to’ book that reveals what has been learned from research into many different aspects of design thinking. It is a book that provides commentary and advice, rather than instruction”.

The book has total eight chapters out of which four are case studies and the other four discuss and summarize the case studies in more general terms.

Initially we are introduced to design, its evidences, ability and process. “Anything that isn’t a simple, untouched piece of nature has been designed by someone”. Hence all traditional and vernacular artifacts and craft works have some form of design thinking involved in their production and evolution over time. But to be a designer one needs to have cognitive skills. These can be understood by asking, watching and thinking about what designers do.

Chapters two and three are precise case studies of Gordon Murray a highly innovative racing car designer and Kenneth Grange an outstanding product designer. The readers are provided with minutest details of the designer’s thinking process complete with pictures of their final designs as well as ideation sketches.

The examples from both case studies evidently show that innovative and successful design work often goes beyond the original brief. Drawing and sketching are used not only as a means of externalizing cognitive images but also as means of thinking. From the case studies and interviews of other designers it is known that inspiration and solutions to design problems often come in the form of sudden illumination to prepared minds in the process of design thinking. Another important feature designers use in their strategy is keeping design thinking going at many levels simultaneously.

The third and fourth case studies in the book which are also Chapters 5 and 6 are really interesting protocol studies. This technique of research involves designers to ‘think aloud’ as they go through a complete design process. Case study 3 is of the highly skilled engineer Victor Scheinman who was given the task to design a device to carry/fasten a backpack on a mountain bicycle. Case study 4 is of a team of three designers who are given the same task. The summary following these case studies explains and compares roles, collaboration and steps in design thinking to name a few.

Overall the book shows that design ability is such a multifaceted cognitive skill. A designer has to have a intelligence that can be used to observe, plan, review and create solutions. Like other forms of intelligence and ability, design intelligence is not a ‘talent’, but can be developed.

But developing an expertise in design ability, like any other field, requires a accumulation of experience. In order to cope with the constant uncertainty appearing at every stage of a design process, a designer has to frame the problem in many ways and broader perspectives so as to find a perfect solution.

“People who prefer the certainty of structured, well-defined problems will never appreciate the delight of being a designer!