How Designers Think

In a recent post, I wrote about the four essential members of a design team. Each designer is an analytical thinker, a contextual thinker, or (most likely) some combination of both. How do designers use these ways of thinking to create products? This post breaks down the way designers think and the two essential approaches to creating good products.

Analytical thinking focuses on the product, asking key questions like, what are the components of the product or experience? How can we design them to make a better whole? Activities like product teardowns, lifecycle analyses, and in-category audits look at existing products and their components. Contextual thinking, on the other hand, looks around the product, searching for insight through the users, the environment, and everything surrounding the product itself. Contextual thinking aims to answer the question, How can we benefit users and their environment in the design of this product? Ethnographic research leads the charge in uncovering contextual insights, but there are other tools (like Victor Lombardi’s Question The Brief) that can be used to effectively develop ideas far beyond what currently exists.

Of course, product development teams need to use both analytical and contextual thinking to create great products and experiences. They often do so in a differentiated manner, with activities that emphasize one or the other. But how can you ensure that a diverse team with a range of thinkers is engaged on a project?

Integrated thinking combines analytical and contextual thinking for powerful results. Often, teams need to create tools for generating concepts that utilize a broad team’s entire skill set. If a team is a diverse group of analytical and contextual thinkers, the integrated approach helps them collaborate early on in the process. Imagine designers, engineers, researchers, strategists, and project managers working together in an immersion session.

One example of integrated thinking is Forced Association (originally introduced to me by UC’s Dale Murray). Thinking analytically, participants break down and list ideas for each of a product’s attributes, like form, color, materials, manufacturing process, etc. Then switching to a contextual mindset, random mixtures of these attributes force participants to consider the new context that these “recipes” would live in. An activity like this is diverse enough to engage the entire team, giving each team member an opportunity to use their individual strengths. The best teams know how to deploy analytical and contextual thinking individually and when to integrate them, dynamically identifying opportunities to combine their thinking for powerful results.

What experiences have you had that combine the strengths of analytical and contextual thinkers to achieve success?

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