Abstract
A thinking style refers to a person’s preferred way to process and react to different situations. Since they have an impact on performance and should be viewed as fluid, some environments may benefit from specific thinking styles to optimize results and the use of resources. In this paper we present a study indicating which thinking style professionals with different backgrounds (engineers, designers, and architects) favour when designing a product. For that, we used the Concept Design Thinking Style Inventory (CD-TSI). Results showed that engineers favour the conditional thinking style (accepting opinions from others without questioning them), designers prefer the exploring style (seeking for options and differentiation), while both designers and architects lean towards the creative style (thinking in parts to get to the whole concept). Contributions in this study are threefold. First, we associate thinking styles to groups of professionals. Second, we discuss them in relation to decision-making processes (rationality and intuition). Third, we associate them to product design stages.
Keywords
design thinking styles; product design; decision-making; concept design thinking style inventory
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2018.356
Citation
Mandelli, R., Rosa, V., Fogliatto, F., Brust-Renck, P., and Tonetto, L. (2018) Do Professionals with Different Backgrounds Use Distinct Thinking Styles When Designing a Product?, in Storni, C., Leahy, K., McMahon, M., Lloyd, P. and Bohemia, E. (eds.), Design as a catalyst for change - DRS International Conference 2018, 25-28 June, Limerick, Ireland. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2018.356
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Do Professionals with Different Backgrounds Use Distinct Thinking Styles When Designing a Product?
A thinking style refers to a person’s preferred way to process and react to different situations. Since they have an impact on performance and should be viewed as fluid, some environments may benefit from specific thinking styles to optimize results and the use of resources. In this paper we present a study indicating which thinking style professionals with different backgrounds (engineers, designers, and architects) favour when designing a product. For that, we used the Concept Design Thinking Style Inventory (CD-TSI). Results showed that engineers favour the conditional thinking style (accepting opinions from others without questioning them), designers prefer the exploring style (seeking for options and differentiation), while both designers and architects lean towards the creative style (thinking in parts to get to the whole concept). Contributions in this study are threefold. First, we associate thinking styles to groups of professionals. Second, we discuss them in relation to decision-making processes (rationality and intuition). Third, we associate them to product design stages.