Abstract
This chapter explores the temporality of design thinking based on ethnographic data from projects and workshops. I describe how design thinking takes place in rigidly measured timeslots that create an atmosphere of constant time pressure without any room for alterations. Following Luhmann’s distinction between a temporal, social, and factual dimension of meaning I examine how time pressure privileges the temporal and social dimension over the factual one: there are no bad (or good) ideas because evaluations are suspended by the shortage of time. Therefore, design thinking creates an atmosphere in which all team members are equally activated and underlie the same time pressure. This generates a formally non-hierarchic process that encourages participants to come up with new ideas. I conclude that design thinking seems to be less about the actual output and more about creating a specific working atmosphere.
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Notes
- 1.
The techniques in question, which emerge in agile software development (the most well-known example is the company Scrum), have to do with a specific organizational understanding and the socio-cultural condition of coding (cf. Schmidt 2012: 183–189). Programming is understood as a “collective, physical and public process which from the start involves working with clients, who are supposed to be integrated into the development team” (ibid.: 186). Design thinking is itself considered an agile method (cf. Komus 2014) although design thinking and agile software development have not yet been systematically compared.
- 2.
In Scrum training programs, the game is called the Ball Point Game. There, instead of manufacturing magic pens, they make magic balls. For an ethnographic description of this, see Schmidt (2012: 191–193).
- 3.
It is difficult to distinguish between these two things and design thinkers themselves run into difficulties. For example, Ulrich Weinberg, the director of the d.school in Potsdam, explained at the 2012 Entrepreneurship Summit at the Free University in Berlin that “the best method we have so far encountered is the way that designers work intuitively. That’s why we call this whole thing ‘design thinking.’ We could though also call it design doing, because it is design thinking and doing” (Weinberg 2012: 6:35 min).
- 4.
Individuals are synchronized even at the level of individual tasks in design thinking through methodological structuring (see Chap. 3, section “Method As Tool” and Chap. 4, section “Design Thinking As Emancipated Work”).
- 5.
Time pressure is created when one has several tasks that have to be completed in a limited amount of time. In contrast, a time shortage is not just a matter of having short externally imposed time limits but arises in relation to other processes within the time frame. In chess, for example, a time shortage is created when one is playing with a timer and one player has used up more than her appointed time, leaving her opponent with relatively less time per move. In other words, a time shortage does not result from the use of a timer alone, but only when a player manages to make her moves faster than her opponent. A player can also create a time shortage and manipulate her opponent psychologically by making several moves in quick succession. Time shortage is thus a relational concept that is determined by an opponent’s speed—or generally, by the temporality of other practices.
- 6.
By comparing design thinking with academic research, I am not suggesting that the former arrives at comparatively false conclusions. It is merely notable how the different dimensions of meaning (temporal, spatial, factual, etc.) are respectively at play. Simply put, design thinking does not address objective questions about content that would need to be discussed or defended in an academic context.
- 7.
Bourdieu insists that science is oblivious to time: “Scientific practice is so detemporalized that it tends to exclude even the idea of what it excludes. Because science is only possible in relation to time which is the opposite of that practice, it tends to ignore time and so to detemporalize practice” (Bourdieu 1980: 81). The detemporalized nature of science is to my mind above all important for Bourdieu’s argument in order to stress the temporality of practices. However, the practices of science and of theory have their own temporalities. Relatedly, Robert Schmidt (2012) notes that we still are missing an “extensive reflexive praxeology of the temporal logic of scientific research” (ibid.: 54) that might include “report deadlines, pending evaluations, accruing project grants, publication deadlines and the like” (ibid.) in the analytic frame (cf. also Hirschauer 2008: 170).
- 8.
I am not suggesting that my conversation partner in the preceding sequence didn’t possess theoretical knowledge about methods. I am also not accusing her of forgetting what she had learned as a sociology student. What she does or does not know is completely irrelevant for practice theory, because knowledge is not conceptualized as theoretical thinking that precedes praxis (like would be the case for Mentalism). Instead practice theory would understand knowledge “as a practical knowledge, an ability, know-how, a conglomeration of daily techniques, a practical understanding in the sense of having ‘learned how to do something’” (cf. Reckwitz 2003: 289) that only reveals itself in praxis. It is not a question of what kind of knowledge a person has and stores in their head but rather what knowledge might be applied for specific social practices (cf. ibid.: 292). Mental life is not separate from practices and does not precede them, but it is itself constitutive of practices (cf. Schmidt 2011: 95). For this reason, practice theory does not speak of the knowledge of social actors but the knowledge of social practices. “The social is ‘located’ […] in ‘social practices’ which can be understood as know-how dependent behavioral routines solidified in practical knowledge. Subjects have ‘embodied’ knowledge of their routines though this knowledge also takes the form of routinized relations between subjects and the material artifacts they ‘use’” (Reckwitz 2003: 289). Practice theory thus localizes knowledge not in the head, but in “social bodies and in material things” (Hillebrandt 2014: 91).
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Seitz, T. (2020). The Temporality of Design Thinking. In: Design Thinking and the New Spirit of Capitalism. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31715-7_2
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