Abstract
Although design thinking is often understood as a practical approach to creativity and innovation in design, it builds on highly refined theories. Many influential ideas were gathered and advanced at the Mechanical Engineering department of Stanford University from the 1950s onwards, as explored in this history series. In part I we introduced the “creative engineering” theory of Stanford educator John E. Arnold. This chapter—part II—is dedicated to the need-based design theory propounded by one of his successors at the department, Robert H. McKim. His theory, first published in 1959, advanced human-centred design conceptions by providing an elaborate account of human needs, by clarifying the role of designs and designers in the process of culture development, and by providing guidelines to assess, or actively increase, design value. According to McKim, the ultimate purpose of design is to promote the well-being of people by helping to gratify their basic needs. As his overall design framework is broadly scoped, it can also serve as frame of reference to analyse and compare different present-day approaches to design, such as innovation-focused design thinking and usability-focused studies in Human-Computer Interaction.
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Notes
- 1.
The following recollection was kindly shared by Bob McKim in personal conversation with William J. Clancey (12 Jan 2016, 16 Sept 2016, 19 October 2016, 31 Jan 2018).
- 2.
Robert McKim, personal communication with William J. Clancey, 16 September 2016.
- 3.
McKim epically advances a Visual Thinking curriculum, beginning with a course on Rapid Visualization in 1961, which is later re-named into Rapid Prototyping. An overview of courses offered by McKim is included in CE (Clancey 2016, p. 219f.).
- 4.
Reconstructing McKim’s ideas in the form of a dependent hierarchy explores their potential to be understood in terms of a single, unified and complete hierarchy of human needs. In his CE essay, McKim suggests no particular ordering among the physical, emotional and intellectual need categories. The term “need hierarchy” subsequently used also does not presuppose any such order. It refers to the possibility of needs being ordered from more basic/general to more concrete/context-specific/culture-dependent. Resulting need hierarchy branches can remain within a single need category. E.g., in the physical need spectrum a person may need… “to stay healthy…to endorse physically healthy postures… to have more head-room in her automobile”.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Robert H. McKim for his interest and support in the reconsideration of his need-based design theory. We thank Anja Perlich and Jonathan Edelman for helpful discussions and are grateful to Aileen Kawagoe as well as Jonathan Edelman for the permission to re-print their images.
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von Thienen, J.P.A., Clancey, W.J., Meinel, C. (2019). Theoretical Foundations of Design Thinking. In: Meinel, C., Leifer, L. (eds) Design Thinking Research. Understanding Innovation. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97082-0_2
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