{
"meta": {
"title": "Design Pedagogy, Process, and Practice Atlas",
"version": "1.1",
"date": "2026-07-11",
"tiers": {
"SRC": {
"label": "Source-verified",
"color": "blue",
"desc": "Publication facts confirmed by live web search at time of build. Citation includes venue, volume, and pages where available."
},
"CAN": {
"label": "Canonical",
"color": "teal",
"desc": "Widely attested scholarly attribution drawn from the standing literature; not individually re-verified against the primary document in this build."
},
"GEN": {
"label": "Editorial / General knowledge",
"color": "gold",
"desc": "Supplied by the editor without a named source. Removable without loss of sourced content."
},
"ATLP": {
"label": "Participant transcription",
"color": "green",
"desc": "Direct language from Design Incubation workshop transcriptions. AWAITING SOURCE MATERIAL — no entries in this build."
},
"ATLI": {
"label": "Participant inferred",
"color": "purple",
"desc": "Relocated or paraphrased participant language from Design Incubation transcriptions. AWAITING SOURCE MATERIAL — no entries in this build."
}
}
},
"chapters": [
{
"id": "I",
"title": "Foundations of Design Pedagogy",
"intro": "The institutional and historical settlements out of which contemporary design teaching descends. Each of these is a model of what a design education is for, and each carries an implicit theory of the learner.",
"sections": [
{
"id": "1a",
"title": "The Bauhaus and the Vorkurs",
"entries": [
{
"term": "Vorkurs (Preliminary Course)",
"tier": "CAN",
"body": "The mandatory foundation year at the Bauhaus, established under Johannes Itten (1919–1923) and continued by László Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers. Its premise: that students must be stripped of prior visual habit and rebuilt through direct material experiment before entering a workshop. The Vorkurs is the ancestor of nearly every 'foundations' or '2D/3D design' sequence in contemporary art and design curricula.",
"cite": "Bauhaus curriculum, Weimar/Dessau, 1919–1933. See Itten, Design and Form: The Basic Course at the Bauhaus (1963/1975); Albers's material studies documented across the Dessau period."
},
{
"term": "Learning by making",
"tier": "CAN",
"body": "The Bauhaus workshop model paired a Formmeister (master of form) with a Werkmeister (master of craft), placing theoretical and technical instruction side by side rather than in sequence. The claim embedded in this structure is that design knowledge is not applied theory but is generated in the act of production.",
"cite": "Bauhaus pedagogical structure; Gropius, Bauhaus Manifesto (1919)."
},
{
"term": "Critique of the Bauhaus inheritance",
"tier": "GEN",
"body": "The Vorkurs's ambition to reset the student to zero has been read as a claim to universality that in practice encoded a specific European modernist visual grammar as though it were neutral perception. Foundation courses that teach 'seeing' as if it were prior to culture reproduce this move.",
"cite": "Editorial framing. No single source; this is a summary position rather than a citation."
}
]
},
{
"id": "1b",
"title": "Ulm and the Scientific Turn",
"entries": [
{
"term": "Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm (1953–1968)",
"tier": "CAN",
"body": "Under Max Bill, then Tomás Maldonado and Otl Aicher, Ulm reoriented design education away from artistic expression toward systems theory, semiotics, ergonomics, and method. Where the Bauhaus trained an artist-craftsman, Ulm trained a coordinator of technical processes. Ulm is the immediate institutional ancestor of the Design Methods Movement.",
"cite": "HfG Ulm, 1953–1968; see Maldonado's ulm journal writings; Aicher's systematic identity work."
},
{
"term": "Method over intuition",
"tier": "GEN",
"body": "The Ulm bet — that design could be made teachable as a rational procedure — is the same bet later made by the Design Methods Movement, and later still by design thinking. Each iteration recapitulates the promise that the tacit can be proceduralized, and each generates the same countermovement.",
"cite": "Editorial synthesis connecting Ulm to §III. Not a claim made by Ulm's faculty in these terms."
}
]
},
{
"id": "1c",
"title": "Studio Culture and the Crit",
"entries": [
{
"term": "The design critique (crit)",
"tier": "GEN",
"body": "The public presentation-and-response ritual that structures most studio pedagogy. Variants: desk crit (one-to-one, in progress), group crit, pin-up, and final review/jury. The crit is the field's signature assessment mechanism and its primary site of enculturation — students learn not only their work's weaknesses but what counts as a reason in design.",
"cite": "Editorially supplied definition. Widely practiced; the taxonomy of crit types here is a working schema, not a cited one."
},
{
"term": "Studio culture as hidden curriculum",
"tier": "GEN",
"body": "Alongside its stated content, the studio transmits norms about labor (all-nighters as virtue), hierarchy (the instructor's taste as arbiter), and belonging. The AIGA and NASAD have both taken up questions of studio culture and student wellbeing; architecture education has produced the larger literature here (see the AIAS Studio Culture task force reports, from 2002 onward).",
"cite": "Editorial framing; the AIAS Studio Culture reports are named as a pointer but are not quoted or paraphrased in detail here."
},
{
"term": "Signature pedagogy",
"tier": "CAN",
"body": "Lee Shulman's term for the characteristic forms of teaching that induct novices into a profession's ways of thinking, performing, and acting with integrity. The design crit is a signature pedagogy in exactly Shulman's sense — it is not merely how design is assessed but how designers are made.",
"cite": "Shulman, L. S. (2005). 'Signature Pedagogies in the Professions.' Daedalus 134(3), 52–59."
}
]
}
]
},
{
"id": "II",
"title": "Learning Theory Applied to Design",
"intro": "Design education rarely names its learning theory, but it always has one. This chapter makes the implicit commitments explicit.",
"sections": [
{
"id": "2a",
"title": "Experience and Reflection",
"entries": [
{
"term": "Experiential learning (Dewey)",
"tier": "CAN",
"body": "Dewey's claim that education proceeds through the reconstruction of experience — that we do not learn from experience but from reflecting on experience — underwrites every studio's iterate-and-review cycle. Dewey is the deep source for the project-based structure of design teaching.",
"cite": "Dewey, J. Experience and Education (1938); Democracy and Education (1916)."
},
{
"term": "Kolb's experiential learning cycle",
"tier": "CAN",
"body": "Four stages: concrete experience → reflective observation → abstract conceptualization → active experimentation. Frequently invoked in design education to justify the make-review-revise loop. Note that Kolb's cycle is descriptive of individual learning, not of a design process, and the two are often conflated.",
"cite": "Kolb, D. A. Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development (1984)."
},
{
"term": "Reflection-in-action",
"tier": "CAN",
"body": "Schön's central concept: skilled practitioners think while acting, adjusting mid-move in a 'reflective conversation with the situation.' Schön's account of the architectural design studio (the Quist–Petra protocol) is the single most influential empirical description of how design teaching actually works. Distinguished from reflection-on-action, which is retrospective.",
"cite": "Schön, D. A. The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (1983); Educating the Reflective Practitioner (1987)."
},
{
"term": "Knowing-in-action / tacit knowledge",
"tier": "CAN",
"body": "Schön's knowing-in-action descends from Polanyi's tacit knowing — 'we can know more than we can tell.' This is the theoretical justification for demonstration, apprenticeship, and the desk crit, and the theoretical obstacle to any fully proceduralized design method.",
"cite": "Polanyi, M. The Tacit Dimension (1966); Schön (1983)."
}
]
},
{
"id": "2b",
"title": "Social and Situated Learning",
"entries": [
{
"term": "Zone of proximal development (ZPD)",
"tier": "CAN",
"body": "Vygotsky's distance between what a learner can do alone and what they can do with guidance. The desk crit is a scaffolding operation in precisely this sense: the instructor holds the part of the problem the student cannot yet hold.",
"cite": "Vygotsky, L. S. Mind in Society (1978, posthumous English collection of work from the 1920s–30s)."
},
{
"term": "Legitimate peripheral participation",
"tier": "CAN",
"body": "Lave and Wenger's model of learning as gradual movement from the edge of a community of practice toward full participation. Explains why studio culture works even when its explicit instruction is thin: students learn by being in the room where the work is judged.",
"cite": "Lave, J. & Wenger, E. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (1991)."
},
{
"term": "Communities of practice",
"tier": "CAN",
"body": "The social unit within which practice knowledge is held and transmitted. Relevant both to the studio and to professional design communities (e.g., Design Incubation itself operates as a community of practice for design educators).",
"cite": "Lave & Wenger (1991); Wenger, E. Communities of Practice (1998)."
}
]
},
{
"id": "2c",
"title": "Difficulty as Curriculum",
"entries": [
{
"term": "Threshold concepts",
"tier": "CAN",
"body": "Meyer and Land's account of concepts that are transformative, irreversible, integrative, bounded, and often troublesome — passing through one changes how the learner sees the whole field. Candidate thresholds in design: that the brief is not the problem; that critique is not opinion; that form is argument.",
"cite": "Meyer, J. H. F. & Land, R. 'Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge (1)' (2003), ETL Project Occasional Report 4; expanded in Meyer & Land (eds.), Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding (2006)."
},
{
"term": "Liminality",
"tier": "CAN",
"body": "The unstable in-between state a learner occupies while crossing a threshold — competence temporarily drops. Design students in this state are often misread as regressing. Naming liminality is one of the more practically useful moves the threshold literature offers studio teachers.",
"cite": "Meyer & Land (2003/2006), drawing the term from Victor Turner's anthropology of ritual."
},
{
"term": "Productive failure",
"tier": "CAN",
"body": "Kapur's finding that letting learners struggle unsuccessfully with a problem before instruction produces better conceptual outcomes than instruction first. A rare piece of empirical learning science that directly supports the studio's tolerance for the failed first attempt.",
"cite": "Kapur, M. 'Productive Failure.' Cognition and Instruction 26(3), 379–424 (2008)."
}
]
}
]
},
{
"id": "III",
"title": "Design Process Models",
"intro": "Every process model is a theory about where design difficulty lives. Read them as arguments, not as instructions.",
"sections": [
{
"id": "3a",
"title": "The Design Methods Movement",
"entries": [
{
"term": "First-generation design methods",
"tier": "CAN",
"body": "The 1960s attempt to render design a rational, systematic, and teachable procedure — Christopher Alexander's Notes on the Synthesis of Form (1964), J. Christopher Jones's Design Methods (1970), the 1962 Conference on Design Methods. The ambition was to externalize design reasoning into diagrammable steps.",
"cite": "Jones, J. C. Design Methods: Seeds of Human Futures (1970); Alexander, C. Notes on the Synthesis of Form (1964); Conference on Design Methods, London, 1962."
},
{
"term": "The retraction",
"tier": "CAN",
"body": "The movement's own founders repudiated it. Alexander distanced himself from design methods; Jones later disavowed the mechanistic reading of his own work. This is the field's first cycle of methodological over-promise and recoil — the pattern repeats with design thinking.",
"cite": "Documented in Cross, N. 'Designerly Ways of Knowing' and in Jones's own later prefaces to Design Methods."
},
{
"term": "Second-generation design methods",
"tier": "CAN",
"body": "Rittel's response to the failure of the first generation: design is argumentative, not algorithmic. Its participants hold competing definitions of the problem, and the method must be a structure for argumentation (IBIS — Issue-Based Information System) rather than a procedure for optimization.",
"cite": "Rittel, H. 'Second-Generation Design Methods' (1972); Rittel & Kunz, IBIS (1970)."
},
{
"term": "Wicked problems",
"tier": "SRC",
"body": "Rittel and Webber's ten-property account of problems that resist definitive formulation: they have no stopping rule, their solutions are not true-or-false but good-or-bad, every wicked problem is essentially unique, and every attempted solution is a 'one-shot operation' with no opportunity to learn by trial and error. The paper opens by arguing that seeking scientific bases for social policy problems is bound to fail because of the nature of those problems.",
"cite": "Rittel, H. W. J. & Webber, M. M. 'Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning.' Policy Sciences 4(2), 155–169 (June 1973). DOI: 10.1007/BF01405730. VERIFIED: volume, issue, pages, and date confirmed via publisher record."
},
{
"term": "Designerly ways of knowing",
"tier": "CAN",
"body": "Cross's argument that design constitutes a third culture alongside the sciences and the humanities, with its own distinct objects (the artificial), methods (modeling, synthesis), and values (appropriateness, practicality). This is the intellectual charter for design as a discipline rather than a service.",
"cite": "Cross, N. 'Designerly Ways of Knowing.' Design Studies 3(4), 221–227 (1982); expanded as Designerly Ways of Knowing (2006)."
},
{
"term": "The sciences of the artificial",
"tier": "CAN",
"body": "Simon's framing of design as the science of devising courses of action to change existing situations into preferred ones — and his introduction of satisficing (accepting good-enough rather than optimal solutions under bounded rationality). Simon is the rationalist pole against which Schön and Rittel are defined.",
"cite": "Simon, H. A. The Sciences of the Artificial (1969; 3rd ed. 1996)."
}
]
},
{
"id": "3b",
"title": "Process Diagrams",
"entries": [
{
"term": "Double Diamond",
"tier": "SRC",
"body": "The UK Design Council's four-stage model — Discover, Define, Develop, Deliver — arranged as two diamonds, the first diverging then converging on the problem, the second on the solution. Derived from a qualitative study of the design processes of eleven global companies (Alessi, BSkyB, BT, LEGO, Microsoft, Sony, Starbucks, Virgin Atlantic, Whirlpool, Xerox, Yahoo! — all corporate in-house departments; IDEO was not among them, contrary to a widely repeated claim; see §III-c2), and adapted from a divergence–convergence model proposed by Béla Bánáthy. Updated in 2019 and repositioned within a wider Framework for Innovation, which adds core principles and a leadership/engagement layer around the diamonds.",
"cite": "Design Council (UK). Eleven Lessons: Managing Design in Eleven Global Brands — A Study of the Design Process. NOTE — UNRESOLVED DATING: three dates circulate. The Design Council's current site says the Double Diamond was 'launched in 2004'; the scholarly convention and most secondary sources say 2005; and the Eleven Lessons report itself is commonly cited as 2007. The likeliest reconstruction is that the model was developed c. 2003–04, released in 2005, and documented at length in the 2007 report — but this atlas does not assert that, because no source consulted states it. Cite with care and specify which artifact you mean. The 2019 Framework for Innovation revision is confirmed on the Design Council's site."
},
{
"term": "Divergence and convergence",
"tier": "GEN",
"body": "The underlying grammar of nearly every process diagram: expand the option space, then narrow it. The Double Diamond's contribution is not this idea but the insistence on running it twice — once on the problem, once on the solution — as a guard against solving the wrong problem well.",
"cite": "Editorial gloss. The divergence–convergence pairing predates and outlives any single diagram."
},
{
"term": "Human-centred design (HCD)",
"tier": "CAN",
"body": "The design of interactive systems organized around explicit understanding of users, tasks, and environments, with user involvement throughout and iteration driven by user-centred evaluation. Formalized as an international standard, which gives HCD a normative status that design thinking does not have.",
"cite": "ISO 9241-210, Ergonomics of human–system interaction — Part 210: Human-centred design for interactive systems (2010; revised 2019). Intellectual lineage via Norman, D. & Draper, S. (eds.), User Centered System Design (1986)."
},
{
"term": "The idealized-model caveat",
"tier": "GEN",
"body": "Process diagrams are pedagogical and rhetorical artifacts. They are used to teach novices a sequence, to reassure clients that a procedure exists, and to make invoiceable phases. They are not empirical descriptions of how experienced designers work — the protocol-study literature consistently finds opportunistic, co-evolutionary, non-linear behavior instead. Teach the diagram; then teach that the diagram is a fiction.",
"cite": "Editorial position. The empirical claim it rests on is sourced: see Dorst & Cross (2001) on problem–solution co-evolution, cited below."
},
{
"term": "Problem–solution co-evolution",
"tier": "SRC",
"body": "Dorst and Cross's empirical finding that designers do not first fix the problem and then solve it; they develop problem and solution together, each refining the other. This is the strongest available evidence against the linear reading of any stage model.",
"cite": "Dorst, K. & Cross, N. 'Creativity in the design process: co-evolution of problem–solution.' Design Studies 22(5), 425–437 (September 2001). DOI: 10.1016/S0142-694X(01)00009-6."
}
]
},
{
"id": "3c",
"title": "Design Thinking",
"entries": [
{
"term": "Design thinking (the term)",
"tier": "CAN",
"body": "The phrase enters circulation through Peter Rowe's Design Thinking (1987), a study of how architects and planners actually reason. It is worth noting that Rowe's book bears almost no resemblance to what the term now denotes: Rowe was describing cognition, not selling a workshop format.",
"cite": "Rowe, P. G. Design Thinking (MIT Press, 1987)."
},
{
"term": "Design thinking (the movement)",
"tier": "SRC",
"body": "The consultancy-and-business formulation, popularized by IDEO. Tim Brown's Harvard Business Review article defines it as a discipline using the designer's sensibility and methods to match people's needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value — the desirability/feasibility/viability triad. Brown's examples include the Kaiser Permanente nursing shift-change project, the Shimano 'Coasting' bicycle, and Aravind Eye Care.",
"cite": "Brown, T. 'Design Thinking.' Harvard Business Review 86(6), 84–92 (June 2008). VERIFIED: HBR issue and date confirmed; hbr.org/2008/06/design-thinking."
},
{
"term": "The d.school five-stage model",
"tier": "GEN",
"body": "Empathize → Define → Ideate → Prototype → Test. The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (founded 2005, with David Kelley) is the primary vector by which this five-stage form entered general education. It is the most widely taught and most widely criticized version of the process.",
"cite": "Editorially stated. The five-stage sequence is ubiquitous in d.school-derived teaching materials; no single canonical publication fixes it, which is itself part of the critique."
},
{
"term": "Abduction and frame creation",
"tier": "SRC",
"body": "Dorst's reconstruction of what is actually distinctive in design reasoning. In deduction and induction, something is known; in abduction-1, the working principle is known and the outcome sought, so the 'what' must be found. In abduction-2 — Dorst's core of design thinking — neither the 'what' nor the 'how' is known, and both must be devised simultaneously. The designer's response is framing: proposing a new way of looking at the situation such that a working principle becomes available. This is the most intellectually serious account of design thinking available, and it is not the account that gets taught in workshops.",
"cite": "Dorst, K. 'The core of \"design thinking\" and its application.' Design Studies 32(6), 521–532 (November 2011). DOI: 10.1016/j.destud.2011.07.006. VERIFIED: volume, issue, pages, and date confirmed. Extended in Dorst, Frame Innovation (MIT Press, 2015)."
},
{
"term": "Designerly thinking vs. design thinking",
"tier": "CAN",
"body": "Johansson-Sköldberg, Woodilla, and Çetinkaya's useful separation of two literatures that share a name: designerly thinking (the academic study of how designers reason — Simon, Schön, Cross, Dorst) and design thinking (the management discourse — Brown, Martin, IDEO). Conflating them is the source of much of the field's confusion.",
"cite": "Johansson-Sköldberg, U., Woodilla, J. & Çetinkaya, M. 'Design Thinking: Past, Present and Possible Futures.' Creativity and Innovation Management 22(2), 121–146 (2013)."
}
]
},
{
"id": "3c2",
"title": "The IDEO / Stanford Lineage",
"note": "Added at v1.1. The single most common citation error in design pedagogy is to write 'the IDEO design thinking process' and then draw the d.school's five stages. These are different diagrams from institutionally linked but distinct organizations, and IDEO itself has published at least three different process models. This section disambiguates them.",
"entries": [
{
"term": "IDEO's three-space model: Inspiration, Ideation, Implementation",
"tier": "SRC",
"body": "IDEO.org's own stated process. The Field Guide is explicit that these are phases, not a linear sequence — it states plainly that human-centered design is not a perfectly linear process and that each project has its own contours. Inspiration builds empathy with the communities and individuals being designed for; Ideation turns what was learned into a designed solution; Implementation builds and tests the idea and brings it into the world. The guide pairs the three phases with seven mindsets — Empathy, Optimism, Iteration, Creative Confidence, Making, Embracing Ambiguity, and Learning from Failure — and 57 methods.",
"cite": "IDEO.org. The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design, 1st edition, 2015. ISBN 978-0-9914063-1-9. 189–192 pp. Licensed CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. VERIFIED: edition, year, ISBN, three-phase structure, seven mindsets, and 57 methods all confirmed against the guide's own front matter and contents."
},
{
"term": "The HCD Toolkit: Hear, Create, Deliver",
"tier": "SRC",
"body": "IDEO's earlier and structurally different three-phase model, and the direct predecessor of the Field Guide. Note the phases are not Inspiration/Ideation/Implementation — they are Hear, Create, Deliver. The toolkit was produced under a Gates Foundation grant routed through International Development Enterprises (iDE), in collaboration with ICRW and Heifer International, and aimed at NGOs and social enterprises in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The Field Guide's own back matter describes itself as an evolution of the HCD Toolkit. Citing 'IDEO's HCD process' without specifying which one is imprecise.",
"cite": "IDEO. Human-Centered Design Toolkit (2009; 2nd ed. 2011). ISBN 978-0-9846457-0-1. VERIFIED: 2009 launch, the Hear/Create/Deliver structure, the Gates/iDE funding route, and the Field Guide's self-description as its evolution all confirmed. Downloads reported by IDEO at 150,000+; iDE reports 155,000+ across three editions."
},
{
"term": "IDEO Method Cards",
"tier": "SRC",
"body": "A deck of 51 cards, each describing one method with a short story about when to use it, sorted into four suits: Learn, Look, Ask, Try. IDEO is explicit that it is not a how-to guide but a tool for exploring approaches and developing your own. Pedagogically, the cards are the most honest artifact IDEO has produced: a non-sequential, browsable set of methods with no implied stage order — which is to say, the opposite of a process diagram.",
"cite": "IDEO. IDEO Method Cards: 51 Ways to Inspire Design. William Stout Architectural Books, 2003. ISBN 978-0-9544132-1-7. VERIFIED: year, publisher, ISBN, card count, and the four Learn/Look/Ask/Try categories confirmed via IDEO's own page and library catalog records."
},
{
"term": "The d.school five-stage model — and why it is not IDEO's",
"tier": "GEN",
"body": "Empathize → Define → Ideate → Prototype → Test is the Stanford d.school formulation, not IDEO's. The two are institutionally linked — David Kelley founded IDEO and co-founded the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design — which is why the conflation is so durable. But IDEO's published models are the three-space (Inspiration/Ideation/Implementation) and, earlier, Hear/Create/Deliver. A student who cites Brown (2008) or the Field Guide and then draws five stages has cited a source that does not contain the thing they drew. Flag this in teaching; it is an easy and very common error.",
"cite": "Editorial position. The disambiguation rests on sourced facts (the IDEO models above are verified); the pedagogical warning is the editor's. Note also that no single canonical IDEO or d.school publication authoritatively fixes the five-stage sequence — its diffusion is through teaching materials, which is itself part of the critique in §III-d."
},
{
"term": "The Kelley lineage",
"tier": "CAN",
"body": "The popular-press arm of the same tradition: The Art of Innovation (Tom Kelley with Jonathan Littman, 2001), The Ten Faces of Innovation (2005), and Creative Confidence (David and Tom Kelley, 2013). These are the trade books through which the IDEO method reached general management audiences, and they are the immediate ancestors of Brown's 2008 HBR piece.",
"cite": "Kelley, T. & Littman, J. The Art of Innovation (2001); Kelley, T. The Ten Faces of Innovation (2005); Kelley, D. & Kelley, T. Creative Confidence (2013). Standard bibliographic attributions; not individually re-verified in this build."
},
{
"term": "CORRECTION: IDEO was not in the Design Council's eleven-company study",
"tier": "SRC",
"body": "A widely repeated secondary claim — reproduced in some design-education sources, and in an earlier draft of this atlas — holds that IDEO was among the firms whose processes the Design Council mapped when developing the Double Diamond. It was not. The eleven companies were Alessi, BSkyB, BT, LEGO, Microsoft, Sony, Starbucks, Virgin Atlantic Airways, Whirlpool, Xerox, and Yahoo! These are corporate in-house design departments, not consultancies. The Double Diamond and the IDEO/d.school models are therefore parallel and independently derived, not a shared lineage — which is a substantive point, not a bibliographic footnote.",
"cite": "Design Council. Eleven Lessons: Managing Design in Eleven Global Brands — A Study of the Design Process. VERIFIED: the full eleven-company roster was confirmed against the report's own text and against Ico-D's contemporaneous coverage. NOTE: the Design Council's own citations date this report to 2007, which sits alongside the 2004 and 2005 dates given elsewhere for the Double Diamond's launch — see the dating note in §III-b."
}
]
},
{
"id": "3d",
"title": "Critiques of Design Thinking",
"note": "Included at the editor's direction and as a matter of intellectual honesty: the pedagogy literature on design thinking is now substantially a literature of backlash, and a document that taught the model without the critique would misrepresent the state of the field.",
"entries": [
{
"term": "The status-quo critique (Iskander)",
"tier": "SRC",
"body": "Iskander argues that design thinking is fundamentally conservative — that it privileges the designer above the people she serves and thereby limits participation in the design process, narrowing the scope for genuinely innovative ideas and making it hard to address high-uncertainty challenges. Her counter-proposal is interpretive engagement: a messier, more democratic process in which the designer is dethroned and meaning-making is distributed and emergent rather than staged.",
"cite": "Iskander, N. 'Design Thinking Is Fundamentally Conservative and Preserves the Status Quo.' Harvard Business Review, 5 September 2018. VERIFIED: publication date confirmed via HBR store record (item H04IST)."
},
{
"term": "The boondoggle critique (Vinsel)",
"tier": "SRC",
"body": "Vinsel's polemic against design thinking's colonization of higher education. His core charge is that design thinking is 'just a fancy way of talking about consulting,' and that reforming education around it means treating students as clients and viewing all of social reality through a design-consulting lens. He targets specifically the claim that design thinking constitutes a 'new liberal arts' or a general reform program for the university.",
"cite": "Vinsel, L. 'Design Thinking Is a Boondoggle.' The Chronicle of Higher Education, 21 May 2018 (print version 8 June 2018). VERIFIED: date and venue confirmed via Chronicle and Virginia Tech records. A longer version first appeared on Medium; see also Vinsel's response to the d.school, 'There's So Little There There' (2018)."
},
{
"term": "The de-skilling critique",
"tier": "GEN",
"body": "The charge that packaging design as a five-step workshop implies that design competence is acquirable in a weekend, which devalues the multi-year training designers actually undergo and floods practice with sticky-note facilitators who cannot make anything. This critique is most keenly felt inside design education, where it bears directly on program legitimacy.",
"cite": "Editorial synthesis of a widely-held practitioner position. See Kolko's writing for a version of the concern about undermining technical skill; no single citation is offered here because none is definitive."
},
{
"term": "The empathy critique",
"tier": "GEN",
"body": "'Empathize' as a discrete forty-minute stage is not empathy. Brief user contact, converted into a persona, can license designers to speak for a population while having done less than an ethnographer would consider a pilot study. Iskander's critique above is the strongest published form of this objection; participatory design (§III-e) is the strongest structural alternative.",
"cite": "Editorial framing; the sourced form of this argument is Iskander (2018), above."
},
{
"term": "The evidence critique",
"tier": "GEN",
"body": "The efficacy claims for design thinking rest largely on consultancy case studies published by the consultancies that sold the engagement. This is not a controlled literature. Note that this critique also applies, in fairness, to much of the process-model canon.",
"cite": "Editorial position. Offered as a claim to be examined, not as a settled finding."
},
{
"term": "The steelman",
"tier": "GEN",
"body": "In fairness to the target: design thinking gave non-designers permission to prototype, made user contact a default rather than a luxury, and gave design a vocabulary in rooms where it previously had none. Its failure mode is over-claim, not falsity. A pedagogy that teaches only the critique produces students who can dismiss the model but cannot use anything in its place.",
"cite": "Editorial position, supplied deliberately so that §III-d does not function as a one-sided brief."
}
]
},
{
"id": "3e",
"title": "Participatory and Critical Traditions",
"entries": [
{
"term": "Participatory design (Scandinavian tradition)",
"tier": "CAN",
"body": "Emerging from 1970s–80s Nordic workplace democracy projects (UTOPIA, DEMOS), participatory design holds that those affected by a system have a right to shape it — a political commitment, not a research technique. The distinction from user-centred design is exactly this: PD gives users power, UCD gives designers data about users.",
"cite": "Ehn, P. Work-Oriented Design of Computer Artifacts (1988); Greenbaum, J. & Kyng, M. (eds.), Design at Work (1991); the UTOPIA project (1981–1986)."
},
{
"term": "Co-design / co-creation",
"tier": "CAN",
"body": "Sanders and Stappers's mapping of the shift from designing for users to designing with them, and their distinction between co-design (collective creativity across the whole design process) and the broader co-creation. Their landscape paper is the standard reference point for the terminology.",
"cite": "Sanders, E. B.-N. & Stappers, P. J. 'Co-creation and the new landscapes of design.' CoDesign 4(1), 5–18 (2008)."
},
{
"term": "Critical design / speculative design",
"tier": "CAN",
"body": "Dunne and Raby's proposal that design objects can pose questions rather than solve problems — that a designed artifact can function as a form of social critique or as a probe into possible futures. Explicitly opposed to 'affirmative' design, which reinforces the status quo. Pedagogically, this is the strongest available alternative to the problem-solving framing that dominates the studio.",
"cite": "Dunne, A. & Raby, F. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming (MIT Press, 2013); Dunne, A. Hertzian Tales (1999)."
},
{
"term": "Transition design",
"tier": "CAN",
"body": "Irwin, Kossoff, and Tonkinwise's proposal (developed at Carnegie Mellon) for design oriented toward long-horizon systems-level societal transition, explicitly organized around wicked problems and requiring designers to hold theories of change and a posture toward the future.",
"cite": "Irwin, T. 'Transition Design: A Proposal for a New Area of Design Practice, Study, and Research.' Design and Culture 7(2), 229–246 (2015)."
},
{
"term": "Design justice",
"tier": "CAN",
"body": "Costanza-Chock's framework asking who designs, who benefits, and who bears the burden — organized around the Design Justice Network Principles and centering communities that are ordinarily designed upon. Directly answers the participation critique leveled at design thinking in §III-d.",
"cite": "Costanza-Chock, S. Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need (MIT Press, 2020); Design Justice Network Principles (2018)."
}
]
}
]
},
{
"id": "IV",
"title": "Practice",
"intro": "What the studio prepares students for, and the gap between the two.",
"sections": [
{
"id": "4a",
"title": "Structures of Practice",
"entries": [
{
"term": "Agency / in-house / freelance / studio",
"tier": "GEN",
"body": "The four principal employment structures, each with a distinct relationship to the brief. The agency sells a process to a client; the in-house team owns a product over time; the freelancer sells discrete deliverables; the independent studio holds a point of view and sells access to it. Students are almost always trained as if bound for the third or fourth and almost always employed in the first or second.",
"cite": "Editorially supplied taxonomy. The observation about the training/employment mismatch is an editorial claim, not a measured finding."
},
{
"term": "The brief",
"tier": "GEN",
"body": "The document that constitutes the problem. In pedagogy the brief is usually written by the instructor, which means students rarely practice the most consequential professional skill: interrogating and rewriting the brief they are handed. Rittel's second-generation position (§III-a) implies that accepting the brief as given is already a design failure.",
"cite": "Editorial position; the underlying claim about problem formulation is sourced to Rittel (1972/1973)."
},
{
"term": "Design systems",
"tier": "GEN",
"body": "The shift from designing artifacts to designing the constraints and components from which artifacts are assembled by others. This is a real epistemic shift in the field's object, and most curricula have not yet absorbed it — the studio still teaches the one-off composition.",
"cite": "Editorial observation."
}
]
},
{
"id": "4b",
"title": "Ethics and Obligation",
"entries": [
{
"term": "First Things First",
"tier": "CAN",
"body": "Ken Garland's 1964 manifesto, re-issued in 1999–2000 (Adbusters, Emigre, Eye), arguing that designers' skills are disproportionately spent on consumer persuasion and should be redirected toward more worthwhile ends. The field's most enduring statement of professional conscience, and a durable teaching text precisely because students recognize the bind it describes.",
"cite": "Garland, K. First Things First (1964); First Things First Manifesto 2000, published across Adbusters, Emigre 51, Eye, and others (1999–2000)."
},
{
"term": "Codes of professional conduct",
"tier": "GEN",
"body": "AIGA maintains standards of professional practice; Ico-D (formerly Icograda) maintains a model code of conduct. Both are advisory rather than enforceable — design has no licensure and therefore no disbarment, which sharply distinguishes its professional ethics from architecture's or medicine's.",
"cite": "Editorially stated. AIGA and Ico-D are named as institutions; their specific code texts are not quoted here."
},
{
"term": "Design and complicity",
"tier": "CAN",
"body": "Papanek's charge — that industrial design had become one of the most harmful professions, second only to advertising — remains the field's sharpest self-indictment and the origin point for social and ecological design pedagogy.",
"cite": "Papanek, V. Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change (1971)."
}
]
}
]
},
{
"id": "V",
"title": "Assessment and Critique",
"intro": "Design's assessment problem: the work is judged by an expert whose judgment is partly tacit, against criteria that are partly emergent, in a public setting that is also a social hierarchy.",
"sections": [
{
"id": "5a",
"title": "The Problem of Judging Design Work",
"entries": [
{
"term": "Connoisseurship and criteria",
"tier": "GEN",
"body": "The core tension: if design judgment is genuinely tacit (§II-a), then it cannot be fully reduced to a rubric — but if it is not articulable, students cannot be told how they are being judged, and assessment becomes indistinguishable from taste. Every studio assessment scheme is a position on this tension, usually an unexamined one.",
"cite": "Editorial framing of the tension; the tacit-knowledge premise is sourced to Polanyi/Schön above."
},
{
"term": "Rubrics vs. holistic judgment",
"tier": "GEN",
"body": "Rubrics make criteria transparent and defensible but tend to reward compliance and fragment the work into scorable parts. Holistic judgment preserves the integrity of the response but is opaque and hard to appeal. Most programs run both and reconcile them by fiat.",
"cite": "Editorial synthesis of common practice."
},
{
"term": "Formative vs. summative",
"tier": "GEN",
"body": "The desk crit is formative (feeding forward into revision); the final review is summative (fixing a judgment). A great deal of studio unhappiness comes from running one while the students believe they are in the other.",
"cite": "Editorially supplied; the formative/summative distinction is standard in the general assessment literature (see Scriven, 1967, for its origin)."
},
{
"term": "Critique protocols",
"tier": "GEN",
"body": "Structured alternatives to the open crit — including timed silent review, criteria-first crit, the 'warm/cool feedback' protocol from Project Zero's Ladder of Feedback, and peer-only rounds without instructor presence. Their common purpose is to interrupt the default in which the loudest voice and the instructor's taste dominate.",
"cite": "Editorially assembled list. The Ladder of Feedback is attributable to David Perkins and Harvard Project Zero; the others are common practice without fixed authorship."
},
{
"term": "The portfolio as terminal assessment",
"tier": "GEN",
"body": "Design's de facto exit exam is the portfolio, which is assessed by the labor market rather than the institution. This creates a durable misalignment: the grade and the job are decided by different judges applying different criteria, and students correctly perceive that only one of them is binding.",
"cite": "Editorial observation."
}
]
}
]
}
],
"glossary": [
{
"term": "Abduction",
"def": "Reasoning from an observed outcome to a possible explanation or means of producing it. In design, abduction-2 (Dorst) names the case where neither the working principle nor the outcome is known and both must be proposed together.",
"cat": "Reasoning",
"src": "PED-SRC",
"cite": "Dorst (2011), Design Studies 32(6)."
},
{
"term": "Affirmative design",
"def": "Design that reinforces the way things are, as distinct from critical design, which questions it. Dunne and Raby's contrastive term.",
"cat": "Critical",
"src": "PED-CAN",
"cite": "Dunne & Raby (2013)."
},
{
"term": "Brief",
"def": "The document constituting the design problem, its constraints, and its success conditions. Distinguished in professional practice from the proposal, which is the designer's response to it.",
"cat": "Practice",
"src": "PED-GEN",
"cite": "Editorial definition."
},
{
"term": "Co-design",
"def": "Collective creativity applied across the span of a design process, in which people not trained as designers act as design partners rather than as research subjects.",
"cat": "Participation",
"src": "PED-CAN",
"cite": "Sanders & Stappers (2008), CoDesign 4(1)."
},
{
"term": "Co-evolution (problem–solution)",
"def": "The empirically observed pattern in which designers develop the problem and the solution together, each successively reframing the other, rather than fixing the problem first.",
"cat": "Process",
"src": "PED-SRC",
"cite": "Dorst & Cross (2001), Design Studies 22(5), 425–437."
},
{
"term": "Community of practice",
"def": "A group that sustains a shared repertoire of practice and into which newcomers are inducted by increasing participation.",
"cat": "Learning theory",
"src": "PED-CAN",
"cite": "Lave & Wenger (1991); Wenger (1998)."
},
{
"term": "Connoisseurship",
"def": "Expert judgment that is reliable but not fully articulable — the capacity to recognize quality without being able to state exhaustive criteria for it.",
"cat": "Assessment",
"src": "PED-GEN",
"cite": "Editorial definition; premise traceable to Polanyi's tacit knowing."
},
{
"term": "Convergence",
"def": "The narrowing phase of a design process, in which the option space is reduced toward a commitment.",
"cat": "Process",
"src": "PED-GEN",
"cite": "Editorial definition; the term is common to most process models."
},
{
"term": "Crit (critique)",
"def": "The studio ritual in which work in progress or completed work is presented and responded to. Variants include desk crit, group crit, pin-up, and final review.",
"cat": "Assessment",
"src": "PED-GEN",
"cite": "Editorial definition; the variant taxonomy is a working schema."
},
{
"term": "Critical design",
"def": "Design that uses the designed artifact to pose a question or advance a critique rather than to solve a problem.",
"cat": "Critical",
"src": "PED-CAN",
"cite": "Dunne (1999); Dunne & Raby (2013)."
},
{
"term": "Design justice",
"def": "A framework interrogating who designs, who benefits, and who bears the costs of design, and committing to community-led practice.",
"cat": "Critical",
"src": "PED-CAN",
"cite": "Costanza-Chock (2020); Design Justice Network Principles (2018)."
},
{
"term": "Design Methods Movement",
"def": "The 1960s effort to make design a systematic, rational, teachable procedure; its first generation was substantially repudiated by its own founders.",
"cat": "History",
"src": "PED-CAN",
"cite": "Jones (1970); Alexander (1964); Conference on Design Methods (1962)."
},
{
"term": "Design thinking",
"def": "Ambiguous term. (1) Rowe's 1987 study of designers' cognition. (2) The management/consultancy discourse popularized by IDEO. (3) Dorst's abduction-2 account. These are not the same object and should not be cited interchangeably.",
"cat": "Process",
"src": "PED-SRC",
"cite": "Rowe (1987); Brown, HBR (June 2008); Dorst (2011); on the disambiguation, Johansson-Sköldberg et al. (2013)."
},
{
"term": "Designerly ways of knowing",
"def": "Cross's claim that design constitutes a distinct culture of inquiry with its own objects, methods, and values, irreducible to science or the humanities.",
"cat": "Theory",
"src": "PED-CAN",
"cite": "Cross (1982), Design Studies 3(4), 221–227."
},
{
"term": "Desk crit",
"def": "One-to-one instructor feedback on work in progress at the student's workspace. The primary scaffolding mechanism of studio teaching.",
"cat": "Assessment",
"src": "PED-GEN",
"cite": "Editorial definition; the scaffolding reading draws on Vygotsky."
},
{
"term": "Divergence",
"def": "The expanding phase of a design process, in which the option space is widened before commitment.",
"cat": "Process",
"src": "PED-GEN",
"cite": "Editorial definition."
},
{
"term": "Double Diamond",
"def": "The Design Council's four-stage model (Discover, Define, Develop, Deliver), running divergence–convergence twice: once on the problem, once on the solution.",
"cat": "Process",
"src": "PED-SRC",
"cite": "Design Council, Eleven Lessons. Date contested: Design Council states 2004; scholarly convention says 2005. Revised 2019 as the Framework for Innovation."
},
{
"term": "Experiential learning cycle",
"def": "Kolb's four-stage loop: concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, active experimentation.",
"cat": "Learning theory",
"src": "PED-CAN",
"cite": "Kolb (1984)."
},
{
"term": "First Things First",
"def": "Garland's 1964 manifesto (re-issued 2000) arguing that design skill is misallocated to consumer persuasion and should be redirected.",
"cat": "Ethics",
"src": "PED-CAN",
"cite": "Garland (1964); First Things First Manifesto 2000."
},
{
"term": "Formative assessment",
"def": "Assessment whose purpose is to feed forward into revision rather than to fix a final judgment.",
"cat": "Assessment",
"src": "PED-GEN",
"cite": "Editorial definition; distinction originates with Scriven (1967)."
},
{
"term": "Frame / framing",
"def": "The proposal of a new way of viewing a problem situation, such that a working principle becomes available. Dorst's answer to the abduction-2 problem.",
"cat": "Reasoning",
"src": "PED-SRC",
"cite": "Dorst (2011); extended in Frame Innovation (2015)."
},
{
"term": "Framework for Innovation",
"def": "The Design Council's 2019 revision of the Double Diamond, adding core principles and a leadership-and-engagement layer around the original four stages.",
"cat": "Process",
"src": "PED-SRC",
"cite": "Design Council, Framework for Innovation (2019). Confirmed on designcouncil.org.uk."
},
{
"term": "Hidden curriculum",
"def": "The norms, values, and hierarchies a program transmits without stating them — in the studio, typically norms about labor, taste, and belonging.",
"cat": "Pedagogy",
"src": "PED-GEN",
"cite": "Editorial application; the term is general educational sociology, not design-specific."
},
{
"term": "Human-centred design",
"def": "Design organized around explicit understanding of users, tasks, and environments, with user involvement throughout and iterative user-centred evaluation. Formalized as an ISO standard.",
"cat": "Process",
"src": "PED-CAN",
"cite": "ISO 9241-210 (2010, rev. 2019); lineage via Norman & Draper (1986)."
},
{
"term": "IBIS (Issue-Based Information System)",
"def": "Rittel and Kunz's argumentation structure — issues, positions, arguments — for second-generation design method, treating design as debate rather than optimization.",
"cat": "Process",
"src": "PED-CAN",
"cite": "Rittel & Kunz (1970); Rittel (1972)."
},
{
"term": "Interpretive engagement",
"def": "Iskander's proposed alternative to design thinking: a distributed, emergent, non-staged process in which the designer is dethroned and interpretation is shared.",
"cat": "Critical",
"src": "PED-SRC",
"cite": "Iskander, HBR, 5 September 2018."
},
{
"term": "Knowing-in-action",
"def": "Schön's term for the tacit competence embedded in skilled performance, revealed by the doing rather than by prior statement.",
"cat": "Learning theory",
"src": "PED-CAN",
"cite": "Schön (1983); antecedent in Polanyi (1966)."
},
{
"term": "Legitimate peripheral participation",
"def": "Lave and Wenger's mechanism of learning: newcomers begin at the edge of a practice community and move inward through participation.",
"cat": "Learning theory",
"src": "PED-CAN",
"cite": "Lave & Wenger (1991)."
},
{
"term": "Liminality",
"def": "The unstable in-between state a learner occupies while crossing a threshold concept, during which apparent competence may temporarily decline.",
"cat": "Learning theory",
"src": "PED-CAN",
"cite": "Meyer & Land (2003/2006), borrowing from Turner."
},
{
"term": "Participatory design",
"def": "The Scandinavian tradition holding that those affected by a system have a right to shape it — a political commitment rather than a research method.",
"cat": "Participation",
"src": "PED-CAN",
"cite": "Ehn (1988); Greenbaum & Kyng (1991); UTOPIA project (1981–86)."
},
{
"term": "Productive failure",
"def": "Kapur's finding that unsuccessful struggle with a problem prior to instruction yields better conceptual outcomes than instruction first.",
"cat": "Learning theory",
"src": "PED-CAN",
"cite": "Kapur (2008), Cognition and Instruction 26(3), 379–424."
},
{
"term": "Reflection-in-action",
"def": "Thinking and adjusting mid-performance — Schön's 'reflective conversation with the situation.' Distinguished from retrospective reflection-on-action.",
"cat": "Learning theory",
"src": "PED-CAN",
"cite": "Schön (1983)."
},
{
"term": "Satisficing",
"def": "Simon's term for accepting a good-enough solution under bounded rationality rather than searching for an optimum. The rationalist tradition's own concession to design's intractability.",
"cat": "Theory",
"src": "PED-CAN",
"cite": "Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial (1969)."
},
{
"term": "Second-generation design methods",
"def": "Rittel's argumentative turn: design method as a structure for debate among parties who disagree about the problem, not as a procedure for optimization.",
"cat": "History",
"src": "PED-CAN",
"cite": "Rittel (1972)."
},
{
"term": "Signature pedagogy",
"def": "Shulman's term for the characteristic teaching forms by which a profession inducts novices into its ways of thinking and acting. The crit is design's.",
"cat": "Pedagogy",
"src": "PED-CAN",
"cite": "Shulman (2005), Daedalus 134(3), 52–59."
},
{
"term": "Speculative design",
"def": "Design that probes possible futures rather than serving present markets; the future-oriented arm of critical design.",
"cat": "Critical",
"src": "PED-CAN",
"cite": "Dunne & Raby, Speculative Everything (2013)."
},
{
"term": "Studio culture",
"def": "The social and normative environment of the design studio, including its transmitted assumptions about labor, hierarchy, and worth.",
"cat": "Pedagogy",
"src": "PED-GEN",
"cite": "Editorial definition; the architecture literature (AIAS Studio Culture reports) is the fuller treatment."
},
{
"term": "Summative assessment",
"def": "Assessment that fixes a final judgment on completed work rather than feeding into revision.",
"cat": "Assessment",
"src": "PED-GEN",
"cite": "Editorial definition; Scriven (1967)."
},
{
"term": "Tacit knowledge",
"def": "Polanyi's category of what is known but cannot be fully stated — 'we can know more than we can tell.' The theoretical basis for apprenticeship and the obstacle to full proceduralization.",
"cat": "Learning theory",
"src": "PED-CAN",
"cite": "Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (1966)."
},
{
"term": "Threshold concept",
"def": "A concept whose acquisition is transformative, irreversible, integrative, bounded, and often troublesome — passing it changes how the learner sees the field.",
"cat": "Learning theory",
"src": "PED-CAN",
"cite": "Meyer & Land (2003; expanded 2006)."
},
{
"term": "Transition design",
"def": "Design oriented toward long-horizon systems-level societal transition, explicitly organized around wicked problems.",
"cat": "Critical",
"src": "PED-CAN",
"cite": "Irwin (2015), Design and Culture 7(2), 229–246."
},
{
"term": "Vorkurs",
"def": "The Bauhaus preliminary course (Itten, then Moholy-Nagy and Albers) — the ancestor of the modern foundation year.",
"cat": "History",
"src": "PED-CAN",
"cite": "Bauhaus curriculum, 1919–1933; Itten, Design and Form (1963)."
},
{
"term": "Wicked problem",
"def": "Rittel and Webber's class of problems with no definitive formulation, no stopping rule, no true-or-false solutions, no test of correctness, and no opportunity for trial and error.",
"cat": "Theory",
"src": "PED-SRC",
"cite": "Rittel & Webber (1973), Policy Sciences 4(2), 155–169."
},
{
"term": "Zone of proximal development",
"def": "Vygotsky's gap between what a learner can do unaided and what they can do with guidance — the space in which scaffolding operates.",
"cat": "Learning theory",
"src": "PED-CAN",
"cite": "Vygotsky, Mind in Society (1978)."
},
{
"term": "Field Guide to Human-Centered Design",
"def": "IDEO.org's 2015 process publication: three phases (Inspiration, Ideation, Implementation), seven mindsets, 57 methods. The evolution of the 2009 HCD Toolkit.",
"cat": "Process",
"src": "PED-SRC",
"cite": "IDEO.org (2015), 1st ed., ISBN 978-0-9914063-1-9."
},
{
"term": "HCD Toolkit",
"def": "IDEO's 2009 open-source toolkit for NGOs and social enterprises, structured as Hear / Create / Deliver. Predecessor to the Field Guide. Its phases are not the same as the Field Guide's.",
"cat": "Process",
"src": "PED-SRC",
"cite": "IDEO (2009; 2nd ed. 2011). Gates Foundation grant via iDE, with ICRW and Heifer International."
},
{
"term": "Hear / Create / Deliver",
"def": "The three-phase structure of IDEO's 2009 HCD Toolkit. Superseded but not identical to Inspiration/Ideation/Implementation — a distinction routinely collapsed in teaching.",
"cat": "Process",
"src": "PED-SRC",
"cite": "IDEO, Human-Centered Design Toolkit (2009)."
},
{
"term": "Inspiration / Ideation / Implementation",
"def": "IDEO.org's three-space model, stated in the Field Guide. The guide is explicit that the phases are not a linear sequence.",
"cat": "Process",
"src": "PED-SRC",
"cite": "IDEO.org, Field Guide to Human-Centered Design (2015)."
},
{
"term": "Learn / Look / Ask / Try",
"def": "The four suits of the IDEO Method Cards (2003). A non-sequential taxonomy of methods with no implied stage order.",
"cat": "Process",
"src": "PED-SRC",
"cite": "IDEO, IDEO Method Cards (William Stout, 2003), ISBN 978-0-9544132-1-7."
},
{
"term": "Method Cards (IDEO)",
"def": "A 2003 deck of 51 cards, each describing one design method with a usage story. Explicitly not a how-to guide.",
"cat": "Process",
"src": "PED-SRC",
"cite": "IDEO (2003), William Stout Architectural Books."
},
{
"term": "Mindsets (IDEO)",
"def": "The seven dispositions the Field Guide names as underpinning human-centered design: Empathy, Optimism, Iteration, Creative Confidence, Making, Embracing Ambiguity, Learning from Failure.",
"cat": "Process",
"src": "PED-SRC",
"cite": "IDEO.org, Field Guide (2015)."
},
{
"term": "Empathize / Define / Ideate / Prototype / Test",
"def": "The Stanford d.school five-stage model. Commonly and incorrectly attributed to IDEO, whose own published models are the three-space and Hear/Create/Deliver structures.",
"cat": "Process",
"src": "PED-GEN",
"cite": "Editorially stated. No single canonical publication fixes this sequence; the attribution error is the editor's flagged concern."
},
{
"term": "Creative confidence",
"def": "The Kelleys' term for the belief that one can create change — the disposition design thinking claims to install in non-designers, and the target of the de-skilling critique.",
"cat": "Critical",
"src": "PED-CAN",
"cite": "Kelley, D. & Kelley, T. Creative Confidence (2013). Also named as a mindset in the IDEO Field Guide (2015)."
}
]
}