“Design Doing”: What if We Put More Design into Design Thinking?

Today’s organisations are increasingly shifting their innovation processes from a top-down approach to bottom-up collaborative practices. These activities can involve multiple kinds of stakeholders that can vary from employees of different departments of the same company to potential final users of the new product/service to be developed. The processes adopted are usually identified as ‘design thinking’, because they take advantage of a set of principles drawn from the design discipline (Kolko, 2015). Hence, many companies are building in-house design capabilities or seeking design consultancies to accompany them throughout the process (Muratovski, 2015). This paper intends to draw a first context framing of the current situation around the topic in Italy, obtained as a result of a desk and field investigation. Moreover, it sets the ground for the analysis of the impact of such collaborative practices and their outcomes: why organizations are looking to design to innovate? What are their main goals while adopting collaborative design processes? How does design deal with such processes? These are some of the questions that set the criteria to understand the attributes of ‘design doing’ which is the ambition of my Ph.D. research: a new course of action able to boost the design potential in organisations approaching collaborative innovation, in order to make it result-oriented more than process-driven and therefore more impactful.