Designing the Constraints: Creation Exercises for Framing the Design Context

Design thinking has been characterized as a social phenomenon in the pioneering studies of Bucciarelli and Schon. A challenge remains, however, to theorize design thinking without having to begin from the individual to arrive at the social. In this paper, we describe a sociogenetic approach, which theorizes design thinking as an inherently social communicative process that is generative of its individual aspects. Accordingly, there is but one design thinking practice that generates both persons and contexts. We use this approach to examine the reflective work of a design team aiming to develop a design and marketing concept-package for a company targeting the Chinese market. The analyses focus on the joint work the participants produce to generate, frame, and re-frame design concepts as they reflect upon prior co-creation workshops throughout the design trajectory. Our findings reveal constitutive features of design thinking as primarily social, including: (a) the dual nature of descriptions as instructional devices; (b) the irreducible receptive aspect inherent to social relations; and (c) the unity of thinking and affect. The analyses allow us to discuss design thinking not so much as a form of "natural intelligence" but as a form of natural intelligibility, a view that has implications for how researchers and practitioners may approach their own reflective practice.