In the last few years, “Design Thinking” has gained popularity – it is now seen as an exciting new paradigm for dealing with problems in sectors as far a field as IT, Business, Education and Medicine. This potential success challenges the design research community to provide unambiguous answers to two key questions: “What is the core of Design Thinking?” and “What could it bring to practitioners and organisations in other fields?”. We sketch a partial answer by considering the fundamental reasoning pattern behind design, and then looking at the core design practices of framing and frame creation. The paper ends with an exploration of the way in which these core design practices can be adopted for organisational problem solving and innovation.

Design-trained people have access to a very broad range of professions. Yet there is something paradoxical about this development: ostensibly, many of these highly successful people have moved out of the field of “design.” This phenomenon deserves deeper consideration: how do design practices spread across society? What key design practices are particularly relevant to the problems of today’s society? Should what these people do still be considered design? To answer these questions, first we need to understand various ways that practices can be adopted and adapted from one discipline to the other. Problem framing emerges as a key design practice that can be adopted and adapted to other fields, and one which provides a valuable alternative to conventional types of problem solving. An example will illustrate how this frame creation allows practitioners to approach today’s open, complex, dynamic, networked problems in new and fruitful ways. The paper goes on to argue that the practice of frame creation is still part and parcel of the domain of design, and explores how design can develop into an expanded field of practice.

A review of literature that examines how expert designers move from very concrete adoptions/amalgamations of obvious existing concepts towards highly abstract shifts to new paradigms of solutions. In this paper we investigated IF and HOW a mixed group of undergraduate and Post-graduate students from diverse backgrounds could demonstrate a similar capacity to collectively display such a movement between levels of abstraction. Essentially, the design team drew from their experiential knowledge, not moving far beyond the combinatorial solution propositions that would characterise a novice designer. More detailed research into the abstraction behaviour of novice and expert designers should inform the creation of methods and tools to assist multidisciplinary teams in moving through various levels of abstraction during the design process.