Research about design cognition acknowledges the importance of knowledge about exiting solutions. Designers tend to employ solution oriented thinking strategies; they generate idea’s starting from initial solutions - called primary generators; they are known to rely on episodic knowledge and precedent throughout the design process; and they iterate frequently between the problem and solution space . This raises the question how such solutions, often in the form of existing designs are taught. Few design programs explicitly acknowledge existing solutions as part of the designers knowledge base, or specify, for example, what types of analyses designers should be able to perform on them. We believe design education could benefit from rethinking how their curricula handle solutions and from explicating this role. To this end we introduce the notion of ‘solution repertoire’. With this term we refer to the knowledge designers have of existing solutions. An analysis of the notion of solution repertoire helps us to identify and recognize solution oriented knowledge and its treatment in our schools. This, in turn, helps us to make more informed choices in our curriculum development.
Design education has a nuanced relationship with examples. Although they are considered useful teaching tools, their use is often restricted to illustrating the design theories and principles around which the curriculum is structured. In contrast, professional designers view examples as autonomous entities and use them to initiate a critical dialogue with their current problem space. Therefore, students should be facilitated in cultivating their own repertoire of solutions and learn to initiate conversations between existing solutions and design challenges to gain a better understanding of the problem space and generate new designs. This paper outlines a small-scale experiment conducted with master's students in Applied Data Science at Utrecht University who took a course on designing recommender system interfaces. The students were provided with a set of examples of recommender interface designs as their main instructional tool. They could use this set to curate their own solution repertoire. As a result, the majority of the participants' work displayed more diverse designs, and they used design patterns distilled from those examples generatively, developing innovative designs. Based on this case study, we tentatively conclude that a design curriculum built around examples, complemented by theories, could be advantageous, as long as special attention is given to helping students initiate fruitful iterations between their challenges and a set of solutions.
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The promotor was Prof. Erik Jan Hultink and copromotors Dr Ellis van den Hende en Dr R. van der Lugt. The title of this dissertation is Armchair travelling the innovation journey. ‘Armchair travelling’ is an expression for travelling to another place, in the comfort of one’s own place. ‘The innovation journey’ is the metaphor Van de Ven and colleagues (1999) have used for travelling the uncharted river of innovation, the highly unpredictable and uncontrollable process of innovation. This research study began with a brief remark from an innovation project leader who sighed after a long and rough journey: ‘had I known this ahead of time…’. From wondering ‘what could he have known ahead of time?’ the immediate question arose: how do such innovation journeys develop? How do other innovation project leaders lead the innovation journey? And could I find examples of studies about these experiences from an innovation project leader’s perspective that could have helped the sighing innovation project leader to have known at least some of the challenges ahead of time? This dissertation is the result of that quest, as we do know relatively little how this process of the innovation project leader unfolds over time. The aim of this study is to increase our understanding of how innovation project leaders lead their innovation journeys over time, and to capture those experiences that could be a source for others to learn from and to be better prepared. This research project takes a process approach. Such an approach is different from a variance study. Process thinking takes into account how and why things – people, organizations, strategies, environments – change, act and evolve over time, expressed by Andrew Pettigrew (1992, p.10) as catching “reality in flight”.
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