Making Sense of Designing

As an applied approach, Design Thinking demonstrated numerous contribution to the world of design, from bringing the designers’ ways of thinking to the public eye and broadening the focus on artifacts to entire social and economic systems. The business world, however, absorbed the Design Thinking methodology as a linear, staged process that as such failed to accommodate all the contingencies of real-world design and deliver desired creativity. Many authors now seek out alternative approaches that better capture and explain genuine creative processes. Becoming-Design, one such approach, has a recent appearance in literature and expands on the idea of Co-Design. It is considered a type of extended collaborative endeavor involving both people and materials as the main factors in shaping the process and outcome of design. The explicit focus on the social and material aspects invite influences and tensions, mess and uncertainties brought by other people, materials and things to designing that, if embraced, may yield more creative expressions and higher success rates of design outcomes.