PI: Prof. Dr. Holger Giese

Abstract

The methodology of Design Thinking (DT) suggests a repertoire of methods and techniques that lead to different shapes of the DT methodology in practice. Which methods and techniques have been employed is of special interest to stakeholders such as project managers and researchers. However, the repertoire of these methods and techniques does not convey much concerning the order of employed methods and techniques in practice. Capturing the employed DT methodology in practice is difficult, because the subjectively perceived and objectively employed DT methodology may differ.

In our current project, we employed recovery rules that successfully reconstructed the employed DT methodology from captured DT project documentation. Our qualitative evaluation shows that the methodology could be reconstructed without human intervention with a confidence of approx. 50% to 80%. However, to draw valid conclusions about employed DT methodologies a higher confidence should be achieved.

We suggest to extend our recovery approach to a semiautomated recovery approach for three reasons: a) increasing the completeness and accuracy of the reconstructed methodology, b) using insights gained during the semiautomated recovery to enhance the recovery rules to c) proceed from a qualitative to quantitative analysis of employed DT methodologies. We expect that the outcome of our research enables us to compare DT methodologies at work.