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, techniques, and phases have been employed in what order is of special interest to stakeholders such as project managers and researchers. Therefore, in our current and former 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 support DT at work besides reconstruction also the prediction of promising future project steps in form of phases, methods, or techniques and project performance would be very helpful. We therefore suggest to enrich our semi-automated recovery approach with a prediction component to support DT in the following ways:

(a) techniques to define the similarity of DT projects and then based on that we will study

(b) whether we can predict based on available project data what the expected quality of the project outcome and risk is for a given unfinished project and and possibly a next planned step, and

(c) whether we can predict the most likely and most promising next design thinking step concerning their impact on the expected quality of the project outcome and risk. We expect that the outcome of our research enables to guide Design Thinkers in their daily work which next design thinking steps to chose next.