Didn’t we solve this one? The function of practice routines in design thinking

While design thinking has become a buzz word both inside and outside the communication design studio, the practice of design – or the social act of designing – remains relatively unstudied. Current design-thinking models used to generalize and market design work veil the daily processes and practices of designers behind an ideology of inspiration and spontaneity, while rendering invisible the audit and logic structures in which designers labour. As a result, designers report that these models, though popular, fail to describe the foundational ‘steps’ through which they generate creative solutions to client problems on a daily basis. This article examines findings from an ethnographic study of design practice, and proposes the addition of recurrent routines of production to an understanding of the larger practice of communication design. Based on an exercise conducted with 22 digital communication designers where ‘design-thinking’ models were used as frameworks for self-reflection, this article discusses the surprising role of overlooked and under-represented practices of affinity sorting and repertoire use. It proposes that both are generators of creativity which act as a short circuit within communication design work. Findings from this study suggest that repositioning aspects of design practice identified in this study as a critical foundation for creative work, rather than as overlooked aspects of daily practice that ‘don’t count’ as designing, could allow for a reconceptualization of design practice as a process of imposing limitations instead of the more commonly described ‘thinking outside the box’.