Design Thinking? Thank an Engineer.

This episode is the audio version of Steven McCarthy's article in Dialectic (Volume III, Issue I): "Design Thinking? Thank an Engineer, read by Lee-Sean Huang. 

Dialectic is an open access scholarly journal of thought leadership, education and practice in the discipline of visual communication design published by the AIGA Design Educators Community and Michigan Publishing. 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3998/dialectic.14932326.0003.102 

Abstract: The methodology of Design Thinking is pervasive across design disciplines, and to some degree business culture, with many crediting its origins to the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design — the “d.school” — at Stanford University. The d.school was preceded however by decades of curricular innovation, studio practice and research by faculty in Stanford’s Department of Mechanical Engineer- ing and Department of Art as they hosted the Joint [Graduate] Program in Design. Three engineering professors in particular developed concepts in “creative engineering,” “visual thinking,” and “concep- tual blockbusting” that will be shown to be foundational to design thinking. Their ideas influenced Stanford design alumnus David Kelley whose company IDEO brought design thinking to corporations and institutions globally.

Biography: Professor Steven McCarthy (MFA, Stanford University) has been on the University of Minnesota graphic design faculty since 1998, and recently achieved emeritus status. He taught graphic design at Northern Kentucky University for nine years prior to this. His long-standing interest in theories of design authorship as both scholar and practitioner has led to lectures, exhibits, publications and grant-funded research in a dozen countries. McCarthy’s creative work has been in over 135 juried and invitational exhibitions, and has been awarded inclusion in the AIGA annual and in Graphis Poster. Institutional ‘special collections’ that have acquired McCarthy’s work include these universities and art and design academies: Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Virginia Commonwealth, Minnesota, Cincinnati, Ohio State, the Art Institute of Chicago and Washington (Seattle). He has published written work in Design Issues, Eye, Visible Language, Visual Design Scholarship, The Poster, and Visual Communication among others. His book on the topic of design authorship, The Designer As... Author, Producer, Activist, Entrepreneur, Curator and Collaborator: New Models for Communicating was published in 2013 by BIS Publishers, Amsterdam.