Making and design thinking: Facilitating participant engagement and intuitive judgement

While design thinking is positioned as opportunity for participants from beyond design to address creative problems, engagement can be challenging due to the inability of unfamiliar methods to resonate with participants’ prior experience and disciplinary knowledge. We explore the opportunity of making to enhance the heuristic, intuitive thinking associated with creative problems and situations of uncertainty that characterize design thinking. We conduct a series of design thinking workshops across making and non-making workshop conditions, followed by expert interviews with design thinking facilitators. Results reveal the introduction of making activity at the start of design thinking process may have amplified engagement and increased participant use of heuristic, intuitive judgment across workshop segments. Analysis of a follow-up expert interview study indicated the creation of safe space through playful making as opportunity to enhance engagement, and provide the required context for the less effortful, non-conscious decisions associated with intuitive judgment in design thinking.