The Design Thinking Methodology at Work: Semi-Automated Interactive Recovery

The methodology of Design Thinking (DT) suggests a repertoire of methods and techniques that lead to different forms 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 is difficult, because the subjectively perceived and objectively employed DT methodology may differ. In our former work, we implemented recovery rules that successfully reconstructed the 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. 50–80%. However, in order to draw valid conclusions about DT methodologies use a higher level of confidence must be achieved. Therefore, to proceed from a qualitative to quantitative analysis of employed DT methodologies we extended our recovery approach to a semi-automated recovery approach to (a) increase the completeness and accuracy of the reconstructed methodology and (b) use insights gained during the semi-automated recovery to enhance the recovery rules. In this chapter, we report on our extended semi-automated recovery approach. As a preliminary result of our experiments, we conclude that our semi-automated interactive recovery approach can be employed to increase the completeness and accuracy of the reconstructed methodology. By using insights gained during the semi-automated recovery to enhance the recovery rules and therefore allow to proceed from a qualitative to quantitative analysis of used DT methodologies.