Applied Teamology: The Impact of Cognitive Style Diversity on Problem Reframing and Product Redesign Within Design Teams

In the words of Professor Larry J. Leifer, “All design is redesign.” As designers collect information about a problem, they form a mental frame of the problem space that is the scaffolding around which to build a solution. When presented with new information, successful designers can “reframe” the problem and the solution as part of a successful iterative cycle. These iterative cycles are central to the Stanford Design Thinking process. A team’s capacity and willingness to reframe can be measured by means of a closed-form assessment tool that eliminates many of the confounding variables of the previous longitudinal (project performance-based) approach. We propose the Stanford Design Thinking Exercise (SDTE) as a measure of reframing behavior and design team effectiveness. The exercise is standardized and can be conducted in a controlled lab or classroom setting in 1 h. The SDTE is designed to be a first step toward a quick, reliable and standardized technique for evaluating design team effectiveness. We found that the SDTE is a robust measurement for reframing change, in that it reports a range of reframing results across a participant population group, but attempts to align the instrument with participant cognitive characteristics were unsuccessful indicating that more work needs to be done to understand specific indicators of reframing.