Act and Reflect: Integrating Reflection into Design Thinking

ABSTRACT

Teams working on creative projects, such as design thinking, mostly face complex problems as well as challenging situations characterized by uniqueness and value conflicts. To cope with these characteristics, teams usually start doing something by drawing on their current store of experiences and professional knowledge, and then (re-)assess the outcomes produced, and adjust future actions based on insights obtained during the process. In reflecting on actions, tacit knowledge is revealed that enables designers to handle challenging situations. Although there is great potential to support design thinking by adding a reflection lens, we lack guidance on how, when, and on what to perform reflection. Based on scientific and theoretical literature, semi-structured interviews, a case study and a software prototype, prescriptive design knowledge on how to integrate reflection into design thinking is deduced, which enriches the scarce body of knowledge at the intersection of reflection and (digital) design thinking.

KEYWORDS:

• Reflection-on-action
• reflection-in-action
• reflective practice
• design thinking
• software tools
• creativity
• design science research
• tacit knowledge

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2020 Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, where it received valuable feedback. We would like to thank guest editors of this special issue at the Journal of Management Information System and the anonymous reviewers for the constructive developmental comments that helped improve the manuscript. We also thank our practical partners and interviewees for their invaluable efforts and time, in particular the HI-Cube startup center. 

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Supplemental Data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/07421222.2023.2172773.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thorsten Schoormann

Thorsten Schoormann ([email protected]; corresponding author) is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hildesheim, Germany. His research focuses on business model innovation, design science research, and supporting (digital) tools that foster economic, ecological, and social sustainability. Dr. Schoormann’s work has been published in such journals as Business & Information Systems Engineering, Electronic Markets, Journal of Business Models, and in the proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems and the European Conference on Information Systems.

Maren Stadtländer

Maren Stadtländer ([email protected]) is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Hildesheim, Germany. Her research interests involve approaches for teaching the development, analysis, and innovation of sustainability-oriented business models to students and organizations, as well as novel digital solutions for increasing student learning outcomes and satisfaction. Her work has been published in such journals as Electronic Markets and Journal of Business Models, and the proceedings of the European Conference on Information Systems.

Ralf Knackstedt

Ralf Knackstedt ([email protected]) is a Professor of Information Systems at the University of Hildesheim, Germany. His research areas include reference modeling, product-service systems, and creativity. He received his doctoral degree and habilitation at the University of Münster (Germany) and worked at the European Center for Information Systems. His papers have been published in such journals as Business & Information Systems Engineering, Communications of the Association for Information Systems, and Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems.