Design Thinking: Slow and Fast

The book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman presented a model of human cognition that became extraordinary popular a few years ago. His ideas have been influential in many areas and have led to 'applications' of different kinds.

The work by design theorist John Gero has also for some time been influential. His FBS ontology established a foundational model of designing as a cognitive process.

In a new article, John Gero in collaboration with Udo Kennengiesser proposes a framework for applying Kahneman's model to designing based on Gero's model.

This is an ambitious enterprise and not easy to do successfully. I am not here to comment on how well they do it or the value of it, but I do find that the effort should be praised for at least two reasons.

First of all, it is an attempt to theoretically work across disciplines, not only by 'borrowing' a theory from another field to apply it. Here we see real ambition to work across theoretical areas.

Secondly, we see here an attempt at developing theory based on existing theory. Often theories like these are seen as competitors and they are compared and measured against each other to see which one is the 'best'. In this paper, the authors are trying to combine two advanced theories with the purpose of improving them. They explore if they can be combined, how they overlap, and if they open up new aspects of each other.

I wish we could see more theory work like this.

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Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Macmillan.

Kannengiesser, Udo & Gero, John. (2019). Design Thinking, Fast and Slow: A Framework for Kahneman's Dual-System Theory in Design. 10.1017/dsj.2019.9.