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Learning to Design: Giving Purpose to Heart, Hand and Mind

Article  in  Journal of Business Strategy · July 2007

DOI: 10.1108/02756660710760953

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Learning to design: giving purpose to heart,
hand and mind
Sabine Junginger
Sabine Junginger is
Lecturer in Product Design
and Design Management,
Lancaster Institute for
Contemporary Arts,
Lancaster University,
Lancaster, UK.
DOI 10.1108/02756660710760953
here are many different approaches to teaching design. Disciplines such as graphic
T design, industrial design and architecture, for example, have roots in their own
traditions and histories. Each design program tends to promote and emphasize
specific skills and qualities in their students’ work. It is then somewhat awkward to attempt a
brief summary of these diverse efforts at design education in a way that is both general
enough and yet specific. To complicate matters, design education itself is experiencing a
shift that is challenging still predominant conceptions of ‘‘good design’’ which centers on the
beauty and function of a product in itself[1]. To arrive at ‘‘good design’’ today, designers
have to get involved in a systematic inquiry beyond aesthetics and functions. There is no
simple way for design students to explore what is ‘‘useful, usable and desirable in
products’’[2]. But every student brings with him or her three essential tools for inquiry that, if
they make use of them, allow them to succeed. These three elements are often referred to as
heart, hand, and mind. Heart implies a love and passion for participating in a process of
making and creating. Yet heart is also a reminder of the need to feel with the people one
designs for. heart allows a student to ‘‘stand in someone else’s shoes,’’ to empathize with
others to see and experience the world through their eyes and situations. Hand, of course,
reminds us of the aspects of making. Possessing heart and compassion will not result in any
practical solutions. Engaging in sketching, prototyping, testing, evaluating and refining
ideas in two- or three-dimensional form, however, translates ideas into actions. Finally, a
curious mind generates ideas but also carefully inquires and reflects on an ongoing design
process. From the beginning, designers learn that a random or arbitrary solution is a poor
outcome and speaks of a poor design approach. Too much is left to chance, too little is being
explored, too many opportunities arise for unintended consequences that can be annoying
or outright dangerous. The challenge for design education is to enable students to set up
their own, independent inquiries into a situation that allows them to discover new insights
and invent novel solutions. And because designers continue to design products for people,
these skills are being developed around the purpose of useful, usable, and desirable
products. A few examples will show how the concept of heart, hand and mind can contribute
to a student’s ongoing inquiry. The design methods and techniques described in the
following examples must not be viewed as a complete ‘‘curriculum’’ for learning to design.
Instead, they serve the purpose of providing a glimpse into design thinking in design
education.
Developing the heart
Learning to empathize is a key skill for designers: Unless one can see and experience
situations from the vantage point of the person in this situation, much of the discussion
remains subject to speculation. And while speculation has a role in generative research,
there is also a great need to find out directly from people who are engaging or have engaged
in a particular experience. This area of design research is part of user research. Among
several tools useful to empathize with other people are Immersion and Task Analysis. Patricia
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 ‘‘ To arrive at ‘good design’ today, designers have to get
involved in a systematic inquiry beyond aesthetics and
functions. ’’

Moore’s research into the world of the elderly is now a design classic and a prime example of
immersive user research. For a period of time, she turned into an elderly woman and traveled
the country to discover the world of the elderly[3]. She first studied the cognitive and
physical ailments typical for an old woman. She then immersed herself in this world, put on a
wig, donned big glasses to reduce her eyesight, and boarded a bus to tour the country. She
took careful notes of her experiences, commenting on accessibility issues and other
difficulties that the elderly face. The elderly she empathized with were caught in this situation
and struggled with mastering their environment. Those people who were capable of
‘‘seeing’’ the need for better products and services for the elderly – the young and healthy –
were blinded by their own sight. But her immersion and subsequent task analysis (in which
she detailed all the steps necessary to accomplish a particular task, adding comments on
what each step required in terms of knowledge and capability) offered a key for new product
development. It is not necessary to go through the lengths Patricia Moore went to in order to
emphasize. While her example remains one of the most vivid in explaining the need for and
the path to empathy, students might try to find their way around a local hospital or
supermarket. They can try to fill out an income tax form or apply for public services. In each
case, they will temporarily have to become ‘‘one’’ with the person they are studying. This is
when they ‘‘feel the pain’’ of a taxpayer or share the frustrations of not having the right
information at the right time in the right form. This is how students generate ideas for new
product opportunities and improved services.

Developing the hand

Visualizing and prototyping play a significant role in designing. Early sketches and
mock-ups, however rough or rugged, allow ideas to be shared and discussed. One of the
goals of design education is for students to ‘‘get their ideas out of their heads and onto
paper.’’ Making skills are often confused with artistic abilities. Of course, it is necessary for
design students to eventually produce work up to professional industry standards.
However, these sophisticated techniques are acquired over time and serve the
presentation of an accomplished inquiry (as in ‘‘done’’) more than the inquiry itself (as in
‘‘doing’’). In fact, one of the common misperceptions design students bring to their early
studies is that the goal is to produce beautiful drawings and models. This fallacy prevents
the student from exploration and discovery and needs to be corrected immediately. The
goal is therefore to introduce thumbnailing, sketching, drawing, diagramming, prototyping
and other methods as tools for inquiry. The first exercise freshmen at the College of
Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology engage in is a blind contour drawing.
They choose a setting on campus, sit down and let their pencil on their paper follow the
edges, curves, twists and turns that their eyes trace on the object. Without lifting the pencil
off the paper and without ever looking onto the paper, this is for most students a new
experience of drawing. The results, predictably, are not beautifully depicted objects or
straight lines but shifting and intermeshing lines, curves and zigzags. This exercise
accomplishes several pedagogical goals at once. First, it shifts the importance from
producing a beautiful drawing to seeing and capturing what one sees. This takes the
pressure off students who are self-conscious and lack confidence in their drawing abilities.
Second, through the experience, students get a first understanding of how things can be
different from what they seem. We all have our own ideas about how something looks but
when we look closely, we are prone to find dissonances in our view and in the thing or
situation in itself.

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Developing the mind
To conduct an inquiry, students need to learn what it means to inquire. This involves an
understanding of the role of assumptions. As we have seen implicitly in the previous two
sections, designers constantly encounter assumptions and many initial exercises aim to
challenge common assumptions. Rousseau (1995) describes fundamental assumptions as
‘‘the often unconscious beliefs that members share about their organization and its
relationship to them.’’ They have a stabilizing effect on the organization and form the core of
an organization’s culture around which behavioral norms, values, behavior patterns and
artifacts or products evolve. Ott et al. (2003, p. 4) point out that ‘‘assumptions are more than
beliefs or values: they are givens or truths that are held so strongly that they are no longer
questioned nor even consciously thought about.’’ Unexamined fundamental assumptions
can lead scientists to build ‘‘category systems’’ around themselves that then perpetually
reinforce their existing assumptions (Weinberg, 2001, p. 33). If we believe Simon’s (1996,
p. 111) famous statement that ‘‘everyone is a designer who improves an existing situation
into a preferred one,’’ we also accept that designers always deal with change. In order to
instill or effect change, however, it is necessary to unearth the fundamental assumptions that
drive an existing situation.
Students’ own fundamental assumptions about a problem or task are questioned and
challenged during regular review sessions of their work. In these presentations, they report
on the origin, status and progress of their ongoing inquiry to peers. They make use of
visualization, story telling and other techniques to communicate their understanding of the
problem and their approach to a solution. At the same time, they invite other students, faculty
and often external visitors with various backgrounds to comment on their ideas, concepts,
methods and solutions. The value in such peer critiques is multi-fold. Students who present
get a chance for a ‘‘reality-check.’’ Are they overlooking something? Have they become too
ambitions? Critiques are meant to be a dialogue, and questions can be asked by anyone
involved, including the presenter. Other students, who typically work on the same or a similar
problem, take notes and chime in with their own insights and experiences. In the end, it is a
great opportunity for shared learning. Students receive direct feedback on how to improve
their abilities to communicate verbally, visually and conceptually (for example: ‘‘I could
better understand your map if you would use consistent color coding’’). In preparing the
presentation, students revisit what they set out to do, why they thought this was a worthwhile
exploration and how they went about doing what they wanted to do. They have to narrate a
story. Often, in this process, students realize that the ending is not what they thought it would
be. Other opportunities emerged in their work; problems turned out to be insurmountable
and made them rethink their approach. Something might have happened that led them to
adopt a completely different concept of the problem. What have they learned? How did this
influence their research and thinking? The skill in a design inquiry is for the design students
to develop their own framework for research. Decisions have to be made when to pursue a
new idea and how far. Unless a student has identified and articulated the purpose for his or
her inquiry, it will be nearly impossible to develop a research framework. Without it, an inquiry
remains random and arbitrary.

Familiarizing your organization with design

Organizations interested in employing design thinking and design methods face a wide
range of questions. What is there to be learned? Who can teach us? How and where? Who
can learn? What resources need to be in place? How long will the education and/or training
take? When will we see results? Will this interfere with our ongoing operations? The list can
grow long and overwhelming. Fortunately, there is no need to tackle everything at once.
Instead, you can carefully nurture design thinking and design methods over time. The
purpose of the remainder of this article is to aid you in launching your own platform for
human-centered designing.
The similarities of employees and beginning design students are greater than their
differences. Both bring with them some idea what design is or is not. Both have acquired
assumptions about the world and themselves. And being human, both tend to be much more

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 comfortable within the framework of existing procedures, rules, and routines and
uncomfortable with ill-defined problems for which there are no guidelines. Like incoming
students, people in an organization, too, possess the basic tools for designing – heart, hand
and mind. The question then is how can these assets be developed and around which
purpose? Managers can employ rather simple design exercises to launch the topic of
design with their colleagues and staff.

Three exercises
Here are three exercises that originated in design schools but have shown to be effective in
design practice with organizations. Each exercise has been tested in the field with students
and employees of organizations learning about design[4]. They are simple and can be done
in a short amount of time and with very few resources, either by an individual or in a team.
The exercises build on participants’ innate abilities for heart, hand and mind. At the same
time, each exercise encourages people to discover, create, visualize, and communicate. It
would be interesting to discuss the role assumptions play in each task.

Identify design around you (heart and mind)

This first exercise can be done by anyone, anytime, anywhere. It aims to train the senses and
the mind to question what we take for granted and to discover new aspects of design, its
forms, functions, history and purpose. In many ways, this exercise echoes Nicolaı̈des’ (1941,
p. 1) drawing exercises that highlight ‘‘the necessary relationship between thought and
action.’’ However, when it comes to design, this ‘‘necessary’’ relationship focuses on the
relationship between people and how symbols, things, actions, and environments shape
and support these relationships.

Exercise 1 (needed: eyes, notebook, pen)

When you look up from the paper right now, what do you see? Surely you can recognize a
number of ‘‘designed’’ objects – but what about the more subtle aspects of design? If
design is ‘‘all that is around you,’’[5] the question is, when, how, where and why do you
notice? You can begin by observing carefully what people do in the space you are currently
in. Where are they going? Are they going anywhere? What are they doing? Do they interact?
How? Can you guess what any of the men or women you see is intending to do? If so, can you
see how your environment supports their efforts or adds difficulty? Can you recognize items
where design has failed? A phone book nobody uses but that makes a great doorstopper? A
chair that really is a bookshelf? Or maybe it is an invoice you received from one of your
service providers that makes you feel like studying FCC rules? Design dysfunctions that
render products useless, unusable and undesirable point to opportunities for redesign.

Discover design hierarchies and structures (heart and mind)

The second exercise takes a few minutes to prepare and about an hour to accomplish,
reflect, and discuss. It is best done in small groups of five to eight participants. Its purpose is
to discover the purpose of organizing. Whenever we design, we deal with some form of
structure of organization. Chapters in a book give structure to its content and suggest how
we read – from beginning to end, from chapter to chapter or from keyword to keyword. The
display options on an automated teller machine structure how we go about withdrawing

‘‘ From the beginning, designers learn that a random or

arbitrary solution is a poor outcome and speaks of a poor
design approach. Too much is left to chance, too little is being
explored, too many opportunities arise for unintended
consequences that can be annoying or outright dangerous. ’’

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money. Bars or handles on a door structure our behavior: we either push or pull the door
open. Depending on the task, we either step forward or take a step back to allow the door to
swing open. From each of these structured experiences (which are designed, deliberately or
unintended), we can see how people, resources, structure and purpose interact. The aim of
Exercise 2 is to develop a sensitivity and awareness for these interactions between kinds of
organizational structures, resources and purpose.

Exercise 2 (needed: small objects, large paper, marker)

1. At home or wherever convenient, gather as many small objects as you can. Take out the
contents of your toolbox, add pieces from a hobby kit, rummage through your kitchen and
yard to include pieces, parts and bits of familiar and unfamiliar objects.
2. In your office, gather a group of colleagues and staff. Sit them around a table and empty
your items in the middle of the table. Ask your group to sort the items so that they make
sense. Instruct them to document the criteria they are using to organize the objects (the
most intuitive ones are material, color, use, or function). Provide no further details or
instructions. Let them sort for 15 to 20 minutes. Once finished, ask your group to come up
with at least two more different ways to organize the items.
3. Discuss your results. How do the solutions differ? Why? What is the link between the
people who organize (your internal group) and the people who will end up looking for a
particular item in the set (people you do not know)? Can anyone find anything in this
structure? Is it geared towards certain people? Are there any implications for how your
own organization is ‘‘organized?’’ What are the organizing principles? What drives the
organization? Who might access products and services easily? Who might not?

Have an experience (heart, hand and mind)

Buchanan (2004) suggests we focus on ‘‘the pathways of individual human experience’’
rather than on the ‘‘massive totality of the system’’ when dealing with complex organizations.
The third exercise, while building on exercises one and two, asks you to observe and
document your own experiences at every step while you attempt to complete a task. This
research method of tracing a task step-by-step is called task analysis[6]. One of the goals of
this exercise is to raise general awareness for the assumptions people make when they
design for others. This exercise can take anywhere from one to several hours, depending on
how you set up the task and how far away you are sending your team(s). This exercise can
also be done on an individual level, though the learning and observations are usually greater
in a group. In this sense, Exercise 3 also works well as a team-building exercise.

Exercise 3 (needed: a document to be copied, a location with a copy machine, paper

and markers)
Hand each of your team(s) a document with the request to get a photocopy of it from a copy
machine. Do not tell them which photocopier to use or where to go. But do ask them to make
careful notes of all the actions they are taking in order to complete the task successfully. This
includes taking notes of questions they encounter, crossroads they are facing, and so on.
Have the team(s) return after a reasonable time. Ask them to visualize their findings in a way
that communicates their steps and experiences to the other teams. How did they find out
about their copy machine? How did they get there? What did they need to do to get the
machine to work? What was working well? What did not?
(In a second pass, this exercise can turn into a form of role-play where participants work with
a specific product or service from your organization but are looking at it with the eyes of
someone who lacks the expert knowledge of an organization insider.)

Next step: the organization as purpose

In completing the three exercises, you will discover some of the key human-centered design
principles. Perhaps you feel that you have not made anything yet, but you will have already
created first prototypes of pathways. More importantly, you have begun the exploration into
your organization. An organization that employs design thinking and design methods

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 ‘‘ One of the common misperceptions design students bring to
their early studies is that the goal is to produce beautiful
drawings and models. ’’

inquires into the organization’s problems from a user’s point of view – from the perspective of
someone who has little understanding about the complexities involved but who needs to
have a clear path of action. If you have not done so yet, you might want to repeat the
exercises with a particular focus on your own organization. Your discoveries along the way
will become the foundation for a more structured inquiry and form the basis for directed
change. At this point, you are working to create a culture of design research.
Congratulations, you have already passed through the first loop of iterative and
participatory design! You are using your skills and insights and are applying them
immediately to the problems of your organization, all the while honing and refining them. The
organization has become the purpose of your design activities.
Now is the time to articulate how your design process aligns with your organization’s design
principles. What are these principles? What are the current processes? How would the
processes need to change to become iterative and participatory? Articulate and visualize
both principles and process. At this point, you might want to connect with design
professionals and/or educators to set up skill workshops and design seminars. They can
also help you identify an initial project to generate design principles and a development
process in line with your vision. While you have been engaging in design in sort of an
instance-by-instance approach until now (conducting a few exercises that are not
necessarily connected to one another), now is the time to think of your design strategy as a
systematic inquiry: Where do you want to go? Why? Consider your first project as a prototype
for your organization. This prototype can be changed, evaluated, tested and changed
again. This prototype is also your key to learning about all the factors that play into your
design strategy. It is crucial to identify a project that is relatively small in scope. This allows
the design team to focus on the process, continue to learn about design and produce a
concrete outcome in a short amount of time that demonstrates the principles at work.
First case studies show that organizations successful in developing and establishing design
capabilities use an iterative and participatory design approach to develop them[7]. Ideally,
the success of the first, quick project generates the momentum for a second project that
tackles issues that have emerged in the first project. Learning to design is an ongoing and
evolving process for anyone who engages in it. To establish design thinking and design
Keywords: methods within your organization, the individual skills need to go hand in hand with creating
Design, an environment supportive of a design approach (Zimmerman, 2003). This includes
Thinking styles, prototyping, evaluating and testing early and often[8]. Learning to design is learning to learn
Education in, with and for the organization.

Notes
1. For a critical discussion of ‘‘good design’’ see Buchanan (2000).
2. Quoted from Buchanan (2000). Elizabeth ‘‘Liz’’ Sanders is widely credited with having coined the
terms ‘‘useful, usable and desirable’’ products. See Sanders (1992).
3. The story of Patty Moore is much more complex than I offer here. Details on the story can be found
online, for example at newstatesman.com www.newstatesman.com/199905170038
4. I have participated in the development and execution of Exercises 2 and 3 as part of the DMM
Transformation Project, conducted by the United States Postal Service with the School of Design
from Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh 2001-2005. Carnegie Mellon Professor Karen Moyer originally
developed the tool sorting exercise to teach information design. The idea for the Photocopy Task

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 Analysis came from Angela Meyer, project manager of the DMM Transformation Project, in an effort
to familiarize new project members with the problems of human-centered design.

5. The slogan ‘‘Design – it’s all around you’’ was part of Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum’s
marketing campaign for the National Design Week 2006. For more details see www.cooperhewitt.
org

6. One of the early resources on contextual design research methods, which also details task analysis,
is provided by Beyer and Holtzblatt (1998).

7. See, for example, my comparative case studies on the Internal Revenue Service, The United States
Postal Service and the Australian Tax Office in Junginger (2006).

8. Useful resources in this context include: Nelson and Stolterman (2002) and Laurel (2003).

References
Beyer, H. and Holtzblatt, K. (1998), Contextual Design: Defining Customer-centered Systems, Morgan
Kaufmann, San Francisco, CA.

Buchanan, R. (2000), ‘‘Good design in the digital age’’, GAIN, Vol. 1 No. 1, pp. 30-3.

Buchanan, R. (2004), ‘‘Management and design: interaction pathways in organizational life’’, in Boland, R.
and Collopy, F. (Eds), Managing as Designing, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, pp. 54-63.

Junginger, S. (2006), ‘‘Change in the making – organizational change through human-centered product
development’’, doctoral dissertation, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, May.

Laurel, B. (Ed.) (2003), Design Research, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Nelson, H.G. and Stolterman, E. (2002), The Design Way, Educational Technology Publications,
Englewood Cliffs, NJ.

Nicolaı̈des, K. (1941), The Natural Way to Draw, Houghton-Mifflin, Boston, MA.

Ott, S.J., Parkes, S.J. and Simpson, R.B. (2003), Classic Readings in Organizational Behavior, 3rd ed.,
Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, Belmont, CA.

Rousseau, D.M. (1995), Psychological Contracts in Organizations: Understanding Written and Unwritten
Agreements, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA.

Sanders, B.-N. (1992), ‘‘Converging perspectives: product development research for the 1990s’’,
Design Management Journal, Vol. 3 No. 4, pp. 49-54.

Simon, H.A. (1996), The Sciences of the Artificial, 3rd ed., MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Weinberg, G.M. (2001), An Introduction to General Systems Thinking, Silver Anniversary ed., Dorset
House Publishing, New York, NY.

Zimmerman, E. (2003), ‘‘Creating a culture of design research’’, in Laurel, B. (Ed.), Design Research –
Methods and Perspectives, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 185-92.

About the author

Sabine Junginger is a Lecturer in Product Design and Design Management at Lancaster
University. She received a PhD in Design in 2006 from Carnegie Mellon University, where she
also received a Master in Communication Planning and Information Design in 2001. She
studies the various roles and relationships of design and the organization, especially in the
context of organizational change. Sabine Junginger can be contacted at:
sjunginger@lancaster.ac.uk

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