Engineering vs. Design Thinking
Peer Insight has been teaching an innovation curriculum to Georgetown and ASU’s Academy for Innovative Higher Education Leadership and at our last class a professor from Stanford’s Engineering Department asked a great question, “How does the Design Thinking approach compare to that of Engineering?”
I don’t have an engineering background myself, but luckily our founder Tim and one of my favorite colleagues, Kathi, both describe themselves as “reformed engineers” so I asked them to compare and contrast Design Thinking and Engineering. Their first response was, "USE BOTH! To innovate you need all the tools at your disposal you can get! We are not 'engineers' or 'design thinkers' We are innovators!"
But to satisfy our intellectual curiosity, I pressed them further and we came up with this diagram:
First off, engineering and Design Thinking seem to share very similar processes. You'll likely see those steps listed above in both arenas. Likewise, they both share some mindsets, in that they both employ critical thinking, strategy, project management, etc.
I pressed them for divergence too and three main differences arose:
1. Engineering relies on deductive reasoning while Design Thinking relies on inductive and/or abductive reasoning.
2. The other main difference is that the main agent/actors inherent in a Design Thinking problem are people, who are unpredictable, irrational and don’t always do what they say. For engineering there’s less of this. It sounds like a steel beam behaves much more predictably than people.
3. Another big difference is the downside risk inherent in an engineering project vs. a Design Thinking project. A bridge collapsing vs. an app not delighting a teenager hardly compare. Thus, engineering hypothesis testing requires more certainty, bigger sample sizes, etc. In Design Thinking we have the luxury of testing and prototyping with real people quickly. Although both fields test through prototypes, Design Thinking gets products in the market faster than engineering because of the lower downside risk.
These three differences result in others, which you can see in our diagram above. One that struck me was the priority for testing.
Engineering typically researches and tests the technical feasibility of a concept or a solution, then the business viability, saving user desirability for last. Design Thinking, because it’s best suited for human-based problems, inverts this order, starting with user desirability and ending with technical feasibility.
So, engineers and design thinkers, what’s your reaction to this? What am I missing? Are these gross simplifications?
Also, special thanks to our communications designer Dave Cooley for the fun characters up top!
Very insightful 💡
They are more or less a part of the same process, just at distinct stages, one following the other. Design thinking being the first, it is at this stage that concepts are generated, refined, and validated to ensure product acceptance by the users. Engineering picks up from here and employs existing technologies to make the product work within the constraints identified by the shareholders.
I think they're actually the same, hypothesis testing is not deductive reasoning. Both engineers and designers are using induction. I think where they differ is where business demands priorities be set, technical feasability --> business feasability --> user experience for engineers vs. user experience --> business feasability --> technical feasibility for design work. I actually think both of these approaches are flawed. An ideal order would be technical feasability --> user experience --> business feasibility. And actually, I think this is the kind of think Jobs pushed at Apple. That's what allowed them to produce moonshot products that nobody else was willing to try, sometimes at impractical prices as a result. But the emphasis on pushing the envelope and in thinking differently from paradigms in a way that I think is better is probably what allowed for the legacy of revolutionary products. I think another difference is that I'd expect designers to be more liberal with abduction too, because there are smaller consequences (arguably none) for being wrong. Whereas in engineering, depending on the project, being wrong might kill someone. So engineers tend to be more conservative, but designs can be more liberal
I have a different opinion and don’t agree with the premise of this article. As a practitioner and educator with over 20+ years of Design Thinking experience in Engineering, Product Design, Industrial Design and Learning Experience/Ux. Design Thinking grew out of The Engineering Design Process which has been around as far back as the pyramids of Egypt. It has been repackaged, improved and bedazzled, but is still the same basic process for thousands of years. It’s just that other non-engineering fields are discovering the power of this creative problem solving process! As a matter of fact, many people think of David Kelley, IDEO and Stanford d school, when hearing about DT. Kelley has a degree in Mechanical engineering. My first degree also is Mechanical engineering...
It's an old article but I would like to comment. I don't agree with you about your last point "Engineering ……… saving user desirability for last..." I think even with engineering now, we have more interest in the user desirability. With the new methodologies like agile, DEVOPS .. we try to adapt to user needs asking permanently for his feedback. Of course the technical feasibility is mandatory. ..