Claudia Nicolai

Hasso Plattner Institute · School of Design Thinking

Hybrid educational formats are on the rise, but there exists neither definitional clarity on the term “hybrid” nor has there been a deeper examination of approaches that lend themselves to highly collaborative education, such as that required for design thinking. This book chapter first presents a taxonomy of time- and place-based hybridity. It the...

To deliver excellent virtual education experiences, design thinking educators adapt along all three “P”s: of People, Place, and Process. This book chapter provides the theoretical foundations for delivering virtual education experiences and, relying on both relevant streams of research and the authors’ own expertise, derives six areas of action—(Di...

Understanding the impact of Design Thinking in organizations is fundamental for fostering its dissemination and development. This chapter thus deals with the assessment of Design Thinking impact in organizations. Providing an overview of the concept of “impact” and reviewing existing models of impact measurement, we derive important criteria for as...

This chapter relies on an interactionist understanding of space, a shared leadership approach, and Design Thinking coaching to derive consequences for the use of space in Design Thinking workshops. It combines, on the one hand, concepts from theory with experience, insights, and tools from practice. On the other hand, it takes both the perspective...

In this paper we endeavor to explore how organizational learning unfolds on the level of group discourses.

This research paper examines the impact of the Design Thinking process in cultivating creative confidence among Digital Engineering students and encouraging them to become more empathetic towards others. The setting for the research is a one-week educational workshop at the HPI School of Design Thinking (D-School) in Potsdam, Germany, called the Gl...

What differentiates an average conversation from a creative conversation? In this book chapter, we answer this question by looking at coherence styles of design conversations. With the help of the Coherence Style Framework (CSF), we are able to illustrate what divergent and convergent thinking on the conversational level looks like. Highly creative...

Companies are recognizing more and more the potential of work spaces to increase their employees’ creativity, well-being, and performance. However, (re-)designing work space is not an easy task and, hence, many companies ask for recommendations and advice from a researcher’s perspective. Taking these rising demands and experiences with work space d...

The creative interaction of a team is where most of the innovation work in organizations happens nowadays. Yet the creative team is an exceptionally messy place in regard to socio-emotional interactions. Working creatively means constantly navigating and negotiating uncertainty and ambiguity, which, apart from constant procedural adaptations, both...

This chapter explores the use of space as a means of effectively fostering creativity and innovation in organizations more specifically, so-called spatial interventions. Spatial interventions refer to the strategic scope of actions that can be undertaken when and while using innovation spaces. We approach the topic of spatial interventions from dif...

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the relation between coherence and creativity in design conversations of innovation teams. Low coherent segments in a conversation can be understood as the linguistic equivalent of shifts of the focus of attention while designing. Focus shifts have a positive influence on ideational productivity. We therefo...

Previous studies on design behaviour indicate that focus shifts positively influence ideational productivity. In this study we want to take a closer look at how these focus shifts look on the verbal level. We describe a mutually influencing relationship between mental focus shifts and verbal low coherent statements. In a case study based on the DTR...

More companies have begun to leverage the unused potential of place. By re-designing the work place or introducing new spaces that are dedicated to innovation projects, they are attempting to increase employee motivation, team performance, innovation management, and the overall innovativeness of the whole organization. However, companies often stru...

This paper presents a mixed computational and manual procedure to systematically probe for distinct low coherent turns in design conversations. Existing studies indicate that focus shifts and their linguistic equivalent, low coherent turns, positively influence ideational productivity. Because coherence is a versatile phenomenon, we contribute a cl...

The focus of this book chapter is the introduction of two complementary instruments, the Topic Markup Scheme (TMS) and the Knowledge Handling Notation (KHN) to analyze design conversations. Both instruments will be applied to a design conversation sample. TMS offers a diagnostic procedure that is capable of describing the topical structure of a con...

Workspaces provide resources, facilitate (different) modes of working, and communicate an organization’s culture. As such they are a powerful resource to amplify the innovation culture of an organization. Changemakers and leaders of organizations face the challenge to create workspaces that promote innovative activities of teams. Companies too ofte...

This paper introduces the visual coding method Topic Markup Scheme (TMS) that represents the topical structure of a conversation in form of topic threads. TMS works on the level of move­ to ­move conversation analysis. We will define the entity of move­ topics (m-­topic), discuss how they relate to each other and how their relation can be represent...

Design thinking is a methodological approach addressing to solve wicked problems with multidisciplinary and cross-functional innovation teams. A flexible work environment enables innovation teams using this approach to ideate, create and design. This paper investigates the impact of creative environments on team wellbeing and performance as an outc...

With the development of the Knowledge Handling Notation (KHN) we were able to provide a model for a notation that captures modes of knowledge handling and visualizes its dynamics in design conversations. The KHN functions as an interface between transcript and pattern analysis for researchers or coaches who aim at diagnosing knowledge handling in c...

Design Thinking (DT) has proven to be a solid approach to engage in complex and ill-defined problem scenarios. Still, Design Documentation (DD) is a complex and yet essential part of the DT process itself. The setting of DT and its modes of information treatment strongly affect the documentation behaviour and distinguish it from other domains of do...

Design thinking is an approach addressing wicked problems in the age of disruption. A flexible working environment enables the ability of teams to innovate, create and design. This paper outlines the impact of space on the team wellbeing and performance as an outcome of the interaction of team members with their environment. The pilot study used a...

Design thinking is a method of understanding problems and producing innovative, compelling solutions. The problems design thinkers tackle have come to be called “wicked” in the literature. But how does design thinking help to solve wicked problems? This article takes a psychological perspective to analyze the particular challenges wicked problems b...

Innovation is a major priority for organizations: improving existing products, developing new products and services is central to a company’s strategy and performance. However, companies still struggle with how to cope with the innovation challenge beyond incremental improvements and how to deal with complexity, ambiguity, and pace. Finding the rig...

Some widely-used approaches in Behavior Group Therapy bear a striking resemblance to Design Thinking. They invoke almost identical process models and share central maxims like “defer judgement” or “go for quantity”. Heuristics for composing groups (mix!) and preferred group sizes (4-6) are very much alike as well. Also, the roles ascribed to therap...

Der gesellschaftliche Übergang zu einer „anderen“ Moderne ist ein viel beschriebenes und viel zitiertes Phänomen, zumindest in Bezug auf westliche bzw. industrialisierte Länder (Giddens 1990; 1991; Bauman 2000; Harvey 1990; Lyotard 1979: 26 ff.). Charakterisiert wird diese Entwicklung durch die Liberalisierung von engen traditionalen sozialen und g...