Abductive Reasoning: A Design Thinking Experiment

Abstract

Design thinking fundamentally relies on abductive reasoning. Diverse thinking types such as divergent thinking, systems thinking, and empathetic thinking have been adopted in design thinking education. Yet, it is very rare to address abductive reasoning to be integrated in a design thinking course because of deductive validity and inductive strength. In practice, the quality of design thinking is judged from design outcomes in terms of creativity and innovation rather than the application of abductive reasoning in thinking that is necessary for educators to develop diverse instructional strategies for design thinking. Through a design thinking experiment where abductive reasoning was structured for groups of students to modify their chosen fairy stories by challenging identified lessons/values/beliefs, we articulated relevant strategies from case analysis. As a result, we discovered the following six strategies for abductive reasoning: questioning on socially given identity; restructuring a hierarchy of values; de‐ and re‐contextualisation; perspective‐taking; being intersubjective through body swapping; and developing imaginative empathy for compassion. The six strategies support pedagogical aspects of design thinking such as collaborative problem‐solving and analytic and empathetic engagement; and thus, design educators can use them in developing instructional strategies to facilitate abductive reasoning in design thinking.

The Digitalization of Studio Practices and Its Impact on the Development of Design Literacy of First-Year Architecture Students

“…Design thinking and designerly ways of knowing have been the topic of numerous studies on the nature of the design process and the cognitive strategies used by designers (Cross, 1982(Cross, , 2001. The design process is initiated with the exploration of ill-defined, ill-structured or "wicked" problems mostly deployed in realworld contexts and continues in a problem-solving mode using cognitive approaches such as framing (Donaldson & Smith, 2017), divergent and convergent thinking (Choi & Kim, 2017), abductive reasoning (Dreamson &Khine, 2022) andreflection-in-action (Schön, 1983). Design is based on an iterative process in which the analysis, evaluation and synthesis phases are intertwined, and new strategies that could lead to the development of alternative solutions to the design problem are employed.…”