What is Design Thinking Anyway?

Roger Martin wrote "What is Design Thinking?"

The article speaks about creating a balance in a composition and using inductive and deductive reasoning.

Deductive logic — the logic of what must be — reasons from the general to the specific. If the general rule is that all crows are black, and I see a brown bird, I can declare deductively that this bird is not a crow.

Inductive logic — the logic of what is operative — reasons from the specific to the general. If I study sales per square foot across a thousand stores and find a pattern that suggests stores in small towns generate significantly higher sales per square foot than stores in cities, I can inductively declare that small towns are my more valuable market.

James, Dewey and his circle became known as the American pragmatist philosophers. Martin speaks of how designers may not realize it but they live in Peirce’s world of abduction; they actively look for new data points, challenge accepted explanations, and infer possible new worlds. There are ways that designers fail to heed Brown’s requirement that the design must be matched to what is technologically feasible, launching products that do not yet have supporting technology. The innovation also must make business sense.