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History of the Design Thinking Research Symposia
Overview
The series of Design Thinking Research Symposia has produced a substantial set of publications in books and journals, with significant research results, and has helped to foster an international community of scholars and researchers focused on design cognition. Looking back to the first workshop in 1991, it is perhaps difficult to recall just how little ‘research in design thinking’ was going on then, compared with today.
Throughout the series of symposia the workshop format has been found to be a successful way of synthesising the contributions of an international community, of reporting current work, and of identifying and promoting necessary further research.
The DTRS has no constitution or official membership. Instead it is a loosely organised and ever-changing group of people that share a common research interest in design thinking. A DTRS committee has been formed that includes all organisers of DTRS meetings.
DTRS1: Research in Design Thinking
(1991) TU Delft, The Netherlands
The series was initiated by Nigel Cross with Norbert Roozenburg and Kees Dorst at Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, in 1991, with what was initially expected to be a one-off international meeting on ‘Research in Design Thinking’. But the content and format of that meeting were felt by the participants to be so good as to warrant additional symposia.
DTRS2: The Delft Protocols Workshop
(1994) TU Delft, The Netherlands
The second meeting, organised by Nigel Cross, Kees Dorst, and Henri Christiaans, required participants to analyse the same dataset. The data were videos of designers solving design problems. The symposium thus focused on the use of protocol analysis as a research tool for analysing design activity.
DTRS3: Descriptive Models of Design
(1996) Istanbul, Turkey
The third meeting, organised by Omer Akin, was held at the Istanbul Technical University, Turkey, in 1996. The theme of Descriptive Models of Design drew a wide variety of papers from a number of disciplines. Many participants had attended DTRS2 but there were a significant number of participants new to DTRS.
DTRS4: Design Representation
(1999) MIT, Boston, US
The fourth meeting, organised by Gabriella Goldschmidt and Bill Porter was held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, USA, in 1999, on the topic of Design Representation. Again the theme attracted a lot of interest necessitating parallel streams for presentations. It was there that the informal group of DTRS organisers introduced the term ‘Design Thinking Research Symposium’ as the generic title for the series.
DTRS5: Designing in Context
(2001) Delft, The Netherlands
The fifth meeting, organised by Peter Lloyd and Henri Christiaans, was again held in Delft, in 2001. This time the theme was Design in Context and looked at the various environmental influences on design thinking. The symposium reverted back to a workshop format using discussants for serious discussion of every paper presented.
DTRS6: Expertise in Design
(2003) Sydney, Australia
The most recent meeting was organised by Nigel Cross and Ernest Edmonds at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia, 2003. The meeting returned to somewhere near the focus of the original meeting in Delft in 1991, on the nature and the nurture of expert performance in design. This sixth symposium brought together a relatively small, international group of active researchers for a workshop meeting to review the state of the art and to report recent work.
Page Last Updated: 16 August, 2006
