Crucial Actions in Design, Coping with critical situations: Taking a Lean Thinking perspective

This doctoral thesis proposes ways for the translation of the Lean Thinking (LT) into design practice and research, taking the LT concepts as dimensions to study designers’ behavior across design disciplines. Lean Thinking has its roots in manufacturing, however, as a philosophy of guiding principles of Value creation, LT has been applied to a large variety of processes, people and organizations. Despite the implementation success achieved in several fields of practice and research, the translation of LT Principles to design has several problems to overcome. But as a motivational framework LT provides concepts, which are relevant to the design activity and in particular to the assessment of designers’ behavior and performance. This research takes the LT perspective, adopting the concepts of Lean Principles, such as Value and Flow, and the concept of MUDA (the Japanese word for waste) for studying designers in the context of interaction with stakeholders in design and product development processes. As in the design activity, Value is not completely defined in the beginning of the Value creation process, this thesis claims the importance of adopting Lean Principles within crucial actions for an effective Value definition. The empirical part of this research comprises of case studies in five design disciplines. Based on these studies, the translation of the Lean Principles and MUDA in design leads to categorization systems and to the concept of critical situations. Results integrate a framework of awareness to critical situations and crucial actions in design. This thesis proposes a motivational approach for designers that help them improve performance in Value creation. The framework of awareness provides a meta analysis and challenges designers and developers to reflect upon their thinking and acting and on what prevents them from changing behavior to reach an effective performance. The use of the framework in practice might improve designers’ and developers’ adaptive behavior and so contribute to professional competence and education.