1. Figure out your learning type

Something we never learn in school is how people learn and that everyone has a preferred way of learning, called learning style. If you are like me, you might learn easier through conversations or drawing than reading, for others it might be the opposite. So, before you even continue to read, find out how you learn best, since this will save you a lot of time! After you found out how you learn best, pick an appropriate media format from the outset (audio, video, conversation with an expert or colleagues, writing …).

2. Start with Wikipedia!

This might sound quite obvious to some, but I never thought about it, CHECK WIKIPEDIA FIRST! This is for three reasons. First of all, it gives you a good and comprehensive introduction into the field. Second of all, it provides you with further references, that most of the time represent the basic literature on any given topic. Third of all, it will help you to get a better understanding of terminology you might not yet know, since specialized literature will most likely require a certain pre-understanding.

3. Identify the most important sources

Sometimes you might wonder where to start and the wikipedia might not help at all. If so, there are a couple of things you can do to get a basic understanding and further references fast:

a) Interview an expert. This can be done via email or by talking to a professional such as an professor or teacher. Try to specify your questions upfront and ask for further, basic or introductory (reading) material as well as author names for further refference.

b) Post a question like “Can someone explain to me …” in an appropriate group on twitter, facebook or linkedin. Make sure that you use the search function before you post, since people might get annoyed if a basic question is posted for the 10th time. In general, social networks can also be used to identify experts for later interviews.

c) Use google scholar or another database to find the most cited work upon a topic. Although this might not always be the best solution, since new content is by nature less cited than outdated/older publications.

d) Try google insights for search to find the most relevant articles during the last years.

4. Find the information in a compressed format

Sometimes you might be challenged to read a book. Most often, people don’t even remember half of the content, especially when in a hurry.

One easy way to get most of the content in a short amount of time are summaries. Summaries exist for a majority of most standard works and most often capture the essence of the content. The easiest way to get a summary is by simply typing in the book title in quotation marks and the word summery into the google search field. In addition there are also a number of websites specialized on writing and distributing summaries. One such example is getabstract.com. Although not cheep, these websites are well worth the money if you have to read multiple books and want to get a professional summery (check for the availability of the title first!).

However, if the title is new, you might not find a summary. In this case look at reviews in journals, magazines or on amazon. Although most reviews stick to the basics, they often entail some good thoughts and reflections upon a book’s content, which might be helpful.

In case you can’t find anything, check the author’s homepage or wikipedia page for previous articles, talking about the same or similar topic since they might already outline the most essential thoughts.

Another possibility is to download an audiobook. However, these are not cheep and often take a couple of hours to listen to.

If you are are looking for a summary of a scientific paper, check citations using google scholar, eventually someone has already done the job in their paper.

Although these approaches are NO replacement for reading the whole book, they might help you get most of the content in the least amount of time.

5. Find alternatives

Sometimes you might face articles which are just a headache to understand, poorly written or you simply don’t get them. Or, you simply might not have enough time to read a certain piece of literature.  How ever, if you simply can’t get the content of a written peace of information, there are several alternatives. One simple method is to interview your peers (if you are a student) or people who might have read the article. Another one is to simply search for a presentation. Slideshare, vimeo and youtube are excellent resources when it comes to that and since more and more lectures are recorded, you might also want to try iTunes U.

You might also want to consider this advice if you figured out that you learn much faster though audio or video than through reading.
That is what worked for me. Since I’m always curious on how to improve my ability to learn, please feel free to share your shortcuts.

If you just got started in research on design thinking, you might have got a bit overwhelmed by the literature out there when typing “design thinking” into google scholar. Since I felt similar in the beginning, I thought I should provide some articles that might be considered an introductory read. The material presented in this post is a loose collection of papers around the topic of design thinking providing a basic introduction to the current state of research (Hassi & Laakso, Johannson et al.) and practice (Brown & Martin).

Tim Brown – Design Thinking (PDF) - this almos classic piece, which is often cited, describes the design thinking from consultant perspective. Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO describes his consultancy’s approach and gives some easy to understand examples, along with a definition that he later questioned on his blog. He later published a book, entitled “Change by Design Thinking“, in which he extends on the subject as well as his consultancy’s work.

While Brown describes design thinking from a consultant point of view, Roger Martin (Dean of the Rotman School of  Management) is focusing on “design thinking for managers”. In his publications he advocates that managers should think like designers and that they would benefit from the way designers work. Along with the HBR article of Brown, this interview with  Martin provide a good introduction into the popular notion of design thinking.

The poular notion? Yes, there is a stream in academia that has talked about design thinking since the late 1960is and that has brought forward various theories about what it is, that designers do. Sadly, there is not much new work, that referes to this academic stream of research. While it is crucial to understand these academic contributes – if you want to relate to something a little bit more profound than consultants taking about what they do (in terms of research) – you might want to check a very insightful design thinking literature review by  Johansson, Woodilla & Çetinkaya (2011).

Another, very informative literature review on design thinking in the management discourse was published by Hassi & Laakso (2011) : Conceptions of design thinking in the management discourse. Proceedings of the 9 th European Academy of Design. For their review, the author interviewed a number of people concerned with design thinking and asked them to reference books and articles concerned with design thinking. Based on this sample Hassi & Laakso describe design thinking in a three-dimensional framework divided into: practices (ways of working), thinking styles (cognitive styles and ways of processing information) and mentalities (the mental attitude by individuals and the organizational culture).

Beside these three 3 are numerous interesting articles, taking different perspectives on design thinking, for example: an Article by Beckman and Berry that looks into design (thinking), innovation and learning; a paper bei Seidel & Fixson (2011) who proposed a set of 3 broad methods to characterize design thinking, or a recent paper by Lucy Kimbell on rethinking design thinking, which comes in two parts (2011/2012) .

For those who have already bought into the notion, you might be interested in these more skeptical publications by Bruce Nussbaum (an early promoter) and Don Norman.

I hope this material will help you to get started with researching design thinking. For those who already know this material and feel that there are some essentials that should be mentioned here, please feel free to suggest them below.