Accessing Highly Effective Performative Patterns

Design Thinking is undergoing an exciting and critical transformation. Ad hoc content and practices, based on anecdote and experience, are being displaced by new content and practices grounded in empirical evidence and rigorous theory. To bring this new knowledge to both designers and design teams, a new approach to design instruction is required. The radical point of view of our research suggests that the work of design teams is a performative act (designing-as-performance) and that design sessions are a performance of a corpus of behaviors that constitute much of the practice of Design Thinking. Furthermore, this corpus of behaviors can be trained and learned in the form of a skills repertoire called performative patterns. Performative patterns function a shared model of action and reflection which provide structure for previously undefined content (Edelman 2019). This new approach to design education involves not only the intellectual task of designing and understanding theory but a phenomenological practice of perception-action loops between the body, the environment in which the team is situated and the artifacts-media with which the team interacts. Research-based training packages promise to provide both sound theory and highly effective performance patterns which together constitute a basis for excellence in team-based design.