Being a professional: Three lenses into design thinking, acting, and being

This paper presents three lenses for interpreting design thinking: a framework on learning to become professionals, and two interpretations of this framework that speak broadly to aspects of ‘design thinking’. The first lens draws on a framework for ‘an embodied understanding of professional practice’ and provides a way to describe how professionals form and organize their knowledge and skills into a particular ‘professional-way-of-being’. The second and third lenses provide examples of using this framework to interpret existing results from phenomenographic studies on ways of experiencing design and ways of experiencing cross-disciplinary practice. We conclude with a discussion of how these three lenses contribute to a working synthesis of design thinking and learning.

► We examined activities of designers through a becoming a professional framework. ► Phenomenography was used to analyse data on experiences of designing and cross-disciplinary practice. ► Critical variations in design and cross-disciplinary practice were identified as ways of thinking, acting, and being.