Even though disciplines that are not traditionally affiliated with design have started to show interest in design thinking such as business, education, healthcare, engineering, and IT (Clark and Smith, 2008; Cross, 2007, 2011; Dorst, 2011; Finn Connell, 2013; Lawson, 2004, 2006; Owen, 2007; Razzouk and Shute, 2012) design thinking studies has tended to focus on limited design disciplines such as architecture, engineering design, and industrial design and there are not enough studies to prove that designers in different design fields perform design processes as design thinking literature proposed (Kimbell, 2011). This qualitative study explores the design process of professionals from different design disciplines, in order to understand the similarities and differences between their process and the design activities proposed by the design thinking literature. Design strategies of experts from different design disciplines were studied and compared, in relation to the activities proposed by the design thinking literature. This basic qualitative study was designed to use semi-structured interviews as the qualitative method of inquiry. This study employed purposeful sampling, specifically criterion sampling and snowball sampling methods. The researcher interviewed nine designers from instructional design, fashion design, and game design fields. A semi-structured interview protocol was developed and participants were asked demographic questions, opinion and values questions, and ideal position questions. Demographic questions provided background information such as education and number of years of design experience for the participants. Opinion and value questions were asked to learn what participants think about the research questions. Ideal position questions let participants describe what good design would be. The researcher analyzed the interview data and the results were reported in a way to demonstrate the differences and similarities within and across disciplines. / Ph. D.

This dissertation is about 'transtructures', a term coined to describe new kinds of infrastructures that are more attentive and responsive to the needs of contemporary society, its emerging economies and technological capabilities. The purpose of this inquiry is to begin to explore the character and possibilities of a design practice that could guide responsibly and ethically the transition of existing industrial infrastructures towards these new configurations: what processes it could follow, and what materials it could include. Through a series of design experiments in the areas of logistics and telecommunications, I started to prototype and develop a programmatic framework for a 'redirective' design practice, which is aimed at engaging publics with infrastructural issues. Design probes and speculative mockups have been employed to express and materialize present and future infrastructural configurations, opening them up to public scrutiny and participation. The premise of this work is fairly simple: if we want to provide more citizen-centered solutions to emerging social demands, we need to explore what changes are possible, and even required, within the industrial systems that currently frame our possibilities for implementing such innovations. Thus, certain design interventions will be necessary to allow people outside these systems to understand and relate to these networks and to identify possibilities for their transformation. The result of this inquiry is the early 'prototype' of what a practice for redirecting and transitioning towards the design of such postindustrial infrastructures could be like. In particular, it exemplifies how design may inquire into the artificial space of industrial infrastructures and explore opportunities for their reconfiguration toward more contextually adaptive forms and functions.

The idea of accounting as a constitutive means, making people think and act in particular ways, is well established in the social strand of accounting literature. In professional organisations, for example, accounting is claimed to be critical to processes of turning people into rational and responsible economic actors. However, this thesis refocuses the empirical attention away from the organisation and into the private sphere of people’s everyday financial lives. As this is a field partly inhabited by people who for various reasons are believed to have difficulty in making sense of financial accounts, a dilemma arises regarding how to influence people’s way of managing their own finances by means of accounting information. How this dilemma is assumed to be resolved in order to make accounting matter is the query of this thesis. Through a study of four cases, the thesis investigates the practices of public authorities, a television makeover show, and a pension insurance company – here referred to as accounting framers – whose task it is to construct accounting in such a way so as to make it come across as important, relevant and useful to various groups of the general public. By examining how people’s accounting interpretations are elaborated in order to make them responsive to financial accounts, the thesis contributes to problematising the constitutive role of accounting and the conditions believed to enable it to turn people into financially responsible actors.

Though the topic of learner agency has received relatively little discussion in the literature of educational technology, it is nevertheless a significant and actually omnipresent concern of both scholars and practitioners. Through the journal-ready articles contained herein, I show how theories of learning and certain practices of instructional designers reflect implicit positions on the agency of learners. I also discuss agency in more concrete terms as the responsibility for learning that is shared with learners in instructional design contexts. In addition, I provide practical suggestions to help designers keep the learner at the forefront of their design thinking. Through this research, I hope to make the broad philosophical concept of agency more accessible and practical, and to outline some initial directions for further inquiry and practical application in the field of educational technology.

La globalisation des marchés, la croissance rapide des pays émergents, le défi de la conception durable des produits et services et les besoins des population à bas revenu sont autant d'enjeux qui incitent les entreprises à chercher de nouvelles formes d'organisation et d'innovation y pour répondre. La théorie de la Base de la Pyramide (BoP) s'inscrit dans ce contexte actuel et propose de contribuer à la lutte contre la pauvreté tout en suivant une logique économique. Bien qu'elle soit relativement récente, la littérature sur cette thématique est multiple et s'inscrit aujourd'hui principalement en sciences de gestion et sciences économiques. Les apports dans le domaine de l'ingénierie sont encore assez peu nombreux et de multiples interrogations restent en suspens sur la faisabilité et l'opérationnalité d'une telle approche. L'objectif de ce travail de recherche est de comprendre en quoi les dynamiques d'innovation orientées Base de la Pyramide demandent de repenser les pratiques de conception actuelles, plus particulièrement l'ingénierie frugale. Ce procédé de conception, qui intègre des économies d'usage et de dépense, est exploré comme moyen de concevoir des produits et des services dans le double enjeu de lutte contre la pauvreté et de rentabilité économique. Nos contributions se situent sur deux axes. Le premier s'appuie sur une étude de 215 cas d'innovation BoP relatés dans la littérature pour proposer une catégorisation des stratégies appelées BoP. Cette catégorisation donne lieu à une lecture à multi-niveaux et permet de dégager des constats importants : la difficulté de combiner impact social et impact économique dans une même approche, la dichotomie marquée entre les stratégies de marché et les stratégies inclusives, ainsi que l'existence de multiples contextes BoP qui rend compte d'une tension entre l'assouvissement des besoins (impact local) et la recherche d'un changement d'échelle (impact global). Le deuxième axe de contribution porte sur la conception frugale, prise comme une approche possible orientée Base de la Pyramide. Nous définissons l'ingénierie frugale par la recherche du juste-suffisant entre la proposition d'une valeur essentielle et la recherche d'un bas coût. La proposition de nouveaux concepts, tels que les « Non Trade Off » (éléments non négociables) du processus de conception et l' « Adaptabilité » d'un produit, nous amène à interroger l'unicité de ce juste-suffisant. La valeur essentielle n'est pas un concept absolu et unique, mais se décline en une multitude de valeurs (re)définies par l'appropriation du produit lors de la conception, la fabrication et l'usage. Cette appropriation passe par des stratégies de focalisation sur des fonctionnalités essentielles, de façon à pouvoir répondre à un environnement pauvre en ressources et en infrastructures, réduire les coûts de production et d'assemblage et répondre à un besoin essentiel. La conception frugale s'inscrit alors dans une logique inclusive, où chaque partie prenante de la chaîne de valeur contribue à redéfinir le juste-suffisant d'un produit frugal en fonction du contexte. Ces résultats, issus de terrains empiriques en Inde et au Vietnam, permettent d'insister sur la prise en compte d'éléments de l'environnement contextuel dans la conception. Nous proposons de représenter ces éléments sous forme de Scènes, pour compléter les outils centrés-utilisateurs existants, et contextualiser la réflexion sur la valeur essentielle du produit. Pour conclure, de ces résultats émergent les prémisses d'un modèle ouvert de la conception frugale qui laisserait d'avantage de flexibilité aux populations de la Base de la Pyramide à s'approprier la valeur essentielle du produit conçu. Concevoir des produits ouverts, adaptables à la variabilité des contextes, permet ainsi d'œuvrer pour un développement plus durable. / Globalization of markets, rapid growth of emerging countries, challenges of a sustainable design and needs of low-income populations trigger companies to look for new forms of organization and innovation. The Base of the Pyramid (BoP) theory takes root on these challenges and suggests fighting against poverty while generating economic growth. Although recent, the literature on this topic is diverse and today falls mainly in management and economic sciences. The contributions in the field of engineering design are quite few, and many questions remain on the feasibility and operability of such an approach. The goal of this research is to understand how the dynamics of the BoP-oriented innovation may require rethinking current design practices. We will particularly explore frugal engineering, a design process that enrolls economy of use and expense, as a means to design products and services within the dual challenge of fighting against poverty and economic growth. Our contributions take place in two areas. The first one is based on a review of 215 BoP case-studies related in the literature: the outcome is a categorization of the BoP-called strategies. This categorization allows a multilevel reading that generates significant findings: the difficulty of combining social and economic impacts within the same approach, the dichotomy between market and inclusive strategies, as well as the existence of multiple BoP contexts which reflects a tension between needs' satisfaction (local impact) and economy of scale (global impact). The second area of contribution is about frugal design, taken as one possible BoP-oriented approach. We define frugal engineering as the search for a just-enough between a core value and a low-cost proposition. Our proposition of new concepts, such as the “Non Trade Off” during the design process and the “Adaptability” of the product, leads us to question the uniqueness of this just-enough. The core value is not an absolute concept; rather it comes in multiple values (re)defined during design, manufacturing and use phases of the product life cycle. This appropriation is made by focusing on key features of the product, in order to meet the environment, resource and infrastructure constrained, to reduce production and assembly costs, and to meet an essential need. Therefore, frugal design is incorporated in an inclusive logic, in which each stakeholder of the value chain contributes to redefine the just-enough of the product (and process). These results, obtained by empirical studies in India and Vietnam, emphasize the importance of contextual elements to take into account during frugal design. We propose the Scenes as a new tool for representing these elements. The Scenes complement the existing user-centered design tools, and help to contextualize the discussion on the core values of a frugal product. To conclude, the premises of an open frugal design emerge from this research. Such a model would leave more flexibility to the BoP users to appropriate themselves the product and define their essential values. Thus, designing open and adaptable products is a way to nourish a better sustainable development.

The scenario in which this doctoral thesis is developed is Colombia, a country with almost 50 million inhabitants, considered the third country with better environment for business in Latin America. Colombia has an environment con-ducive to business development, but with a low investment in R&D (Research, Development and Innovation). The investment currently has 0.2% of the GDP, and the typology of companies that make up the Colombian business network are in 99,5% of cases Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME's). This is a challenge for the nation that should consist in increasing the competitiveness of companies to improve economic growth in a new peace scenario. To achieve sustainable development in Colombia, it is necessary for companies to establish innovation strategies that allow them to grow not only in the gener-ation of new products and services, but also in the optimization of processes. The development of competencies in the area of human resources oriented to inno-vation and the proposal of new business models should be the axis that motivate the local economies and in this way that they support the social transformation of the regions of the country. Taking into account this scenario, the challenge of Colombian MSME's is the im-plementation of Design management processes that allow them to become inno-vative companies. In this sense, the ability of Design Thinking as a facilitating tool in the development and implementation of innovation in different compa-nies around the world has been demonstrated. This has been possible thanks to the variety of design-based models that have been created in order to support the development of innovation at all levels. In this thesis, it was evidenced that the innovation processes that employ meth-odologies close to the design not only use the Design Thinking, but that the de-sign process and the traditional design also play an important role in the imple-mentation of the innovation in the companies. There are a large number of methodologies and models based on design process-es that can be understood from Design Thinking, an expression first used by the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University that defines a systemic and integral process based on practices and Methods of design, where creativity is fundamental and innovation is the goal. Its method is based on a deep knowledge of the user, the integration of multidisciplinary profiles, and the solu-tion of the challenges and in the pilot trials of these solutions through proto-types that the same end users test before being produced. After analyzing the following six different models: 1) the Third Hybrid Space, 2) Innovation as a Learning Process, 3) Open Book for Social Innovation, 4) 101 Design Methods, 5) Human-Centered Design, and 6) The Double Diamond, the most suitable was two of them, The Double Diamond and the Open Book for So-cial Innovation, because they work the innovation from the three dimensions of the company: Strategic, Tactical and Operative and each of both from the factors: Innovation, Users, Market and Technology, a qualitative and quantitative analy-sis. At the same time, the set of design methods and methodologies that under the name of Design Practices for Business (PND - Prácticas de Diseño para los Negocios in Spanish) was used as the basis for defining the tools that would be used later in the new model to be created. The Double Hexagon is formulated as a model that, applying the PDN, allows a MSME's to implement innovation as a strategic factor that not only creates an innovation, but also implies that the company becomes an innovative company. / El escenario en el que se desarrolla esta tesis doctoral es Colombia, un país con casi 50 millones de habitantes, considerado el tercer país con mejor ambiente para los negocios en Latinoamérica lo que supone un entorno propicio para el desarrollo empresarial, pero con una baja inversión en I+D+i (Investigación, Desarrollo e Innovación). La inversión presenta en la actualidad un 0,2% del PIB sumado a la tipología de empresas que conforman el tejido empresarial colom-biano con un 99,5% de Micro, Pequeñas y Medianas Empresas (MIPYME). Ello presenta un reto como nación que debería consistir en un aumento de la compe-titividad de las empresas para mejorar el crecimiento económico en un nuevo escenario de paz. Para lograr un desarrollo sostenible en Colombia, es necesario que las empresas establezcan estrategias de innovación que les permita crecer no sólo en la gene-ración de nuevos productos y servicios, sino también en la optimización de los procesos. El desarrollo de competencias en el área de recursos humanos orienta-do a la innovación y la propuesta de nuevos modelos de negocio deben ser los ejes que motiven las economías locales y de esta manera que apoyen la trans-formación social de las regiones del país. Teniendo en cuenta este panorama, el reto de las MIPYPE colombianas es la im-plementación de procesos de gestión de Diseño que les permita transformarse en empresas innovadoras. En este sentido, se ha demostrado la capacidad que tiene el Design Thinking como herramienta de facilitación en el desarrollo e implemen-tación de la innovación en diferentes empresas alrededor del mundo. Esto ha sido posible gracias a la variedad de modelos basados en diseño que se han creado con el fin de apoyar el desarrollo de la innovación a todos los niveles. En esta tesis doctoral se evidenció que los procesos de innovación que emplean metodologías cercanas al diseño no sólo usan el Design Thinking, sino que el pro-ceso de diseño y el diseño tradicional también juegan un papel importante en la implementación de la innovación en las empresas. Existen un gran número de metodologías y modelos basados en procesos de diseño que pueden ser entendidos desde el Design Thinking, una expresión acuña-da por el Hasso Plattner Institute of Design en la Universidad de Stanford que define un proceso sistémico e integral basado en prácticas y métodos de diseño, donde la creatividad es fundamental y la innovación es el objetivo. Su método se basa en un profundo conocimiento del usuario, la integración de perfiles multidisci-plinarios, en la solución de los retos y en el pilotaje de estas soluciones a través de prototipos que prueban los mismos usuarios finales antes de ser producidos. Después de analizar seis modelos diferentes: 1) el Tercer Espacio Híbrido, 2) la Innovación como Proceso de Aprendizaje, 3) el Libro Abierto para la Innovación Social, 4) los 101 Métodos de Diseño, 5) el Human-Centered Design y 6) el Double Diamond desde las tres dimensiones de la empresa: Estratégica, Táctica y Operati-va y cada uno de estas desde los factores: Innovación, Usuarios, Mercado y Tec-nología, se realizó un análisis cualitativo y cuantitativo que facilitó la selección final de dos de ellos como los más idóneos. Paralelamente se definió de manera global el conjunto de métodos y metodolo-gías de diseño que bajo el nombre Prácticas de Diseño para los Negocios (PND) sirviera de base para definir las herramientas que serían utilizadas posteriormen-te en el nuevo modelo a crear. El Doble hexágono se formula como un modelo que aplicando las PDN, permite que una MIPYME implemente la innovación como un factor estratégico, es decir, que no solo haga innovación, sino que sea una empresa innovadora. / L'escenari en el qual es desenvolupa aquesta tesi doctoral és Colòmbia, un país amb quasi 50 milions d'habitants, considerat el tercer país amb millor ambient per als negocis a Llatinoamèrica el que suposa un entorn propici per al desenvolupament empresarial, però amb una baixa inversió en R+D+i (Recerca, Desenvolupament i Innovació). La inversió presenta en l'actualitat un 0,2% del PIB sumat a la tipologia d'empreses que conformen el teixit empresarial colombià amb un 99,5% de Micro, Xicotetes i Mitges Empreses (MIPIME). Açò presenta un repte com a nació que hauria de consistir en un augment de la competitivitat de les empreses per a millorar el creixement econòmic en un nou escenari de pau. Per a aconseguir un desenvolupament sostenible a Colòmbia, és necessari que les empreses establisquen estratègies d'innovació que els permeta créixer no solament en la generació de nous productes i serveis, sinó també en l'optimització dels processos. El desenvolupament de competències en l'àrea de recursos humans orientat a la innovació i la proposta de nous models de negoci han de ser els eixos que motiven les economies locals i d'aquesta manera que recolzen la transformació social de les regions del país. Tenint en compte aquest panorama, el repte de les MIPIME colombianes és la implementació de processos de gestió de Disseny que els permeta transformar-se en empreses innovadores. En aquest sentit, s'ha demostrat la capacitat que té el Design Thinking com a eina de facilitació en el desenvolupament i implementació de la innovació en diferents empreses al voltant del món. Açò ha sigut possible gràcies a la varietat de models basats en disseny que s'han creat amb la finalitat de recolzar el desenvolupament de la innovació a tots els nivells. En aquesta tesi doctoral es va evidenciar que els processos d'innovació que empren metodologies properes al disseny no solament usen el Design Thinking, sinó que el procés de disseny i el disseny tradicional també juguen un paper important en la implementació de la innovació en les empreses. Existeixen un gran nombre de metodologies i models basats en processos de disseny que poden ser entesos des del Design Thinking, una expressió encunyada pel Hasso Plattner Institute of Design en la Universitat de Stanford que defineix un procés sistemic i integral basat en pràctiques i mètodes de disseny, on la creativitat és fonamental i la innovació és l'objectiu. El seu mètode es basa en un profund coneixement de l'usuari, la integració de perfils multidisciplinaris, en la solució dels reptes i en el pilotatge d'aquestes solucions a través de prototips que proven els mateixos usuaris finals abans de ser produïts. Després d'analitzar sis models diferents: 1) el Tercer Espai Híbrid, 2) la Innovació com a Procés d'Aprenentatge, 3) el Llibre Obert per a la Innovació Social, 4) els 101 Mètodes de Disseny, 5) el Human-Centered Design i 6) el Double Diamond des de les tres dimensions de l'empresa: Estratègica, Tàctica i Operativa i cadascun d'aquestes des dels factors: Innovació, Usuaris, Mercat i Tecnologia, es va realitzar una anàlisi qualitativa i quantitatiu que va facilitar la selecció final de dues d'ells com els més idonis. Paral·lelament es va definir de manera global el conjunt de mètodes i metodologies de disseny que sota el nom Pràctiques de Disseny per als Negocis (PND) servira de base per a definir les eines que serien utilitzades posteriorment en el nou model a crear. El Doble hexàgon es formula com un model que aplicant les PDN, permet que una MIPIME implemente la innovació com un factor estratègic, és a dir, que no solament faça innovació, sinó que siga una empresa innovadora. En el segon hexàgon que correspon a l'Apoderament Col·laboratiu es genera de nou una transferència de coneixement i/o de tecnologia que li permet a la MIPIME continuar amb la seua innovació de manera autònoma. / Jiménez Ibáñez, JE. (2017). Análisis y desarrollo de un modelo de tutorización integral basado en el design thinking orientado a la innovación estratégica en empresas colombianas [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/90557 / TESIS