Professor Nathan Crilly’s book ‘Design thinking and other approaches’ focuses on what people from different disciplines bring to problem solving and creative work.
People from different backgrounds (such as design, engineering and computer science) see things in different ways. This influences the problems they identify and the ways in which they address those problems.
Professor Nathan Crilly
The publishers are offering a two-week open-access period from 29th April 2025 - 13th May 2025.
Nathan wrote the book after 20 years researching the work of designers, including how they identify, re-frame and solve problems. “There has been a growing interest in the idea that how designers approach problems is something that everyone can learn from. This approach is often called ‘design thinking,’ and focuses on practices such as understanding the people you are serving, visualising and prototyping your ideas, and making iterative progress.”
Design thinking is one of the skill-sets that Nathan supports professionals to develop in the Cambridge Advance Online course on “Creativity, Problem Solving and Design Thinking”. The course has successfully delivered training to hundreds of professionals who work across many sectors, including innovation, policy, law and management. Beyond design thinking, that course also includes approaches such as systems thinking and entrepreneurial thinking, and this was the inspiration for the research that went into the book.
“At first, I just wanted a simple way to explain to learners how design thinking, systems thinking and entrepreneurial thinking are related. These approaches aren’t the same as each other, but they also overlap, so I thought I’d find a diagram that explains this. When I couldn’t find what I wanted, I started to research the relationships between these approaches but also other approaches. It was clear that all these approaches are most often considered separately, even though they have a lot in common.”
Video above: Nathan presenting the research behind his book as a keynote speaker at the 4th International Conference of Possibility Studies (Cambridge, July 2024) “Exploring the relationships between design thinking, systems thinking, entrepreneurial thinking and other disciplinary approaches.”
Although 'design thinking', 'systems thinking', and 'entrepreneurial thinking' are well-recognised as contributing to creative work, there are also other useful approaches to draw from. These other approaches include 'engineering thinking', 'computational thinking', 'scientific thinking', 'mathematical thinking', 'geographical thinking', 'historical thinking', 'anthropological thinking' and many more. However, these approaches are often taught and applied separately, which obscures what is distinctive about each of them, but also how they overlap. The book argues that these forms of thinking should not be understood in isolation but instead in relation to each other. This is because they can all help us to identify, understand and solve problems.
As Nathan says “These disciplinary approaches aren’t just important in practice, they are also important to education. Something like a degree course in Engineering is full of subject-specific content (mathematics, structures, materials, etc.) but students are also developing approaches that are applicable well beyond the boundaries of the discipline. This engineering approach might include skills such as problem decomposition, critical thinking and assumption checking. It’s valuable for students to learn about these more general skills they are gaining. In multi-disciplinary collaboration, it’s also useful to appreciate what everyone is bringing to the table: not just the subject-matter associated with their disciplines, but also the more general approaches they can offer.
Nathan Crilly (BEng, PhD) is Professor of Design in the Engineering Department at the University of Cambridge. He graduated with a Bachelors Degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Southampton in 1999, and completed his PhD in design research from the University of Cambridge in 2005. Nathan was appointed as a University lecturer in Engineering Design in 2007. He researches human behaviour as it relates to design, creativity and innovation. Nathan is the academic Lead for the Cambridge Advance Online course on “Creativity, Problem Solving and Design Thinking”.
Nathan has created an Interactive visualisation of the relationships between four disciplinary approaches for exploring the relationships between certain descriptions of design thinking and other approaches - an experiment in trying to make such comparisons navigable.
