Introduction

Several years ago, and in conversations with fellow academics from the international community of design thinking researchers, we began to formulate the idea of providing a way of facilitating research collaboration and communication through sharing a common research dataset. We would invite internationally leading researchers to make use of the same dataset, share their findings with each other and at a workshop, subject their work to critical scrutiny by peers who were familiar with the same dataset, and produce a book from the results. The idea of distributing a dataset for analysis by researchers interested in design thinking had proved very successful in 1994 when Nigel Cross, Kees Dorst, and Henri Christiaans filmed designers at Xerox PARC to gather recordings of design problem solving behaviour in a laboratory setting. This data was distributed for wider analysis to test the potential (and limitations) of protocol analysis ¹ . Indeed, the findings from that project, presented in the Delft protocols workshop, remain something of a landmark in design thinking research and we felt the time was right, 10 years on, to try and match this achievement by revisiting the shared data approach. Our conversations struck a chord, and this book is one of the outcomes of the project which has unfolded.