Design Thinking as Knowledge Work: Epistemological Foundations and Practical Implications

This paper argues that knowledge work and design thinking represent different approaches to problem-solving based on fundamentally different epistemologies: a rational, analytic—or “intellectual”—approach, versus an interpretive, emergent, and explicitly embodied approach. While problems to be addressed may be of similar, overlapping, or completely different character, knowledge-intensive firms and design firms have different perspectives for framing problems and different processes and resources at their disposal for solving problems. By comparing the two perspectives on problem-solving and highlighting their different epistemological roots and research traditions gaps where the two perspectives could cross-fertilize each other, for researchers as well as practitioners, are revealed.