Understanding radical breaks

Abstract

In this chapter, the authors propose an empirically supported framework for understanding how small horizontally organized design teams perform radical redesigns or radical breaks. The notion of radical breaks captures what is often thought of as “thinking out of the box”, and reframing problems to find new and unique solutions. A radical break occurs in the course of a redesign when designers make a major departure from the provided artifact. We introduce three imbricated concepts as a mechanism for understanding how design process determines design outcomes: scoping (what designers take to be the task), behaviors (how designers move through the task), and shared media (drawings, prototypes and gestures). Results of an experiment using small design teams in a redesign task suggests six primary modes of “scoping”, two primary modes of design “behavior”, and two primary modes of “shared media”.