Being a professional: three perspectives on design thinking, acting, and being

The purpose of this paper is to present three perspectives for interpreting design thinking: (1) an alternative framework on learning to become a professional, and (2) two interpretations of this framework that speak broadly to a topic of “design thinking”. The first perspective draws on a framework for “an embodied understanding of professional practice” that focuses on the ways professionals form and organize their knowledge and skills into a particular “professional-way-of-being”. The second and third perspectives provide examples of using this framework as a lens for interpreting existing results from phenomenographic studies on ways of experiencing design and ways of experiencing cross-disciplinary practice. We conclude with a discussion of how these three perspectives contribute to conceptualizing a working synthesis of design thinking.