Service design from the perspective of “six thinking hats”: A comparison of storytelling strategies of experts and novices

Abstract

It has been broadly proved that storytelling, which is regarded as a natural creative human activity, serves as an effective thinking tool for improving creativity in service design. In practice, however, the lack of support for storytelling affects the perceived usefulness and ease of storytelling for novice designers. This results in a low willingness to use storytelling, poor usage, and low design innovation among novice designers. Research has identified significant differences between experts and novices in the design process, and summarizing these differences in thinking strategies can effectively guide novices in design activities. In previous research, we have successfully used the six thinking hats for novices to learn expert strategies and enhance their creativity. The purpose of this study is to compare differences between experts and novices in storytelling strategies and design behaviors in process, in order to understand how to support novices in storytelling and enhance creativity. The study uses verbal protocol analysis to explore the differences between three teams of novices and three teams of experts. We use the De Bono's "six thinking hats" thinking tool to decode designers' implicit and latent design thinking and use Burke's "dramatistic pentad" theory to extract the design teams' storytelling thinking. The results show significant differences between experts and novices in storytelling strategy and construction process, where experts tend to have more efficient storytelling strategies and design behaviors than novices. The expert strategies we found can guide design educators to support students when solving service design problems and provide important theoretical support and methodological guidance for instructing novices in expert storytelling strategies.