42 © 2013 Massachusetts Institute of Technology DesignIssues: Volume 29, Number 2 Spring 2013 Design Thinking Support: Information Systems Versus Reasoning Pieter Pauwels, Ronald De Meyer, Jan Van Campenhout Introduction Numerous attempts have been made to conceive and implement appropriate information systems to support architectural design- ers in their creative design thinking processes. These information systems aim at providing support in varying ways: enabling designers to make diverse kinds of visual representations of a design, enabling them to make complex calculations and simula- tions that take into account various relevant parameters in the design context, providing them with relevant information and knowledge from all over the world, and so forth. Despite the con- tinuing efforts to develop these information systems, they still fail at this point to provide essential support in the core creative activi- ties of architectural designers. Seeking to understand why an appropriately effective support from information systems is so hard to realize, we began to look into the nature of design thinking and on how reasoning processes are at play in this design think- ing. Our investigation suggests that creative designing rests on a cyclic combination of abductive, deductive, and inductive reason- ing processes. However, traditional information systems typically target only one of these reasoning processes at a time, which might explain their limited applicability and usefulness. As research in information technology increasingly targets the combination of these reasoning modes, improvements in design thinking support by information systems might be within reach. Information System Support for Design Understanding how an information system can provide support in the design process requires sufficient understanding of how design thinking occurs in this process. Constructing such an understanding has been the goal of many research initiatives dur- ing previous decades. Several appropriate overviews are available that describe the historical evolutions in these research initiatives and their outcomes. 1 We elaborate here on some of the key points in this domain of research, focusing on the theories outlined by Nigel Cross, Bryan Lawson, Donald Schön, and Herbert Simon. Central elements in these theories are (1) the intensive interaction 1 See Nigan Bayazit, “Investigating Design: A Review of Forty Years of Design Research,” Design Issues 20, no. 1 (2004): 16-29; Nigel Cross, “Forty Years of Design Research,” Design Research Quarterly 1, no. 2 (2007): 3-5.