Comparison of the Five Discourses of Designerly ThinkingThe five discourses of designerly ways of thinking can be compared as in Table 1. An argument could be made for collapsing these five discourse streams into three: creating a single practice-based approach by combining the frameworks of Schön, Buchanan, and Lawson and Cross, and placing ‘designerly thinking in practice’ in contrast to the rationalized, systematic study of design by Simon, and the meaning-creation of Krippendorff’s hermeneutic approach. We prefer treating the practice-related approaches as three different discourse streams, based on the level of theo- retical focus: Schön examines the designer’s reflection-in-actions of problems encounteredin practice from an objective stance, theorizing ‘about’ the practice. Buchanan examines the nature of the problems themselves, and the designer’s use of placements as ‘tools’ to intuitively or deliberately shape a design problem, while Lawson and Cross’s empirically-based studies focus on the designer’s specific aware- ness and abilities. We suggest that further theoretical investigation is needed to connect the three approaches in a meaningful and coherent manner.Design scholars continue to discuss theoretical developments in the leading design journals, with one or two articles a year, out of a total of about 50 articles a year, and more infrequent articles in other journals and conference papers. Different theoretical perspectives have been used in research into designerly thinking: one stream of articles dis- cusses research through protocol analysis to catch the ways designers are making sense of their own working processes (Galle & Kovács, 1996; Ho, 2001); another examines methods for teaching designerly thinking to design stu- dents through normative decision-based pro- tocols (Leong & Clark, 2003; Oxman, 2004). In conceptual research, Liu (1996) followed the neo-positivistic tradition and considered designing as a combinational search based first on Simon’s model, and then on Schön’s ways of seeing, while Louridas (1999) drew on Schön’s reflective practice, but also hinted towards a meaning-making perspective. In general, there has been a move towards the hermeneutics and practice perspective. We now return to the management focused and more popularized discourse.