Design is a creative activity and service design is an emerging subject in design. While studies in other disciplines have analyzed the effectiveness of single thinking hats and proved the six-hat thinking technique to be beneficial for developing creativity, De Bono’s ‘six thinking hats’ are composed of six different thinking hats, representing different thinking directions respectively, this paper discusses how thinking set comprised of individual hats coordinates the designer’s designing activities. For that purpose, two studies are conducted. In order to explore the six-hat thinking spontaneously mobilized by expert designers during idea-generation phase of service design, the experts are designing in pairs. The first study, which is based on the “six thinking hats” model, codes the six hats, conducts naturalistic observation of eight expert designers in an interference-free environment, and analyzes their thinking through protocol analysis. The results indicate a certain degree of correlation between six-hat thinking that spontaneously mobilized by expert designers and designing activity in the idea-generation phase. The expert designers form thinking-hat sets during their team conversation that in a way coordinate the pace of design. A second study is conducted to further analyze the thinking-hat set’s coordinating role, and the results show that the effect of six-hat thinking is related with the timing of its engagement. It has a focusing and guiding effect when adopted in the early stage of design, and an effect on the updating, screening and iterating of the design plan when adopted in the middle stage of design. The conclusions of this study can be applied in service design education as it enriches the applications of six-hat thinking technique and can introduce it to the classroom in a more efficient and targeted manner in future design education, offering a new way to improve the students’ designing creativity.

设计是一项创新活动，服务设计是设计中的新兴主题。虽然其他学科的研究分析了单顶思维帽的有效性并证明了六顶帽思维技术有助于发展创造力，但德波诺的“六顶思维帽”由六个不同的思维帽组成，分别代表了不同的思维方向，这本文讨论了由各个帽子组成的思维集如何协调设计师的设计活动。为此，进行了两项研究。为了探索专家设计者在服务设计的想法生成阶段自发动的六顶帽子思维，专家们进行了成对设计。第一项研究基于“六个思考的帽子”模型，对六个帽子进行了编码，在无干扰的环境中对八位专家设计人员进行自然观察，并通过协议分析来分析他们的想法。结果表明，由专家设计师自发动员的六顶帽子思维与创意产生阶段的设计活动之间存在一定程度的相关性。专家级设计人员在团队交谈中形成思想帽，以协调设计的步伐。进行了第二项研究以进一步分析思维帽集的协调作用，结果表明六帽思维的效果与其参与的时间有关。在设计的早期阶段采用它具有集中和指导作用，而在设计的中期阶段采用它对设计计划的更新，筛选和迭代具有影响。