Thinking About Design
Now that Design Thinking hype has deflated, and has maybe taken “design” down with it a bit, I've been reflecting.
You're probably familiar with the rough set of concepts and activities accumulated, codified, and promoted over decades by a variety of individuals and organizations with a variety of agendas. (Not all bad! But the purpose and context of any practice matter.)
The marketing was successful, if you consider the ubiquity of the term and the extent to which so much strategic design got lumped under Design Thinking. The paucity of real-world outcomes, however, has led to a post-hype/post-ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) backlash that contributed to organizations ditching Design in favor of Product, and led to some clients asking me “Is design still a thing?”.
Yes. Yes it is. Design is still a thing. Thinking is also still a thing. Also, empathy. I was never keen on the way designers working for speculative and rapacious corporations banged on about empathy, but I do miss the lip service now that it's gone.
The problem wasn’t the faffing about with Post-It’s, but rather the extent to which Design Thinking was marketed as a general purpose vending machine for human-centered innovation, to the exclusion of more critical, context-sensitive, community-oriented, and, frankly, reality-based, approaches to making intentional, principled, substantive change to material conditions. This was particularly unfortunate in education where too many schools and programs confused a consulting offering for a curriculum or even a field.
Design Thinking as a product itself took off because the mere act of getting managers together across disciplines and departments in one conversation with permission to ask foundational questions and contemplate new ways of doing things was so unusual, it was revelatory. Internal territory battles are such that it often requires a well-compensated outside partner to be a forcing factor and a facilitator. The genuine value and the often undeniable joy of doing this got all bound up with methods and artifacts that maybe aren’t all that in terms of their sheer power. The collaboration is the power.
Unfortunately, innovation is not deterministic and the implicit ethical framework and business analysis are irresponsibly shallow. Without further interrogation, desirable, viable, and feasible can each easily be synonyms for exploitative. You can’t ask “How might we…?” without first asking “What gives us the right…?” If you want to get real wonky about it, to do the thing it promises to do, design needs to problematize the problem, and sometimes this means walking away. Design is fundamentally intention, so doing the wrong thing with greater intention only makes it more wrong.
There’s nothing particularly transformative or humane about reproducing and strengthening harmful systems, or getting into new lines of business that are doomed to fail because they exceed the capabilities, capacity, or true purview of an organization.
Rote adherence to Design Thinking robbed design practice of a strong point of view grounded in critical thinking. We can and should recultivate that even in these chaotic times.
