Month: June 2021

Proponents of Design Thinking claim that institutes, like the Hasso Plattner at Stanford, can be places of real exploration and new forms of teaching and research. However, some educators and designers air an opinion that design thinking has warped into something superficial that has little to do with actual design.

Unexpectedly, in his much-talked-of article Design Thinking is a Failed Experiment, one of Design Thinking’s biggest advocates Bruce Nussbaum, formerly the editor of BusinessWeek, points out that the methodological framework has given the design profession and society at large all the benefits it has to offer and is beginning to ossify and actually do harm. So, what can be wrong with this human-centered approach that is supposed to provide a new generation of designers with problem-solving thinking and unlimited creativity?

In June 2017, the graphic designer Natasha Jen, a partner at the design firm Pentagram, gave a talk titled Design Thinking is Bullshit. Jen explains that Design Thinking takes a thoughtful, complex, iterative, and often messy process and dramatically oversimplifies it in order to make it easily understandable, delivering it as a manufactured series of sterile steps and ignoring the rich set of tools and methods that designers have for doing their work and challenging themselves. According to Jen, “Design Thinking packages a designer’s way of working for a non-design audience by way of codifying design’s processes into a prescriptive, step-by-step approach to creative problem solving — claiming that it can be applied by anyone to any problem.”

This is echoed by Jon Kolko, Partner at Modernist Studio, and the Founder of Austin Center for Design, who is convinced that intellectual design thinking cannot replace but can only support practiced skills in form giving, in iterative prototyping, in design fundamentals like composition, color theory, and sketching, and in creating things that people actually use – i.e. it cannot replace actual ability to design. He recalls that even Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO who popularized design thinking, studied design at both Northumbria University and the Royal College of Art, and worked as a practicing designer. “When we make things—again, the word things is used loosely, applying to both a toaster and a business strategy—we become intimate with details, with material, with complexity, and with simplicity. We iterate and immerse and explore and craft,” Kolko explains.

In the meantime, Design Thinking trivializes the role of craft and making things, which is fundamental to the process of design. Most people practicing popularized design thinking haven’t explored psychology of problem solving, they do not bother with real and meaningful empathetic immersion in the context of social problems and, given their emphasis on innovation, often choose to completely ignore what the university was designed to promote – the past.

This results in a split-off within the design world. While some institutions and firms are driven by practitioners aware of the history of making things and skilled in the craft of making things, others practice design thinking in a dramatically different way – not by making things, but by thinking about them. This, in its turn, leads to the fact that students graduate design-thinking-centric academic programs without the ability to actually design things. Design has its roots in the creation of things, while students of design thinking often don’t have “craft skills.” In his argument against design thinking, Lee Vinsel, Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech, describes how studying design thinking gives students an unrealistic idea of design and the work that goes into creating positive change. “Upending that old dictum ‘knowledge is power,’ Design Thinkers give their students power without knowledge, ‘creative confidence’ without actual capabilities,” writes Vinsel as he unveils that individuals working in art, architecture, and design schools tend to be quite critical of existing Design Thinking programs. Reportedly, some schools are creating Design Thinking tracks for unpromising students who couldn’t hack it in traditional architecture or design programs — DT as “design lite.”

‘Lite’ seems to be a great word to describe many aspects of Design Thinking. Design thinking is often dressed up as fun work, rather the serious kind. What lies underneath is that ideation sessions encourage positive thinking at the expense of critical thinking.

Vinsel insists that the entire model of design thinking is based on design consulting and is just a package sold by consultants and universities. While most proponents of design thinking are impressed by the method’s Empathize Mode, again it is “empathy lite” that is promoted, for a true empathetic and meaningful connection with people cannot be forged in hours or even days. The d.school’s An Introduction to Design Thinking Process Guide describes the Empathize Mode as “the work you do to understand people, within the context of your design challenge,” and this is nothing else than one of the most vital business rules “Listen to your client” in order to understand their problem and discover what they need.

Nussbaum agrees saying that “by packaging creativity within a process format, designers were able to expand their engagement, impact, and sales inside the corporate world. Companies were comfortable and welcoming to Design Thinking because it was packaged as a process”. Design Thinking has become a tool of consultancies to sell work, not to drive real impact.

Thom Moran, an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan, believes that Design Thinking treats design as marketing. “It’s about looking for and exploiting a market niche. It’s not really about a new and better world. It’s about exquisitely calibrating a product to a market niche that is underexploited.”

“In the end, Design Thinking’s not about design,” Vinsel sums up. “It’s not about the liberal arts. It’s not about innovation in any meaningful sense. It’s certainly not about ‘social innovation’ if that means significant social change. It’s about commercialization.”

From this prospective, rolling out the d.school’s model would mean using design consulting as a model for reforming education. In this paradigm, students should be treated as customers, or clients, and educators should make sure our customers are getting what they want. This approach implies that Design Thinking should be a central part of what students learn, so that graduates come to approach social reality through the model of design consulting. In other words, we should view all of society as if we are in the design consulting business, which honestly has little to do with the true meaning of design and innovation.

From Nussbaum’s point of view, Design Thinking from the very beginning was a scaffolding for the real deliverable: creativity. Denuded if the mess and conflict, which are part and parcel of the creative process, in order to appeal to the business culture of process, it fails to deliver. Still, one should not discount contributions of Design Thinking to the field of design and to society at large. It managed to move designers from a focus on artifact and aesthetics within a narrow consumerist marketplace to the much wider social space of systems and society – it made design system-conscious.   The future will show if, supported by applicable craft skills and training, as well as the knowledge of history of making, design thinking could provide a framework in which humanists and scientists could work together on problems that need to be solved, such as climate, food, poverty, health, transportation, or built environments – or it should give way to new paradigms.

For a last few years, Design Thinking has been a buzzword in the world of design. Since design itself is no longer just for physical objects, Design Thinking is being applied to abstract entities, such as systems and services, as well as to devise strategies, manage change and solve complex problems. Some enthusiasts even have been pushing this methodological framework as a way to reform higher education and other fundamental social institutions. However, not everyone feels this way. We explore the value and defects of this engaging way of working.

In its most basic description, Design Thinking is a decision-making method that seeks to understand the user, challenge assumptions, and redefine different issues in the effort to think of alternative solutions that are successful and often creative in unpredictable ways.

Tim Brown, CEO of design consultancy IDEO, best known for pioneering this expanded view of design beyond products, defines it as “a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success”. In this way, the methodical framework product designers have used is applicable to business strategy and complex, multidisciplinary problems.

Today, the technique has proven effective in a much broader context, including transformation of corporate cultures at PepsiCo and Samsung, establishment of new public school systems in Peru, and improving access to economic resources in Mongolia, transportation in India, and community building in low-income neighbourhoods in the U.S.

Design Thinking can be traced back to foundational thinkers like the cognitive scientist and Nobel Prize laureate for economics Herbert Simon and the designer Robert McKim. The architect and urban designer Peter Rowe, who eventually became the dean of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, was one of the first people to popularize the term in his 1987 book, Design Thinking. The 1980s brought the rise of human-centered design and the rise of design-centered business management. While teaching design principles to engineering students at Stanford University, Professor David M. Kelley, founder of IDEO, noticed that the principles he taught were often misunderstood and undervalued. His students complained that graduates with more narrow, specific content knowledge in sub-disciplines, such as electrical engineering or mechanical engineering, seemed to get better starting jobs in industry than those who developed an expertise in complex systems design. His students felt that after mastering the principles of design, they were not “experts” at anything that was valued.  In response to these challenges, Kelley explained that his students were experts in a new way of “thinking”. He called this Design Thinking, and it caught on.

At present, Design Thinking is often associated with the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, or the d.school.  Founded by Kelley at the Stanford School of Design in 2004 as a graduate program that integrates business, the social sciences, the humanities and other disciplines into more traditional engineering and product design, d.school made the development, teaching and implementation of Design Thinking one of its own central goals since its inception.

In 2018 alone, the d.school offered more than 80 courses (most of them oversubscribed), enrolling 1,250 students from all disciplines. Some courses are lectures, others offer bench work or sitting around tables; some are for a full 10 weeks and others, “pop-up” courses, for four weeks or sometimes only for a weekend. All of them are team-taught by up to six instructors from different disciplinary and professional backgrounds, despite the fact that the d.school has no dedicated faculty of its own. All courses involve coursework based on problem solving and are designed for teams of students to work collaboratively to find solutions. While design schools elsewhere emphasize traditional product design, d.school sees its mission “to equip students with a methodology for producing reliably innovative results in any field.”

As the interest in spreading Design Thinking methodology throughout other disciplines is growing, John L. Hennessey, President of Stanford University, asked Kelley to try to find a way to make it possible for all Stanford graduates, not only those interested in design or engineering, to develop a competency in Design Thinking. This resulted in two new classes for undergraduates:  “Designing Your Life,” which aims to help upperclassmen think about the decisions that will shape their lives after graduating, and “Designing Your Stanford,” which applies Design Thinking to help first- and second-year students make the best choices about courses, majors, and extracurricular activities. Both are popular.

The courses offered in DT are quite costly. IDEO’s self-paced, video-based Design Thinking course, “Insights for Innovation” is available for $599, while Stanford’s online 4-day “Design Thinking Bootcamp” is $13,000.

The Design Thinking movement is gaining ground rapidly, and other prestigious universities, business schools and forward thinking companies choose to follow the paths pioneered by IDEO and d.school by adopting the methodology to varying degrees, sometimes re-interpreting it to suit their specific context or brand values. For example, Boston College also received advice to use Design Thinking in a pervasive way. In a series of more recent articles, the Harvard Business Review documents the growing influence of Design Thinking in business and society.

K-12 also follows suit – e.g. Design Tech High School, commonly referred to as d.tech, in Redwood Shores, California, which was funded by the Oracle corporation, focuses on teaching teenagers Design Thinking.

One of the institutions who implement Design Thinking in its curriculum is Olin College of Engineering, a small, new kind of engineering college on the outskirts of Boston. The Olin program is organized into streams interacting with one another, and the design stream is one of them, spanning value creation activities all the way from “opportunity identification and problem framing through detailed design to end of life and closed-loop systems.”  Besides, students also take design courses specific to their area of study by the way, meaning they usually take 8 to 10 design courses in total, far more than a typical engineering program. Thus, students are not just challenged to apply their area of expertise to “design it right,” but also take ownership of figuring out how to “do the right thing” and add value to people’s lives in a meaningful way.

The proponents of Design Thinking believe it is the key to education’s future: it “fosters creative confidence and pushes students beyond the boundaries of traditional academic disciplines.”

The Olin academia finds the effects of the Design Thinking curriculum quite beneficial both for the students involved. Unlike conventional schools where students are “guided” through the well-structured learning process of lectures, homework and exams by an expert “professor,” Design Thinking requires students to take charge of their own learning with minimal instructions.  According to Richard K. Miller, Founding President of Olin, once the students realize that they really have the freedom to shape their learning experience and make real decisions, they usually “respond well to the new experience, even though it often actually results in significantly more work and less certainty about the technical content knowledge gained.”

The emphasis in the d.school and the like is shifted from traditional product design to the process of designing, and further to the process of designing producers, and even people — all with the aim of “social innovation.”

“We build people first, then things,” says Larry Leifer, professor of mechanical engineering and director of the university’s Center for Design Research. For Leifer, the d.school is a kind of anti-university. While traditional universities with their academic disciplines that provide “context-independent knowledge,” the world and its problems are not organized by discipline. In contrast, the d.school learning is context-dependent,” embracing an extradisciplinary (or multidisciplinary) approach and pulling whatever it needs from any discipline in order to solve specific problems.

According to Peter N. Miller, professor and dean of the Bard Graduate Center in New York, this is the essence of this education paradigm. Design Thinking “redescribes the classical aim of education as the care and tending of the soul; its focus on empathy follows directly from Rousseau’s stress on compassion as a social virtue.”

By standing outside the professional structure of the disciplines, such Design Thinking institutions remain free to ask new kinds of cross-disciplinary questions and “follow less-frequented tracks across the intellectual landscape.” As a result they can be more open to divergence and creative work, be places of real exploration and new forms of teaching and research. This, Miller believes, makes Design Thinking similar to the liberal arts, or humanities. Still, where the liberal arts are about problems, he goes on, Design Thinking is about solutions. While liberal arts take the familiar aspects of life and defamiliarize them in the interest of interpretation, Design Thinking takes the complexities of life and simplifies them in the interest of problem-solving.