Author: Lilia Valieva

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.