The Perils of 'Design Thinking'

https://archive.ph/vRkDq

I had a colleague, an architect deeply soaked in the Design Thinking cool aid, telling me that architecting a single-family house is humankind's most intellectually challenging endeavor because he has to worry about the end users and construction materials that go in ("holistic[TM]"). I asked him if building a space shuttle is easier than building a house, and he genuinely believed that engineers have a far easier (and dumber) time than designers like himself.

This take of designers being superior being to engineers is something I consistently observed among designers over the decade.

Here is a light-hearted video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvU5dmu4sl8

I've spent far too long in the "Design" world (I'm talkikg Design with a capital D).

It's largely an ivory tower ego playground for the financially elite, but with a creative side. It's a lot of relentless self-marketing with a generous helping of whatever buzzwords are in at the moment.

The designers are easy to spot. They wear boldly coloured look-at-me glasses and clothing. It's like a menagerie of rare birds. Find them at international Expos, Bienalles and design festivals (if in doubt, seek out a pavilion).

Their ideas are largely stale and reused. These people are born rich and die rich and affect very little positive change in the time between.

But - remove the glamour and apply design thinking to hard, thankless but important problems and it can be a pretty meaningful and worthwhile profession IMO.

If you want to see designers trying to fuck the world go to the Osaka 2025 Expo where designers are each proposing the next Brazilia City. They want total control over everything all centrally planned. no room for anyone’s individualism except the designer’s

I did not really understand why they use the term 'Design Thinking.' The article did not make it clear to me why they use the product development framework for social problem-solving.

Personally, I like data-driven design. As in: ask a designer why, and you know why this is good or bad design. The 'why' should be linked to real data and decisions based on them.

Is such discussion of such a broad area helpful in anyway other than filling magazine pages?

It's a bit like saying 'language is so damaging, every argument I ever had was a result of language'.

> Design won’t save the world. Go volunteer at a soup kitchen, you pretentious fuck

So things like the cotton gin or Ford's use of interchangeable parts don't count as design or somehow didn't change the world?

How is volunteering at soup kitchens more effective at changing the world than interchangeable parts?

And still yet...are you wanting to change the world for the better?

it assumes the system is already asking the right question. you walk in with sticky notes ,empathy maps ,whatever. but the brief's scoped wrong from the start. you're figuring out how to make the form smoother ,not whether the form even needs to exist. so you end up optimizing bad premises. no amount of ideation fixes that

It's as if people that wanted to accomplish something called their method design, but the people that came after them wanted the design itself to be the achievement. We see this in the developer world, where the goal is not to have working software, but a work of art of engineering that is to be admired by fellow colleagues.

A slight nitpick to the section of Bauhaus - the goal was not industrialization, and in fact in the early days that "group" was completely against industrialization. Gropius was the first director of Bauhaus, but the school existed previously in other forms led by Henry van de Velde, who only left Germany because of WWI and the fact he was Belgian. And in fact, there was a clash in the group already in 1914 at one of their first exhibitions, where one fraction strongly advocated for industrialization and "typed" production. But van de Velde won, and Gropius sided with him. If you visit van de Velde's house, it's clear what he was thinking. The house was designed with his family and his work in mind. In a way that his many children and family could live there and he would have his space and peace and quiet to work. So the idea was to have living conditions adapted to the needs of the people, but it's clear that without industrial scale it would only be available to the rich. But still, "form follows function" is not necessarily industrial. Van de Velde's house is classical in appearance, but still the starting point was function not form.

Such a dumb position. Every discipline has projects that don't succeed. What about when engineers use both metric and imperial measurements while engineering a space probe.

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This looks to me like a profession which is overstepping its bounds. The trap seems to be in the "form follows function" motto. It shouldn't mean that designers have a word to say about how things function.

TFA: > The solution, though, isn’t to stop trying to change the world. What could a more beautiful, user-friendly, accessible, and egalitarian society look like?

That absolutely is not a job for a designer. Anything about how society works is politics. If a a designer suggests things in this area, they are not designers, they are politicians. TFA notes that en passant as well: Lyons and Ideo didn't have a design problem, but a political problems.