Design thinking: lost and found
Breaking out of the linear process
One of the main driving force behind user experience and most of design as we know it today is design thinking. Design thinking is about understanding user needs and creating solutions to peoples problems through products or services — whilst also understanding technology and the needs/goals of the business. This method encourages us to fail early and learn fast, it’s pretty sound.
But the jury is out. Design thinking has it’s critics and this post, which started as a point to claim how it fails, actually has turned out to argue that it is our understanding of design thinking that fails us rather than design thinking itself.
I started with why design thinking is so widely criticized as a process. I just did not understand. We are talking about a way of thinking that *guarantees to get you closer to users, fill your belly with insights and then design the next thingy thing.
It’s a buzzword, it’s a phrase that gives steakholders your vote of confidence, it’s what ever people have wanted it to be as of late.
But to make generalisations that sum up design thinking as a process of hexagons, arrows and post it’s is a grave misunderstanding of how powerful this tool has actually been in design over the last ten years.
I personally have no issue with buzz words if they help a community of creators speak the same language and create mutual understanding. — Richard Banfield
Design thinking in my opinion and in the eyes of many others has been largley very successful. It has become the framework for culture shifts within companies, it has been used as a tool for research and now it is widely understood to be a part of most design centred approaches to problem solving.
Then how could it fail?
I mean, pictures full of hexagons or circles in a linear line, even if it was to make it clearer, certainly do not help it’s credibility as an iterative process.
We are taught that design thinking is an iterative process from the start yet most projects you will work on as a professional do not have a ‘start’. Instead every project has a different angle to work from and because design thinking has become so obsessed with the ‘process’ we fail to see the ways in which we can use it as a tool to help us realign a project.
Design thinking has not only just started being lost in translation, I think the meaning of it has struggled to grasp a hold for a longer time than we think. There is a lack of progression for the way we see design processes, tools or approaches and the misunderstandings of design thinking show that.
Perhaps, as we become disillusioned with design thinking and it’s promises we can take it’s premise and articulate it in a new way, a way that is progressive and brings us to the state of design today. Realigning design thinking as a tool rather than an ‘iterative’ process might be a start but I believe something much bigger is needed to fix it.
