Thanks for this. I’ll admit that I’ve often thought of Design Thinking as bullshit, and a fair amount of practitioners don’t help this by using very buzzword-laden text. However, I think visual designers like me and Natasha have a harder time working with this because a huge part of what’s valued in visual design is aesthetics, and this is what having your finished work on the walls and having a workplace crit by your colleagues is supposed to enhance. A basically elitist aesthetic standard that wins design awards and wows clients.
Sure, you might get feedback on the user experience or technical issues, but unless you’re designing products for designers, the chance of people’s feedback on these issues being relevant and not just random bias is pretty low, no matter how experienced the design team.
All too often, visual design is seen as a conflict between low-class clients who have no taste for good design work and the put-upon designers who’re working for them.
What’s striking about Natasha’s argument is that it’s largely bullshit itself. She demands proof, but supplies none herself beyond ‘real designers use their intuition and don’t come up with lame obvious solutions’. That’s not a process, it’s an oracle. Some of her examples, such as the architectural models on display, are in fact precisely what she claims Design Thinking lacks, design artifacts that demonstrate a step of the design thinking process (in this case, prototyping forms). And, as you note, she skips over two aspects of the design thinking process. First, feedback is built into every step of the system because all decision makers are supposed to be included, so if everything goes smoothly, there’s no need for the adverserial crit or milestone presentation to clients until the end of the cycle, when you have real data from a prototype and it’s not just ‘I don’t like it, make it blue’. Secondly, there’s far more opportunities for gathering real user/business evidence in the design thinking process than there is in a less structured design cycle and making sure non-designers see how decisions were made and feel like they can add their own ideas.
To sum up, I pretty much agree with you — Design Thinking isn’t a magical fix all, and it’s sometimes simplified to the point of BS, but for more risk-averse, conservative organisations that often have deeply siloed departments, it’s a great first step to thinking about improving their offering.
