Design thinking is about “thinking”, not about “design”
I recently came across Natasha Jen’s “Design thinking is bullsh*t” conference talking. I was blowed away because for years, I wanted to say something like this but didn’t know how. I posted it into my social network without hesitation. Not surprisingly, it caused some debates between my designer friends.
So I think, maybe it is the time to finally activate my Medium account to write something😉.
Well, first thing first, IMO,
Design thinking is NOT bullsh*t
What is Design Thinking?
Design Thinking has become such a hot topic on Medium and the design community. Everyone seems to be fascinated about it and want to apply it into our daily working. But what Design Thinking really is?
As Don Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things wrote,
“Designers don’t try to search for a solution untile they have determined the real problem, and even then, instead of solving that problem, they stop to consider a wide range of potential solutions. Only then will they finally converge upon their proposal. This PROCESS is called design thinking”
Also as shown on the IDEOU website,
“Design thinking is a PROCESS for creative problem solving.”
Not saying that they are unimportant, but if you remove all the noises here and simplify it to extreme, you can find out that, Design Thinking is a PROCESS.
Design Thinking is a PROCESS.
It’s just a process, a way of doing things. It is a good process though, to help you clear your minds and think about problem solving in creative ways.
However, it doesn’t make you more creative by applying design thinking itself. You get more creative by practicing and getting experience from all of your design activities, design thinking is just one of them.
The Power of Design Thinking
Let me share a real story with you.
I was hired by IBM couple of years ago, and the first day I came onboard and tried to setup my IT stuff, I was shocked by the email system they were using. It’s IBM Notes (previously Lotus Notes, which I only heard in history books and thought it had already R.I.P. decades ago.)
I used to complain a lot about how disappointing Outlook was on Mac (and it still is), but since then I had to look at the life-long launch screen, the tiny small, non-retina texts, super slow loading and scrolling performance of Notes, I missed Outlook so much. It almost felt like I had always been in the heaven without knowing it till one day I reached the hell.
But I wasn’t hopeless. As it is well known, IBM is (one of) the biggest design thinking players in the industry, for sure it had already noticed this issue. As a matter of fact, there was a large poster right in front of the company’s reception desk, advertising the amazing, design thinking driven, all-new email system, IBM Verse (forgive me for not remembering the name of it, took me a while to google it out 😂).
As shown on the poster, it appeared to be a really exciting new way of emailing, lots of innovations had been considered and added to it. It’s going to be an email system you’ve never thought about. Well I know ad is ad, but really it sounded quite promising and I was hoping to get access to it as soon as possible.
It takes time for such a giant company to deploy the new system to all its employees. So I had to wait for couple of months to be able to use the new system, which was quite understandable.
I tried my best to live with Notes for couple of months, and finally, it was my turn to switch to the new system. WOW! I think, time to say goodbye Notes, my new bride is here 🎉🎉🎉🙈😎😜😋
And guess what? I decided to go back to Notes in another two months 💔.
Here is another story.
A project was kinda reborn with new investments. So a new team was set up to create yet another amazing solution. To achieve that, the team gathered together to run a week-long Design Thinking workshop, believing that it was going to clear things out so that the team could roll out the product in the next couple of months.
The workshop itself ran perfectly, there was a good facilitator organizing the workshop, everyone was quite engaged to do the step-by-step excises.
Like a typical workshop, it started with understanding users. Everyone writes their understandings of users and combined you get an empathy map like this.
In the manual book it says, “everyone knows something about your users”. Well, it is probably true if you’ve been in the project for a while, or it is just some common situations you’d easily imagine. But if it is a professional domain and you had no experience of it, do you really understand your users?
In this case, in later conversations between the team members, it turned out that no one had ever used the existing product and no one even knew who’s using it. Yet the team was sitting in a room for a whole week trying to create a solution for them.
You need to do your homework!
“OK, I get it, so you are saying in your way that Design Thinking IS bullish*t?”
Hmm.. Not exactly what I’m trying to say.
What is Wrong with Design Thinking?
I like the workshops as much as most of the other folks. It helped me solving lots of problems and design challenges. However, every time we started a DT workshop, I’d like to emphasize that,
Just as mastering Photoshop doesn’t make you an artist, running design thinking workshops isn’t going to solve your problems automatically.
Lots of DT workshop facilitators would say that, “design is not JUST about drawing a nice picture…” It is very much the truth, and it is a very good statement to start the workshop, especially with lots of non-designers participating, but what people usually tend to neglect, is that,
Drawing a nice picture is still a big part of the design.
At the end of the day, someone still need to sit down and open Photoshop (or Sketch, or anything else, doesn’t matter) to create the design piece by piece. If this person sucks, best chance that the design will also suck. There’s no magic here.
The problem I noticed, was that people are overselling Design Thinking as if it is a magic pill to solve all your problems, which it isn’t. First you need to make sure you are doing it right, and then you still need a strong team to design and build your product.
In some crazy projects, the team who takes part in the DT workshop, is not even the same team who designs and builds the product.
Design Thinking (sometimes) fails because people are too lazy, trying to follow a certain format to find out the answers automatically. There is no format here, every problem is unique. Design Thinking is not your ultimate way of solving problems, it has (lots of) flaws. If you use it in the wrong way, it might also hurt you badly.
TL; DR
OK, I’m not a native English speaker and you probably have already got annoyed by the typo, grammar mistakes I made above, but since you’ve made it here. I’ll quickly sum it up:
- Design Thinking is NOT bullsh*t.
- Design Thinking is NOT a magic pill.
- The main word here is thinking, not design. It helps you to think, but it doesn’t generate design for you.
- For really creative people, you may not need it.
