Design thinking of yore

This reflection is about the historical misalignment of Design Thinking with the development of Design and Design Theory. The main point I present is that initial conceptualizations of Design were very attuned to current common topics such as collaborative design, interdisciplinarity, and holistic design. These topics were rebranded into a process and popularized by organizations from a wealthy and influential portion of the world for their own benefit — and profit.

In the beginning, there was the Bauhaus, the first Design school, even though Design didn’t exist as a term. Its founder, Walter Gropius, often referred to the Gesamtkunstwerk, which can be translated as the total work of art, universal artwork, synthesis of the arts, all-embracing art form or total artwork. Gesamtkunstwerk is a work of art that makes use of all or many art forms. The term is a German word that doesn’t translate to other languages well and has come to be translated into English as aesthetics (a set of principles underlying and guiding the work of a particular artist or artistic movement.) I personally think total artwork is the best translation. The ultimate goal of the educational program developed by Gropius and other professors (artists, psychologists, engineers) at the Bauhaus was to form designers capable of engaging in collaborative work to build the Gesamtkunstwerk or the total artwork.

Let me give you some more background. The Bauhaus school was established in Germany in 1919 by Walter Gropius. The school specialized in design, art and craftsmanship. Gropius believed that artists and architects should also be craftsmen, that they should have experience working with different practical techniques, artistic mediums, and disciplines, such as industrial design, architecture, fashion and theater and music. An important part of the initial vision of the BAUHAUS is that Gropius did not see an artifact — or every aspect of its design — as being the work of a single hand. As described in the original manifesto written by Gropius, “Bauhaus strives to bring together all creative effort into one whole, to reunify all the disciplines of practical art — sculpture, painting, handicrafts, and the crafts — as integral components of a new architecture. The ultimate, if distant, aim of the Bauhaus is the unified work of art — the great structure (the total artwork) — in which there is no distinction between monumental and decorative art.” Missing from that statement are disciplines that are a big part of design nowadays, such as ethnography and anthropology. These disciplines, along with psychology, mathematics and systems engineering were brought later to the curriculum in other schools, most prominently the Ulm School of Design.

Nowadays, as designers have taken on larger, more complex, and more technically challenging projects, it’s become evident that they need a greater understanding about — how things and people work and their connections. This is true at a general level (how culture works, how people act, how infrastructure works) as well as at an atomic level (how perception works, how working memory works). Unfortunately, both the large and the small bits of human behavior and earth sciences and physics are difficult to fit into a design curriculum, and they are typically excluded in favor of traditional “design” skills (typography, color theory, 2D design, product design — 3D). It is argued by Design Thinking ‘experts’ that a designer should be a generalist of the world, knowing a bit about everything. This concern is not new, the Bauhaus and the Ulm School of Design went through various iterations in its curriculum because of this. For example, after the introduction of systems engineering and advanced optics studies (physics) at Ulm, students organized protests, asking for more courses on “things that they would actually use in the real world.” The right balance between applicable technical skills and foundational knowledge has yet to be found in Design and Design related programs such as HCDE.

For the present-day designer, Don Norman argues that: “New skills are required, especially for such areas as interaction, experience, and service design… [These] require understanding of human cognition and emotion, sensory and motor systems, and sufficient knowledge of the scientific method, statistics, and experimental design so that designers can perform valid, legitimate tests of their ideas before deploying them… Designers need to deploy microprocessors and displays, actuators and sensors… The old skills of drawing and sketching, forming and molding must be supplemented and in many cases, replaced, by skills in programming, interaction, and human cognition. Rapid prototyping and user testing are required, which also means some knowledge of the social and behavior sciences, of statistics, and of experimental design.” Sorry Norman but I will have to disagree with you. This is a whole other profession — something I’ve been calling the Scientific Designer, someone who would work at the intersection of Big D Design, Research, and Engineering. Anyways, advocating for new and more formal faculties of thought in design curriculums is definitely not avant-garde and definitely not brought up by the interdisciplinary claims made by Design Thinking.

The term Design Thinking was born in Silicon Valley, at Stanford more accurately, and it was coined by IDEO figures of the likes of Kelley and Brown, who taught design courses at the d.school. This rebranding of old concepts without credit disrespects the work and history of many important, genuinely groundbreaking schools and designers and design educators. As a side note, this tends to be a normal practice here in the United States, the land of marketing. Did you know pineapples are not from Hawaii? Or that hot dogs are not American at all? I’ll throw another handful in the pot: apple pie, democracy, cars, peanut butter, cowboys, blue jeans, the statue of liberty and Justin Bieber. Surprising, huh.

Jokes aside, by turning the design activity into a NIMBY artifact, we fail at bringing real people closer to design, which could ultimately make it a stronger field. You want to learn how to use Design to bring ‘Power back to the people’, as they say in UCD manifestos, only after paying thousands of dollars for a Masters degree at Stanford. I argue that Design Thinking may even generate segregation in design. Some of the techniques are not realistically applicable in a variety of contexts, take prototyping for example. Third-world countries’ citizens don’t have the chance to waste resources to generate critical interventions in the world. Resources as scarce and expensive. When poor individuals do a prototype, they use materials that are really leftovers collected in junkyards or trash — which may even be dangerous.

If you want to rebrand something to make it popular, please do so with important practices, because a shiny design process won’t get you anywhere without good designers. We should strive to educate a new generation of environmentally aware, historically connected, technicality informed designers who can think creatively and work cooperatively on important real-world issues, designing the total artwork of tomorrow.

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