Tell me, how would you define Design Thinking?

Can you explain the concept in a sentence or two? How confident do you feel in your answer?

Despite the time I spent studying product design at Stanford and working at IDEO, the epicenter of the process, I still have a hard time succinctly explaining Design Thinking. Today, I’d like to come clean and admit that I believe Design Thinking has become a bit of a distraction for the design industry.

Last week, I attended an event for the FastCompany Innovation Uncensored Conference. Over drinks and hors d’oeuvres, I had a stream of people introduce themselves as design thinkers. One of them used so many buzzwords in a sentence that they started lose meaning — “What we do is very user-centered, iterative, Design Thinking, innovation, co-creation…” The folks I spoke with were all consultants: “innovation experts” who must convince people to pay top dollar for them to parachute into the company to scatter a bit of magic innovation dust. Design Thinking may work to explain to business people the value that consultants can bring to an organization, but I don’t think it’s doing many favors for us in-house designers.

Last Friday a young designer stopped by my office for an informational interview. Like myself, she studied at Stanford and learned the canonical Design Thinking (capital D, Capital T) process. Now working with a small startup, she told me of how she’s struggling to balance the tactical projects she’s asked to do (like fixing interactions in an ordering flow) with her belief that the company is fundamentally focused on solving the wrong problems. Her projects generally have short timelines (one or two days) and she’s cut off from any insights from the end users because that research is done on a different team. This young designer was at a loss for what to do. She asked me, “How do you design at your work? Do you actually do the Design Thinking process?”

In speaking with this woman, I realized that the Design Thinking process has some fundamental limitations we designers need to acknowledge. As it is, the methodology has set up a generation of independent and in-house product designers to feel like failures, when we’re actually doing a fantastic job of balancing the needs and demands of our organizations with limited timelines and resources.

The Design Thinking Process is sold as a one-size-fits-all solution. In actuality, it’s a tool for teaching problem solving that’s effective in educational settings and consultancies. These are places where one will encounter well-scoped projects on set timelines, with defined teams working together to solve them. This is not how in-house designers work at startups and companies — where we’re balancing fighting fires with long-term strategic work — and it’s futile for us to judge ourselves the process standards set in a very different context.

In my coming posts, I’ll be sharing my top concerns about Design Thinking, and offer my own stories on how design happens. Through this, I hope to start a dialogue around better terms and approaches those of us who work in-house can use to describe the work we do.