Why Design Thinking will Fail Again (Part 2)
Design Thinking is not Design. This distinction is crucial to ensure expectations are met.
(Part 2 of a 3-part post that looks at the current state of Design Thinking, its promises and pitfalls, and the road ahead.) <<Go to Part 1 | Go to Part 3>>
In 2005 Design Thinking was evangelised by Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, as the next big thing for US businesses. By 2011, in a short span of 5 years, there came about a disillusionment in its value — 2011 saw a spate of criticism from those who had once touted its goodness.
Here’s
on FastcodesignComing up with ways to implement [design thinking] throughout your organization, developing the ways to motivate and engage your employees along with the metrics to ensure that you have a sense of the real value of your achievements are all critical issues that need to be considered, carefully, upfront.
Designers often bristle when the term design thinking comes up in conversation. It’s kind of counterintuitive, right? But here’s why: Having been initially overjoyed that the C-suite was finally paying attention to design, designers suddenly became terrified that they were actually being beaten to the punch by business wolves in designer clothing.
Design thinking captures the qualities that drew designers to the field.
Suddenly, designers had a problem on their hands.
, formerly of Apple, once commented that“design thinking is a term that needs to die.”
Designer
of Bay Area firm Adaptive Path wrote scornfully:“Design thinking is trotted out as a salve for businesses who need help with innovation.”
He didn’t mean this as a compliment. Instead, his point was that those extolling the virtues of design thinking are at best misguided, at worst, likely to inflict dangerous harm on the company at large, over-promising and under-delivering and in the process screwing up the delicate business of design itself.
So let’s be very clear. Design thinking neither negates nor replaces the need for smart designers doing the work that they’ve been doing forever.
- Packaging still needs to be thoughtfully created.
- Branding and marketing programs still need to be brilliantly executed.
- Products still need to be artfully designed to be appropriate for the modern world.
When it comes to digital experiences, for instance, design is really the driving force that will determine whether a product lives or dies in the marketplace.
was not so kind. He went on to call it a Failed Experiment.Design consultancies that promoted Design Thinking were, in effect, hoping that a process trick would produce significant cultural and organizational change. From the beginning, the process of Design Thinking was a scaffolding for the real deliverable: creativity. But in order to appeal to the business culture of process, it was denuded of the mess, the conflict, failure, emotions, and looping circularity that is part and parcel of the creative process. In a few companies, CEOs and managers accepted that mess along with the process and real innovation took place. In most others, it did not. As practitioners of design thinking in consultancies now acknowledge, the success rate for the process was low, very low.
Besides the 3 Problems of Design Thinking viz. the way it is being pitched to businesses as a magic potion that their inmates can drink and become Asterix–leading to high expectations that they finally will have a way to get ahead–the “designer” is becoming a fuzzy customer. Web designers, #UI folks, #UX designers are scurrying around masquerading as Design Thinking experts (experts? gimme a break!), and the client is none the wiser.
Demand is palpable to the extent that even businesses that have no business in the business of design are filling ‘sweat shops’ to create Design Thinking faculty. The formula is simple. Pick up the Stanford d.school curriculum (smart of them to have open-sourced the curriculum). Get a graphic designer to team up with a management consultant to rejig it a bit (customise is the word we use these days). Hire a bunch of smart communicators — helps if they have been doing graphics — give them a short personality makeover and you’re ready. All they have to talk about is customer-centric, empathy, prototyping and learn to look smug. There you have it. Design Thinking at speed!
See where this is headed? I knew you’d figure this one out. :-)
You see, design is one of those elusive, multi-dimensional subjects that attracts only a few. And while it is a lot of fun, it is more pain than gain for most part.
When they start, designers have no answers. They only have questions.
They have this bad habit of seeing anything and immediately believing it can be improved. Products, monuments, roads, systems, communication, services, … whatever. And their minds start looking for solutions. Most believe they can change the world and they jump straight into doing so. Remember Apple’s iconic misfits video?
Any wonder then that it took a Steve Jobs (1955–2011) to “show” the world the power of design, something all designers never succeeded in doing. In his words,
“the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
But, to set things straight, Design Thinking is not Design remember?
So then, what is it really? I think the best way to describe it is a way for non-designers to learn to take a few deep breaths before the ‘know-it-alls’ go about designing and redesigning products from their own points of view. Ironically, although they are the ones who made it happen, a user-empowered world is alien to today’s business and technology thinkers. So I’m hoping that after they’ve taken those few deep breaths, they’ll come out of the building to mingle with us common folks and observe how we interact with the world. The same world in which their products exist. Call it empathy or by any other name, don’t just live our lives in your head or in your company’s labs. That’s all. It’s that simple. Why? Because the insights you get directly are invaluable in finding the ‘right’ problems to solve. As a nice side effect, you’ll end up saving all the laughing money that you pay to ‘market research / user research’ consultants while solving the right problems for the right set of users.
Forced by habit, my incorrigible friends are trying to create a one-size Design Thinking “toolkit”, calling it a customer-centric or a client-centric methodology for problem solving. They seem to believe, in their one-dimensional world, that they’re co-creating, which by the way, failed and went out of the window almost a decade ago. My advice to them would be to empathise with their customers’ customers — the actual human being at the other end of the supply chain.
And that will get them on the right track, hopefully.
(More in the concluding part of this 3-part series)
I’m @sunilmalhotra on Twitter.
