The End Of Design Thinking As We Know It

For years, Stanford has been teaching non-designers to think like a designer. They called it design thinking. The term design thinking lowered the bar for people. You can’t teach people to become a designer in a two-day boot camp. That is ridiculous. Designers are people who follow a calling since their early childhood. They were the kids that could draw when everyone else couldn’t. They read design blogs, go to museums, and wear designer clothes. They live and breathe design their whole lives. There is no way one could catch up to that. It’s a lost race. But design thinking is something else. You don’t have to become a designer, you just have to learn to think like one. And since designers do more than they think, this shouldn’t be too hard right? Not everyone can be a designer but everyone can think like a designer.

But recently a fundamental shift happened. It might seem like a small thing but it is the start of a tectonic shift. Stanford d.school launched a new course. A three-hour course to teach people not design thinking, but design. Without the thinking. Plain design. In three hours. Now that design thinking has lowered the bar for people to learn about design, we are ready for the next step. Lose the thinking and do just design. Design thinking was just a way to make design seem more accessible. Left and right people are discovering that design thinking workshops and sprints don’t actually deliver the groundbreaking results people were hoping for. More and more people are starting to wake up to the fact that it actually takes skilled designers to design shit. Design thinking is no longer enough, we need design. It’s no longer enough to teach people design thinking, they actually need the doing as well. Without the doing, the thinking is useless.

I think this is a good thing. A natural development. A next step in the evolution of design and the problem-solving capacity it holds. Design thinking opened up doors. It made people aware of the power of design when it comes to innovation and complex problem-solving. Every designer knew that design is not a five-step process. Every designer knew that just thinking about the user won’t magically create good designs. Design thinking was designed to fail. It was beachhead for design to land on the continent of complex business problem-solving. And that worked perfectly. Design is now in every boardroom, in every business consultancy firm worth their salt. Design thinking was a Trojan horse to get design in the door. Now we can burn down the horse and take the city. In the end, it’s all about design and not design thinking. Design thinking was a brilliant construct. What did that even mean? Nobody knew. But it worked like a charm.

But there is a flip side to the whole design thinking story. Design thinking is not just for non-designers to get closer to design. It was also designed for designers to get closer to business thinking. It was a bridge for non-designers and designers. We saw a lot of non-designers taking design thinking classes and participating in design thinking workshops. Loads of people crossed the bridge from business land into design land. I did not see a lot of designers taking business classes. I did not see designers doing an MBA in one day (that actually exists and now it’s completely free (in Dutch): https://mbaineendag.nl/). For design to take the city, designers also need to cross the bridge to business thinking. The power of design to solve complex business problems only works if designers understand and speak business. If designers take the city and don’t know how to govern it, it will be a short reign. We need to do this together. Designers and non-designers hand in hand. It’s good that non-designers learn to design. Designers can make fun of that all day long. But instead of that, they could also learn business so we can all work together to solve the complex problems we face. I think we have enough of those right now to justify the effort.

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