Is Design Thinking Really Bullshit?

Published in

Institute of Design (ID)

6 min readSep 7, 2017

I watched a video of the talk by Natasha Jens, a talented Communications Designer working in NY. She is not alone in criticizing the trend of design thinking and its half brother, innovation, but I feel compelled to answer it, as it strikes directly at the heart of my practice and livelihood for the last decade. Here is an excerpt from her talk on why Design Thinking is Bullshit:

“Design Thinking packages a designer’s way of working for a non-designer audience by codifying their processes into a prescriptive, step-by-step approach to creative problem solving — claiming that it can be applied by anyone to any problem.”

http://www.core77.com/posts/68499/Natasha-Jens-Design-Thinking-is-Bullshit-Argument

Now, let me start by saying that I have a deep love and respect for things well made, conceived, and implemented. I have a long history with beauty, complete with an undergraduate degree in fine art and half a year of a Masters in the same prior to moving to an industrial design degree. I do care about things like font, composition, aesthetics and form. I also care about our world, quite deeply, and have been using Design Thinking to help shape it. I know for certain it is not “bullshit,” though it may be misused, malpracticed and sold wrong.

First, not that it matters, but I agree with Natasha’s main premise that ‘Design Thinking is not a five-step process.’ It’s really not. It’s messy. It’s iterative. It flows in all sorts of directions. Truth be told, there are lots of ways these projects get planned and executed. We do exploratory work for new-to-the-world, complex projects, sometimes in multiple countries. We also do validation work for clients who already have concepts but are wondering why they are not disrupting the universe. Typically, they have the complex.

So the processes can go the way they are displayed on pretty graphics, or they can flow in other ways. But typically, clients don’t hire us to go in all sorts of directions, so we make believe its linear, like time, so they can see what we are planning. Then we can bill them a lot of money for our fantastic and disruptive work. Really, Natasha is only critiquing a stereotype of design thinking, not the actual thinking.

Another of her main points rests on an interesting point of tension I thought had been settled a few years ago in the design world. What is the essence of a modern designer? What are we? Are we making profound designer-ly things, or just moving 3M Post-its around on shiny glass walls? Well, actually, I think it’s both. There has been a branching off, and the traditions of communication design are alive and well, and still needed. At the same time the ability to deal with overwhelming complexity, to collaborate, and to track large numbers of observations, insights, opportunities and ideas is also needed. You know what? Post-its work pretty well for that. Thank you, 3M. When we do patient journey mapping for a patient experience of Hepatitis C or breast cancer, for example, in five countries, we need a bit more than just a mood board. We cope with complexity — and yes — sometimes we even use software to do so, and it’s not always Illustrator.

She is also concerned with using evidence in the design process, and this to her is in the form of the “Crit.” While there is nothing fundamentally wrong with a critical basis for creative production, it can help as a kind of internal check and balance, or dialectic, to inspire iteration and improvement. The idea that collective criticism is actually a substitute for external evidence for something like ethnography — or any of the other hundreds of methods — insults the very reason human centered design arose in the first place. It is rather humorous and ironic that a hardcore designer who calls bullshit is calling it on the same design principles that called the black box of designerliness bullshit decades before. There is a lot of hype, maybe too much hype, about how much Design Thinking is able to do. For example: NO! You will not become a black belt design thinker after a three-day boot camp. I don’t care who you had as a teacher. But let’s think of the very notion Natasha seems to long for: a small group of people that are busy designing something far away from the real context of activity, having no concept of the actual needs on the ground. These small groups of people are coming up with ideas, brainstorming, playing fooseball, and drinking beer to design the perfect solution for a project they will never see completed in reality. It’s a little like designing a product in Brooklyn for someone in Uganda without knowing a thing about the place, the users, or the channel.

I don’t like being a crank. Sorry, but no. The idea that a bunch of designers wearing black and eating avocado toast can Crit their way through complexity is laughable at best. That went out with pinstriping and making bigger and bigger fins on cars. We have moved on from that bygone era, and we now have many more ways to work than we once did.

The three examples she uses to illustrate the failure of Design Thinking are also fairly telling. Natasha Jens is well known for her track record in branding work, and there is lots of great work. She is obviously very talented. Her examples are just not realistic to critique the true value of Design Thinking. Is Design Thinking always useful for every design problem? Absolutely not, but there are many situations where talking to stakeholders, prototyping, or micro pilots might be a more suitable option. The examples she cites are basically what I’d call ‘lipstick on a pig’ projects. The examples are overly simplistic and probably more telling of the true problem within the Design Thinking industry: the fact we have no quality control or kosher symbol. Maybe we need rabbis to come by all our shops, inspect our facilities, and give us their blessing.

Of course we have issues with those who are less than professionally able to provide said services providing them nonetheless. Guess what? It happens in every industry. I had a plumber insist I had to install an access T in the middle of my yard through a foot of snow in February one year to clear out my sewer, because yes, there was a rather immediate issue I wanted cleared up. It turns out a few years later I could have called my other plumber who just so happens to have the right (cheaper) tool for the job. Really, Design Thinking is no different. Natasha comes from a very traditional communications background and has those tools to use.

I lived through almost a decade of critique-based creative production. Doesn’t it seem serious and important just by the way I described it? I really do think there is value in the critique-based method — I am mocking it, yes — but there is a rich history and reality to enabling a mentoring relationship, a formality ritual in a chaotic realty. There is also the designer value system we all exist within as designers that we need to hold on to. I believe this, and I hope we can hold onto the value of that value system.

As designers, we act as liaisons or diplomats between many different areas of expertise. We have more and more that is expected of us. The same old tools and approaches aren’t going to cut it working with the Pentagon, even if you are Pentagram.

Is Design Thinking Really Bullshit?

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Written by Ric Edinberg