What is Missing in Design Thinking?
A Lesson from Art School
We welcomed our first cohort of students into MassArt’s Masters in Design Innovation program, and it seemed a good moment to reflect on what I learned this semester. This is an interesting shift for me to go from teaching business students to teaching design students (okay, so it is “Art & Design School.”) As someone who spent time studying in art and business programs, it prompted me to think about what are some of the fundamental differences, and what can we learn in the business world that just isn’t taught in business school. I came to one thing I think we are missing in the business concept of “design thinking” that is predominant in design practices, and that is the crit.
At the outset, I’ll admit I’m not a purist. I believe it is possible to learn the value of design in a business school, just as it is possible for us to teach business principles in a studio. At Oxford I studied design leadership with Lucy Kimball, a brilliant mind in service design; I studied design research with Catherine Dolan, an outstanding anthropologist; and I studied various other very human topics such as how to market new products for different psychological stages of product adopters and how to manage across cultural differences in global organizations. Not to say there aren’t strengths to learning business in b-schools and design in d-schools, but the settings and disciplines certainly have a deeper overlap than they once did.
After my first semester moving from the case room to the studio, my first lesson (hopefully of many to come) was: We don’t use enough critique method in business. We maybe also don’t use enough case method in design.
Value of Critique
The role of the critique as a primary mechanism of learning in arts teaches us a few things that are less common in business settings. Critiques teach you that it isn’t about your reasoning, it is about what happens when your design meets a fresh set of eyes without any baggage. That parole, that instant of interpretation is what matters and you free yourself from the hazards of group think and untested hypotheses that run rampant through so many business settings. If people hate your idea, it is a moment to learn something profound, not a moment to try and persuade them to your way of thinking.
I think we do have things similar to the crit in traditional business-world meetings. The project review, the pitch, and planning meetings all have critique overtones. But these settings are often “win or lose.” This makes us more defensive in business, more guarded, and more about persuasively making your case. There is less assumption of iteration. Less room for weaknesses in the presentation or idea to become opportunities for a stronger outcome. Less willingness to point out what you still don’t know. Bits the audience don’t like or understand are seen more as a reflection of the author’s weaknesses or shortcomings.
Art and design students learn how to use a crit, and business students tend not to, in my experience. I believe that translates pretty directly to a design world with crits as common, and a business world where we “make our case.”
Case has a place
I’m not pitching that we ditch case thinking in business or in education. As we teach business in a design school, we are using cases and critiques together. Cases teach us to explore the causal chains and complex systems in play for any given business or experience. The a priori nature of case discussions allow us to form hypotheses that don’t have a place in critique discussions. We write “cases for” everything from investment to HR decisions. The “case” is perfect for building the narrative that we need to socialize an idea and make the reasoning transparent, well founded, and investable.
Case methods as used in business school are the hallmark of “analytical thinking.” As I discuss this with peers, analytical thinking and the deductive nature of business reasoning is often presented as the other end of a spectrum from the intuitive, creative, and inductive reasoning of design approaches.
But they are totally different things
Case and crit may be colliding in education, but they aren’t really mutually exclusive.
The case gives us a vehicle for analytical reasoning on which to make a decision or build a concept. It has the benefit of hindsight in most cases, and allows us to explore consequences tied to reasoning.
The crit gives us a vehicle for feedback on a concept or decision expressed in one form or another. It is future-leaning naturally, and allows a dialogue around creativity, outcomes, and design. The crit requires that the reasoning become an assumed thing, in the background. If the reasoning of case-thinking works out, the hypothesis of the case manifests as the outcomes the critique then tackles.
At the root of it: Case is about what the author believes. Crit is about what the audience believes. A high-functioning organization has to have both.
The rich dialogue of case analysis can’t be replaced by the critique. The room for the critique to bridge creativity and intended outcomes can’t be accomplished in case analysis. Together we get a pretty dynamic process. When design thinking brought us to the realization that business was lacking something to focus us in on the consumer, we added a lot more around desirability & usability, because we already had feasibility and viability pretty well engrained. As much as I am promoting the crit, it is because that is what we’re missing, not because it is superior to the case, but because it is complementary to it.
In my opinion, we should think about how we can better adopt crit techniques in the business world and business education. Design Thinking as a set of mindsets and practices can bring us pretty far along the way, but I think the crit is still missing. I believe bringing the crit into common practice would pave the way to bolder ideas and healthier cultures across the design thinking business world.
For those looking at this from a business or design education perspective, a quick addendum. At MassArt, we’ve attempted to take action on this way of thinking by hybridizing what we think are complementary aspects of business and design education approaches. In our first semester, where I focused on finance and quantitative reasoning for design, we naturally used case method to build economic models, product forecasts, and holistic pro formas of design concepts. We analyzed case studies, we built cases for concepts. But in an attempt to use the right tool for the right job, we didn’t stop with the cases. We brought each concept into a gallery setting, embedding the quantitative reasoning of the case into the narrative of the pitch, making a natural setting for crit as well. While you might argue that one could critique a pro forma, it is challenging to do so at a level of real depth required to get into the logic of numbers. That isn’t really a group activity, and one of the values of crit is the diverse perspective of a group that allows you to control for individual style and opinion. By asking the author to lay bare the key assumptions, dependencies, and logical relations embedded in the pro forma, along with the outcomes of that work, we attempted to foster discussion and a crit environment that can engage with the case thinking that dominates such a topic as finance. Please feel free to get in touch with us if you are aiming to bridge this gap in your own teaching or practice: bslittle@massart.edu
